This day in aviation history: Failure and Persistence

Okay.  Raise your hands if you (admittedly, I do, and my hand is raised right now) take a lot for granted.  I think taking our significant others for granted may be the biggest reason for relationship discord, but I’m not writing about taking each other for granted, perhaps more simply stated as “relational forgetfulness”.

I’m writing not about “relational forgetfulness” but about “historical forgetfulness”, the forgetfulness of steps taken by one person or another who, through their trial and error, grit, courage, and persistence, ultimately leads to providing us the quality of life, the safety, and the luxury of forgetfulness that these people have gifted to us.

One such person, resigned to the dustbin of history is Franz Reichelt, who took a leap off the Eiffel Tower (we’re highlighting his sacrifice on this day of the closing ceremonies of the Paralympics in Paris) to test a parachute.  His parachute failed, leading to his death.  But ultimately the failure of his parachute led to parachutes that actually worked and have saved scores of aviators from certain death.

From Wikipedia (as are both of the above photos of him), “Franz Karl Reichelt, 16 October 1878 – 4 February 1912), also known as Henry François Reichelt after his French naturalization, was an Austro-Hungarian-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. 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 in mid-air. Although he created and experimented with multiple prototypes of wings and parachute suits over the years, they were, by and large, failures, to the point that it was a point of contention between newspapers after his death whether or not any of his designs were ever functional.

“Believing that a suitably high test platform would prove his invention’s efficacy, Reichelt repeatedly petitioned the Paris Police Prefecture for permission to conduct a test from the Eiffel Tower. 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. Despite attempts to dissuade him, he jumped from the first platform of the tower wearing his invention. The parachute failed to deploy and he plummeted 187 feet to his death. The next day, newspapers were full of illustrated stories about the death of the ‘reckless inventor’, and the jump was shown in newsreels.”

Onward and upward!

Sources:  Wikipedia