Franz Reichelt ran a successful dressmaking shop on the Rue Gaillon in Paris, sewing for Austrian clients. Like much of Europe in the first years of powered flight, he was aviation-mad — and fixated on a real problem: aviators were dying in falls, and no practical parachute existed light enough to wear.
His answer was a parachute suit: a wearable outfit of silk, rods, and rubber that would unfold from the body into a canopy. Early dummy tests from his fifth-floor courtyard showed promise; then a string of failures followed. Dummies dropped like stones. One test Reichelt made himself from 8 metres into a haystack ended with a broken leg. He concluded the drops were simply too short for the suit to deploy.
4 February 1912
Reichelt lobbied the Paris police prefecture for over a year for permission to test from the Eiffel Tower. Permission was granted for a dummy drop from the first platform, 57 metres up.
He arrived at 07:00 on a cold Sunday morning, wearing the suit. To the journalists and Pathé newsreel cameramen present he announced that he would jump himself: “I want to try the experiment myself and without trickery, as I intend to prove the worth of my invention.” Friends and the aviation professionals present spent the climb trying to talk him out of it; a guard’s attempt to intervene was waved off — Reichelt insisted his authorization covered him.
At 08:22 he climbed onto a stool set on a restaurant table by the guardrail, checked the wind by tossing a scrap of paper, hesitated for a long forty seconds — and jumped.
The suit wrapped around him almost immediately. He fell for four seconds and struck the frozen ground at the foot of the tower, dying instantly. The impact left a measurable dent. The Pathé camera caught everything, including the crowd afterwards measuring the hollow — the footage survives and is among the earliest filmed deaths.
The verdict
The next morning’s papers were less cruel than the internet later became: Le Figaro mourned a brave man undone by conviction. The technical verdict was straightforward — the canopy was too small, the drop too short, and Reichelt had refused every offer to test with added safety lines.
The tragedy changed little in parachute design; sound backpack parachutes were already in development elsewhere. Reichelt is remembered instead as a fable — of the inventor so certain of his idea that he skipped every step between prototype and proof.