The contest stipulated that the suit must weigh no more than 25kg. When Reichelt presented his 70kg (150lb) jumpsuit to the Aéro-Club de France, however, engineers categorically rejected it. Reports vary but by some accounts, dummies wearing Reichelt’s suit landed safely after being launched from a 5th-floor window. Reichelt’s initial design seemed to hold promise, although it’s unclear how much testing he conducted. In 1797, André-Jacques Garnerin daringly detached himself from a hydrogen balloon 3,200 feet above Paris, landing shaken but unhurt a half mile from the launch site. The first successful jump was made more than a century earlier. The physics of parachutes was well understood at the time. Reichelt, who had zero scientific or engineering training, became obsessed with the idea of designing an all-in-one parachute suit that a pilot could wear. The author of the winning design would receive 10,000 francs. In 1911, the Aéro-Club de France launched a contest challenging innovators to design a parachute capable of saving the life of a pilot. Many constructed their own aircraft and a significant percentage were killed while testing their designs. Inventors around the world were exhilarated by the possibilities that lay ahead in the field of aviation. ![]() 1907 Monoplane of Louis Blériot, the first man to pilot an airplane across the English Channel.
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