Idiot Inventor Jumps From Eiffel Tower to Demonstrate Parachute Suit
Early airplanes were extremely hazardous to their pilots, whose only hope for surviving mechanical troubles or failure was to figure out how to land their airplanes safely. Jumping out was not an option, as the parachute had not yet been invented. So in 1911, the Aero Club de France offered a 10,000 Franc prize to the first inventor of a successful parachute.
That caught the attention of Franz Reichelt (1879 – 1912), a French tailor who had been fascinated with flight since childhood. So he set out to claim the prize by inventing a device that would allow pilots to parachute safely to the ground. Being a tailor, Reichelt gravitated towards a clothing solution, and designed a suit featuring a cloak with a big silken hood. It weighed about 20 lbs and had a surface area of around 340 square feet. Reichelt tested the design several times on dummies thrown out of his fifth-floor apartment, but without success.
Despite the repeated failures, Reichelt requested permission from the Paris police to test his invention on a dummy from the Eiffel Tower. Upon securing a permit, he advertised to the press and public that he would test his parachute suit at 8 AM, February 4th, 1912. That day, Reichelt arrived at the Eiffel Tower wearing his special suit, and was met by a crowd of onlookers, cordoned away from the drop zone.
He ascended the tower, accompanied by journalists, while two film crews positioned themselves, one on the ground to catch the drop from the tower, and another at the tower to film the dummy being thrown. People were perplexed however because they could see no dummy. It gradually dawned upon them that the dummy was Reichelt, who had not brought one, but intended to test his invention by jumping off the tower himself.
Reichelt was stopped by a guard, but he persuaded him to let him proceed. Friends and journalists also tried to talk him out of it, but he was adamant. Climbing the stairs, Reichelt paused to give onlookers a cheery “A bientot!“, before continuing to the tower’s first deck. There, as people shouted at him to stop while the cameras rolled, Reichelt climbed on a stool placed atop a table adjacent to the guardrail and jumped at 8:22 AM.
The suit was a flop. Reichelt fell about 200 feet to his death on the frozen ground below, with an impact that left a six-inch crater and crushed his spine and skull. Unbeknownst to him, just two days earlier, an American inventor had successfully parachuted 225 feet from the Statue of Liberty, using what would become the standard half-spherical backpack parachute.