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Franz Reichelt He Jumped Off the Eiffel Tower to Test His Invention
On the morning of 4 February 1912, a tailor climbed onto the railing of the Eiffel Tower, wearing a suit he had invented himself. The cameras were rolling.
Franz Reichelt was born in 1878 in Bohemia and moved to Paris at nineteen, where he opened a successful dress shop. In those years the first airplanes were falling out of the sky and pilots were dying, and there was no parachute that could save them. So the tailor set out to make one: a suit you could wear that would open into a parachute when you spread your arms. His tests with dummies kept failing, and the Aéro-Club de France called his design too weak. He kept going. For more than a year he asked the Paris police for permission to test from the Eiffel Tower. When they finally said yes, it was for a test with a dummy.
At the tower, Reichelt told everyone he would jump himself. His friends begged him to stop, and an expert warned that the parachute would not have time to open. He stood on the railing of the first platform, 57 metres up, hesitated for about forty seconds, and jumped. The parachute barely opened. He was thirty-three.
The facts behind this file
What the record shows
- Born 16 October 1878 in Wegstädtl, Bohemia (now Štětí, Czech Republic). He moved to Paris in 1898 and ran a dressmaking business at 8 rue Gaillon.
- The Aéro-Club de France rejected his design as too weak after dummy tests.
- In 1911 Colonel Lalance offered a prize of 10,000 francs for a safety parachute for aviators.
- After more than a year of requests, the Paris police allowed a test with a dummy only.
- On 4 February 1912, in freezing weather, he jumped from the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, a little more than 57 metres up, at 8:22 a.m., after hesitating about 40 seconds. He was 33.
Legends, disputes & careful wording
- His own earlier jump tests (from 8–10 metres, one ending with a broken leg) are known only from newspaper reports.
- His last words on the stairs and the quotes of the people who tried to stop him come from the French newspapers of the day.
- Wikipedia calls it the first accidental death captured on film; the episode says 'one of the first'.
Main sources
- Le Petit Journal, Le Petit Parisien, Le Matin, L'Ouest-Éclair (1911–1912)
- Statement of Prefect Louis Lépine
- The 1912 newsreel (public domain)
Spotted a mistake or know a better source? Tell us.
Image & film credits
- Photo of the jump, 1912 (Parachutespringen, SFA022812156): public domain.
- Film: Franz Reichelt at the Eiffel Tower, 4 February 1912 (newsreel, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons). The video does not show the fall.
- Photo of Reichelt with others, 1910 (Touring Club Italiano archive): CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Other images are public domain or CC0 (Reichelt portraits and suit photos, Paris 1900 photographs, 6 rue Gaillon, 1911 crash photo, newspaper pages from 1911–1912). Video clips from Pexels. Music and sound made for this video.
