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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