Harold Lloyd – Safety Last!

Harold Lloyd may not be a household name, but you’ve likely seen his most famous stunt. If you haven’t, you’ve seen it paid tribute in Back to the Future, where Christopher Lloyd‘s (no relation) Doc Brown dangles from the clock tower.

For a scene in the 1919 silent, Lloyd was supposed to carry a prop bomb. Only the bomb wasn’t so much a prop as, you know, a bomb. It exploded, and Lloyd lost an index finger and a thumb.

Dangling from a clock on the side of a skyscraper occurred in Safety Last! Surprisingly, Lloyd died of prostate cancer in 1971, rather than some convoluted, Rube-Goldbergian disaster.