Talk:Franz Reichelt

Cause of Death
I heard an autoposy (autopsy) showed the cause of death was a heart attach (attack) prior to landing. Can anyone verify?--Twintone 1:50 pm, 12 March 2007, Monday (7 years, 2 months, 25 days ago) (UTC−4)I heard an autoposy (autopsy) showed the cause of death was a heart attach (attack) prior to landing. Can anyone verify?--Twintone 17:50, 12 March 2007 (UTC)


 * i agree with you. i'm not sure if i red (read) it on the top of the eiffel tower or down in the square below, but i think it was that way. He got so scared when he saw it wasn't working that he had a heart attack, so he was died (dead) when he hit the ground. He should try from somewhere lower before...


 * Apparently, the fall was only 60 meters (from article). That would take about 3.5 seconds to fall, neglecting air resistance. His chute probably slowed him a bit, but I doubt it slowed him enough to give him time to die from a heart attack. Amoran (talk) 10:21, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

French Stub?
The man was Austrian, so why is this a "French people stub"? 84.190.234.25 19:12, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
 * He wasn't Austrian, he born in Czech ;) --212.158.134.83 (talk) 12:56, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Contradictory
The introductory paragraph says that he was reluctant, tried to back out, and was forced to go on with the experiment by his manager. However, the detailed description of the jump continues to say how determined he was and could not be dissuaded. This needs to be clarified and cleaned up. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fracturing (talk • contribs) 10:43, 27 May 2011 (UTC) Not only that, the official newsreel on British Pathe (they should no rather than someone guessing on wikipedia), says "The first time Reichelt went up the tower, he actually turned back after getting scared. However, after some persuasion from his manager, he climbed the tower again." See: http://www.britishpathe.com/gallery/ten-tragedies-caught-on-film/0 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.216.185.112 (talk) 07:29, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Out of office emails
Guardian columnist Area Mahdawi suggests out of office email messages that invite you to look up people who died testing their inventions. She can be contacted on Twitter #ArwaM Sipu (talk) 17:59, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

Video plays at about 160% of the correct speed and is not correctly attributed
There is something wrong with the speed of the video (Reichelt.ogv), both here and on the Eiffel Tower page, which shows him to only take approx 2.1 s from jump to landing. From a standing start at 57 m, that would imply about 2.5 g downward acceleration, hitting the ground at 54 m/s (194 km/hr, 120 mile/hr), not just a failed parachute, but an impressive downward push 2.5 times as powerful as gravity! With gravity alone, and no air resistance, it should take about 3.4 s, hitting the ground at 33 m/s (120 km/hr, 75 mile/hr). Since he was wearing baggy clothes and stretched out his arms, air resistance would have slowed him markedly by the end -- otherwise we could all cycle at 75 mile/hr, and tennis balls could be hit as far as cricket (or baseball) balls! Also, he hardly appears to accelerate at all during the last second. My guess is that his fall would have taken 4 - 5 s. However, the original (at ) seems to take about 3.3 s, so the rest may be their error in splicing between the two cameras. Does anyone know how to correct the speed?

Also, it seems it should be attributed to British Pathe, rather than "unknown". It seems rather unlikely that someone else was shooting over their shoulder in both locations, made the same splicing error, and added identical shots of the body being carried away and then someone measuring the depth of the crater he left behind! Enginear (talk) 01:37, 9 February 2020 (UTC)


 * The cameras at the time would have been hand-cranked, so the number of frames per second would be unpredictable (and if the camera operator thought they were likely to run out of film they would undercrank to make it last). The speed of playback would be down to the projectionist and may have had no relation to the original frame rate, so I would say there is nothing wrong with the speed of this in the context of it being an early-20th-century film clip - if we knew exactly how long the fall took then maybe there would be some benefit to altering the playback speed, but we don't, so we'd just be altering it to be wrong in a different way. With regard to attribution: it is quite possible that British Pathé bought in the films for the newsreel rather than having two or three of their own cameras on site, so the original authors are probably unknown; we could give them credit for the editing, but we don't know whether that was done in-house either. Yomangani talk 23:21, 9 February 2020 (UTC)