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In the long history of insane people
trying to one-up another in stupidly dangerous world records,
one of these records stands above all the others
as being the most dangerous. That record is the
water speed world record. How fast you can make yourself move while
on the water. The current world record was set in 1978,
and every official attempt to beat it since has
resulted in the person attempting it getting themselves killed.
But what makes the attempt so dangerous?
It should be pretty obvious if you watch a video of one of these attempts.
Traveling at insanely fast speeds of several hundred miles
per hour, on flimsy boats on a lake is a
recipe for disaster waiting to happen. But before the current
world record in 1978 was set, the record was
already an elusive and deadly prize.
Going fast on the water for most of history wasn't really
an exciting feat, until we figured out how to put gasoline
engines on boats. In the 1930s, the competition for the
water speed record was in a tight race that kept going back
and forth between an American and British team of idiot
geniuses. The first casualty in pursuit of the
record was perhaps the ironically named Englishman Sir Henry
Seagrave, who in 1930 set the world record
at 99 mph (159 kph). Apparently unsatisfied
with not breaking past 100 mph (160 kph), he set out
immediately afterwards on the same day to try again, but
this time his boat struck an object in the water, which
caused it to capsize and killed both him
and his co-pilot. The record continued to go
back and forth between the
Americans and the British, until a guy named Malcolm Campbell
(bet you'll never guess which of the countries he belonged to), locked the
record in place in 1939, before that
big global war kind of stopped people from trying
for a while. Once the 1950s came around though, and
people started figuring out how to put jet engines on their boats.
The fatalities of people trying REALLY
began to skyrocket. An Englishman named John Cobb
wanted to be the first person to break the 200 mph (320 kph)
speed barrier, and built a jet-powered boat called Crusader
to do it. In 1952, out on Loch Ness,
he managed to get up to 210 mph (337 kph), and
achieved his goal and the record. But the boat's front plane
unfortunately collapsed, which caused the boat to
instantly disintegrate, causing Cobb to die from
shock. Two years later, in 1954, the pursuit
of the record would claim its next life. The Italian
Motorboat Federation was offering a 5,000,000 lira
price to any Italian that could beat the record. So, two Italian
businessmen built a piston engine hydroplane named
Laura 3. Traveling across a lake in Northern Italy,
the boat was going fast at 190 mph (306 kph),
but ultimately became unstable and the pilots lost
control of it. The boat somersaulted through the water and
threw one of the pilots out, which
didn't result in him surviving. Following these disasters,
a guy named Donald Campbell, son of the previously mentioned
Malcolm Campbell, decide to break the record himself.
Learning many lessons from Cobb and the Italian designers,
he created a new craft called K7 that returned
to the classic 3-pointer design that was built entirely out of
metal to increase rigidity. Over the next 9 years,
Campbell and K7 went on to break the world record
7 times! Finally getting up to a speed of
276 mph (445 kph) in 1967.
He became the most prolific water speed
record breaker of all time,
and he could have retired then. But for whatever sad reason he didn't. He wanted to go even further
and equipped K7 with even more powerful
engines to try and beat his own record for an 8th time!
He sped across the lake at an average speed of
295 mph (475 kph), and whether he got
cocky or just reckless, he decided to go
back across the lake immediately before the water had settled down.
On this return run, K7 began to lose stability and
Just 400 meters short of the finish line,
K7's nose lifted beyond it's critical pitch,
took off, somersaulted, and smashed into
the water, nose first, breaking up as it cartwheeled across
the surface. It took two weeks of searching
just to discover the wreckage. But it wasn't until
33 YEARS later in 2001 that Campbell's
body was actually discovered!
The world record that I mentioned at the beginning of this video was finally set in
1978 by the Australian Ken Warby.
He managed to get an average speed of 317.6 mph (511 kph)
during his run. He survived to talk about it.
But the next two attempts to beat his record did not.
The first was by an American name Lee Taylor who had already
gotten himself into a horrible crash that nearly killed him over a decade
previously. Determined to take the record from Warby though,
he scheduled his attempt for November 13, 1980 but when
the day arrived he found the conditions on the lake unfavorable
and cancelled. Not wanting to disappoint the spectators
and media though, he went on a test run anyway and
hit a swell which caused the boat to start violently shaking at the
high speeds. The boat ended up collapsing into the water
which claimed Taylor's life in front of everybody who had
gathered to watch him. The final official attempt at breaking
the record was in 1989, when Craig Arfons
raced in his fiberglass Kevlar boat that's probably
an Xbox Live gamer tag somewhere named Rain X Challenger.
But like so many before him, his boat
somersaulted at 300 mph (483 kph)
and killed him. Ever since those two disasters,
no official attempts have been made to break Ken Warby's record
set back in 1978. But despite the high
accident and fatality rate, the water speed record remains
highly coveted, by both boat enthusiasts and racers.
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