Franz Reichelt - Early Experiments

Early Experiments

Reichelt was born in Vienna in 1879 and moved to Paris in 1898. He obtained French nationality in 1909, adopting the first name François (the French equivalent of the Germanic "Franz"). One of his sisters may have also come to France and been married to a jeweller there, but newspaper reports differed on the details of his family life, with most reporting that his sisters stayed in Vienna. Reichelt himself was unmarried. He took an apartment on the third floor at 8 rue Gaillon near the Avenue de Opera from 1907 (which he rented for 1500 francs a year) and opened what was to become a successful dressmaking business, catering mostly to Austrians on trips to Paris. From July 1910, he began to develop a "parachute-suit": a suit that was not much more bulky than one normally worn by an aviator, but with the addition of a few rods, a silk canopy and a small amount of rubber that allowed it to fold out to become what Reichelt hoped would be a practical and efficient parachute.

The dawn of the aviation age brought inevitable accidents coupled with a growing interest in safety measures, most notably in the development of an effective parachute. Early parachuting successes, such as those by Louis-Sébastien Lenormand in 1783 and by balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard, had used fixed-canopy parachutes (that were already "open" before the jump began), and although André-Jacques Garnerin had invented a frameless parachute suitable for use from high altitudes, by 1910 a parachuting solution that was suitable for use when jumping from a plane or at low altitude had yet to be developed. Reichelt seems to have become interested in parachute design after hearing some of the stories of fatal accidents among the early aeronauts and aviators. His early tests with dummies equipped with foldable silk "wings" were a resounding success: dropped from the fifth floor, they touched down lightly. Attempts to convert the initial prototype parachutes into a workable suit proved difficult. Reichelt's original design weighed around 70 kilograms (150 lb) and used 6 square metres (65 sq ft) of material. He presented his design to the leading aeronautic organization, La Ligue Aérienne at the Aéro-Club de France, hoping that they would test it, but they rejected his designs on the grounds that the construction of the canopy was too weak, and they attempted to dissuade him from wasting his time on further development. Undaunted by the rejection, Reichelt persevered and conducted experimental drops with dummies from the courtyard of his building at rue Gaillon. None of his tests proved successful.

In 1911, Colonel Lalance wrote to the Aéro-Club de France, offering a prize of 10,000 francs for a safety parachute for aviators – double the prize he had offered the year before. The competition was open for three years and stipulated that the parachute must weigh no more than 25 kilograms (55 lb). Eager to participate, Reichelt refined his design, reducing the weight while increasing the surface area of the material until it reached 12 square metres (130 sq ft). Further tests proved no more successful than his earlier attempts: his dummies invariably fell heavily to earth. L'Ouest-Éclair reported that in 1911 he had then made a jump himself from a height of 8 to 10 metres (26 to 33 ft) at Joinville. The attempt failed but his fall was cushioned by a pile of straw, which helped him escape injury. Le Matin reported an attempt at Nogent from a height of 8 metres (26 ft) that resulted in a broken leg. Le Petit Journal suggested that he also made at least two apparently inconclusive tests with dummies from the first deck of the Eiffel Tower during 1911, but an interview with one of Reichelt's friends in La Presse made it clear that he had been unsuccessfully applying for permission to conduct a test from the Eiffel Tower for over a year before he finally received the authorization for the final jump. There had been other tests from the tower during 1910 and 1911 though; Gaston Hervieu, who employed a dummy aircraft and mannequins in his experiments, was attempting to perfect a parachute design to ensure the safe landing of a pilot with all or part of a damaged aircraft. Reichelt attributed the failures of his designs at least in part to the short drop distances over which he had conducted his tests, so he was keen to receive permission to experiment from the Eiffel Tower.