Sax faced many brushes with death. As a child, he once fell from a height of three floors, hit his head on a stone and was believed dead. At the age of three, he drank a bowl full of acidic water, mistaking it for milk, and also swallowed a pin. He received serious burns from a gunpowder explosion and once fell onto a hot stove. Several times he avoided accidental poisoning and asphyxiation from sleeping in a room where varnished furniture was drying. Another time young Sax was struck on the head by a cobblestone and fell into a river, almost dying.
His mother once said that "he's a child condemned to misfortune; he won't live". He became known locally as "the ghost-child of Dinant".
The second was developed in response to the Crimean War's Siege of Sevastopol where the French military and its allies were locked in a destructive conflict. As a potential solution to such lengthy sieges, Sax thus designed the "Saxocannon", a giant cannon whose half-ton round shots would be powerful enough to completely destroy an "average-sized city".
Antoine-Joseph "Adolphe" Sax was a Belgian inventor and musician who invented the saxophone in the early 1840s, patenting it in 1846.