In the year 1912, Franz Reichelt, known (inaccurately) as the "Flying Tailor", leaped from the Eiffel Tower to test a garment of his own invention: the "parachute coat." Previously, Reichelt had seen mixed success when tossing parachute-clad dummies from his fifth-floor apartment, but believed that a higher platform would afford his invention better performance.
It was an icy February morning. Reichelt arrived by car, already clad in his parachute suit. The chief of police (seriously, click it) had approved the jump, thinking that Reichelt was planning to use dummies, not his HUMAN BODY.
- "Sa moustache a defie la gravite, son corps n'a pas."
His friends—and even a guard—tried to dissuade him, but Reichelt was resolute, insisting, "Je veux tenter l’expérience moi-même et sans chiqué [sic], car je tiens à bien prouver la valeur de mon invention."
At 8:22 am, observed by a crowd of about thirty journalists and curious onlookers, he readied himself—facing towards the Seine—on a stool placed on a restaurant table next to the interior guardrail of the tower's first deck, a little more than 57 metres (187 ft) above the ground. After adjusting his apparatus with the assistance of his friends and checking the wind direction by throwing a piece of paper taken from a small book, he placed one foot on the guardrail, hesitated for about forty seconds, then leapt outwards. According to Le Figaro, he was calm and smiling just before he jumped. His parachute, which had seemed to be only half-open, folded around him almost immediately and he plummeted for a few seconds before crashing into the frozen soil at the foot of the tower.
Reichelt's impact created a 5.9-inch depression in the icy ground. Sacré bleu.
Franz Reichelt: Death du Jour.
If you have the stomach for such things, you can watch video footage of Reichelt's abrupt, mundane plummet—a heavy thing falling off a tall thing. It is utterly unflightlike.
