![]() ![]() The contest stipulated that the suit must weigh no more than 25kg. When Reichelt presented his 70kg (150lb) jumpsuit to the Aéro-Club de France, however, engineers categorically rejected it. Reports vary but by some accounts, dummies wearing Reichelt’s suit landed safely after being launched from a 5th-floor window. Reichelt’s initial design seemed to hold promise, although it’s unclear how much testing he conducted. In 1797, André-Jacques Garnerin daringly detached himself from a hydrogen balloon 3,200 feet above Paris, landing shaken but unhurt a half mile from the launch site. The first successful jump was made more than a century earlier. The physics of parachutes was well understood at the time. Reichelt, who had zero scientific or engineering training, became obsessed with the idea of designing an all-in-one parachute suit that a pilot could wear. The author of the winning design would receive 10,000 francs. In 1911, the Aéro-Club de France launched a contest challenging innovators to design a parachute capable of saving the life of a pilot. Many constructed their own aircraft and a significant percentage were killed while testing their designs. Inventors around the world were exhilarated by the possibilities that lay ahead in the field of aviation. It’s time to shake things up.1907 Monoplane of Louis Blériot, the first man to pilot an airplane across the English Channel. We don’t remember their names, or note their sacrifice. All the while we ridicule or forget the countless men who didn’t beat the odds. When a man beats the odds and becomes wealthy, we say he achieved it through privilege instead of risk and toil. Now we post pictures of men doing something dangerous and caption it “this is why women live longer than men”. There was a time we celebrated this spirit, both for its rewards and its excesses. Every painfully won inch forwards is achieved by this desire in men to test and risk.įor each man who becomes a titan of industry hundreds of thousands risk it all on plans that lead to ruin. We sit in comfort on airplanes circling the globe now because of the drive that also caused this man to die at the base of a building, wearing a parachute of his own design.įor each continent mapped, untold numbers sailed off into the darkness of history and their deaths. For each man who makes a discovery that changes the world, untold thousands fail. Be it an idea, a business, a theory, a relationship. The next day, newspapers were full of illustrated stories about the death of the "reckless inventor", and the jump was shown in newsreels. The parachute failed to deploy and he fell 57 metres (187 ft) to his death. Despite attempts to dissuade him, he jumped from the first platform of the tower wearing his invention. He finally received permission in 1912, but when he arrived at the tower on 4 February he made it clear that he intended to jump personally rather than conduct an experiment with dummies. Initial experiments conducted with dummies dropped from the fifth floor of his apartment building had been successful, but he was unable to replicate those early successes with any of his subsequent designs.īelieving that a suitably high test platform would prove his invention's efficacy, Reichelt repeatedly petitioned the Parisian Prefecture of Police for permission to conduct a test from the Eiffel Tower. Reichelt had become fixated on developing a suit for aviators that would convert into a parachute and allow them to survive a fall should they be forced to leave their aircraft. VIDEO: Franz Reichelt’s Death Jump off the Eiffel Tower (1912) (trigger warning)įranz Reichelt (1879 – 4 February 1912), also known as Frantz Reichelt or François Reichelt, was an Austrian-born French tailor, inventor and parachuting pioneer, now sometimes referred to as the Flying Tailor, who is remembered for jumping to his death from the Eiffel Tower while testing a wearable parachute of his own design. ![]()
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