Franz Reichelt

Franz Reichelt (16 October 1878 – 4 February 1912), also known as Frantz Reichelt French tailor, inventor and parachuting pioneer, now sometimes referred to as the Flying Tailor. He is remembered for jumping to his death from the Eiffel Tower while testing a wearable parachute of his own design, a device that today might be called a wingsuit. 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. Initial experiments conducted with dummies dropped from the fifth floor of his apartment building had been successful but he was unable to replicate those early successes with any of his subsequent designs.

Believing that a suitably high test platform would prove his invention's efficacy, Reichelt repeatedly petitioned the Parisian Prefecture of Police for permission to conduct a test from the Eiffel Tower. He finally received permission in 1912, but when he arrived at the tower on 4February 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 to his death. The next day, newspapers were full of illustrated stories about the death of the "reckless inventor." It was captured on film and then showcased in newsreels, making it the first accidental death captured on film.

Early life Franz Reichelt was born on 16 October 1878 in Wegstädtl, Kingdom of Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (today Štětí, Czech Republic), and moved to Paris, France, in 1898. and there was a stiff breeze blowing across the Champ de Mars. showed images of the fatal jump. Film of the attempt, including footage of Reichelt's body being removed and the onlookers measuring the depth of the crater left by his impact (15 centimetres; 5.9 in

Reichelt came momentarily to prominence again in the 1940s in the United States, when his likeness was claimed as the model for one of the figures that were "strangely un-American in expression and garb" in the WPA-funded mural at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York. In an incident reminiscent of the 1933 controversy over Diego Rivera's Man at the Crossroads mural at Rockefeller Center, a furor erupted over an image depicting two minor leftist aviators, supposedly flanking a central portrait of Joseph Stalin. The WPA already had an unwanted reputation as being sympathetic to the left, and despite the artist August Henkel's "glib" explanation of the "accidental" inclusion of a Soviet red star and his claim that the image identified as Stalin was actually of Reichelt, the murals were taken down and three of the four panels burned.

In popular culture Reichelt's jump is retold in the novel Chasing the Black Eagle by Canadian author Bruce Geddes.