I can’t claim to admire Reichelt’s tenacity, but nor do I scorn his intellect. Like Kern, I was looking for clues that might reveal something about Reichelt’s frame of mind. I hesitate to admit that while reading the book, I probably watched the notorious video a couple dozen times. None of his interviewers seemed to care and in the end, I accept their lack of scrutiny. When finished, I read and listened to interviews with Kern, hoping to learn more about what parts of his story were fictive. I’m a stickler for reality so I repeatedly found myself turning to Google and Wikipedia while reading. In Les Envolés, Kern creates a backstory for Reichelt that is full of facts embellished by fancy. Was Reichelt despondent over his limited failed trials and hoping to end his life? Were his debts such that the prize money was worth risking his life? Did he believe that the gods were on his side and that he’d surely succeed? Was there someone in his life that he desperately wanted to impress? Undoubtedly, there were myriad motivations that fueled his footsteps. His gaze fixated downward, Reichelt appears unaware of the Trocadero Palace that lay just across the Seine, as well as the spectators, held back by police, that had come that day to watch a man fall to his death. A cameraman filmed as Reichelt surveyed the ground below.

Unable to reach the top of the balustrade without help, Reichelt and two officials assembled a table and chairs from the tower’s trendy café to mount the railing. We’ll never know what may have been in Reichelt’s mind on the day he climbed the 360 steps to reach the famous landmark’s first floor. Not only was Reichelt’s contrivance far too heavy, the canopy of his parachute used less than half the square area of material needed to adequately impede a wearer’s descent.įranz Reichelt’s fatal jump caught on camera. 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. 1907 Monoplane of Louis Blériot, the first man to pilot an airplane across the English Channel.

Franz reichelt witness