![]() How strong and tall she’d always be-the tower standing there, never tipping. He said the tower would show the world how strong and tall France was and had always been. It marked the day every Frenchman and every Frenchboy earned the right to love their Frenchladies in the way they were famous for: thoroughly, joyously, and free from constraint. And why not celebrate that upheaval? It marked the beginning of things. Gustave said the tower was for France, and for the Exposition Universelle-the World’s Fair that would celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. That was how one family grew closer through pain, which meant Gustave wasn’t just an architect anymore. She hugged the boy, who was bleeding from the lip, and wrapped him with both arms. His father leaned out the window and said, What lesson have you learned?, while his mother ran into the street, worried that her only son was dying. He broke his arm and wailed like he was just born, afraid of the cold air. The boy jumped, because his body was a leaf or a bird-except thinking that didn’t make it true, and the boy fell. Then he climbed his tower and declared himself an architect beyond measure.Īny man can build. Then he became a kind of dream inside the mind of every child who thought they, too, could stack things high enough to climb into a better life.Ĭhildren playing in the street piled buckets and tin cans, and one reckless child-an Austrian immigrant boy with big ears who lived in a poor quarter-even built a tower out of chairs. It kept growing, and Gustave became more famous. Who cared if it had purpose? And the tower wasn’t even finished yet. Everyone else-all the people who didn’t have enough leisure to waste it debating beauty-cheered Gustave for building the biggest thing they’d ever seen. Gustave said in Le Petit that aesthetes could shut their eyes or lie facedown in the dirt if they were bothered. They argued that no single building should be visible from all points in Paris. Also infamous, since artists and writers reviled him as the man who ruined the Parisian skyline. Construction began, and as the tower got taller, and didn’t fall, Gustave grew famous. In Paris he began his search for puddled iron and three hundred men to carry it, stack it, and drive those rivets in. It was a work of engineering meant only to defy the weather. It wasn’t a work of art meant to espouse beauty or form. Slowly the designs got smarter and a two-dimensional version of the tower took shape. The tower would plunge into the city.Īt night Gustave imagined designs and drew them with those doubts in mind. Or the wind would blow, the metal would bend, and the rivets would snap. They said the tower would topple under its own weight. He died on impact.His name was Gustave Eiffel, and he built his giant French tower because it was impossible-that is what everyone said-to build something so tall. ![]() Franz Reichelt is the 85th most popular inventor (up from 112th in 2019), the 94th most popular biography from Czechia (up from 122nd in 2019) and the most popular Czech Inventor.įranz Reichelt was a tailor who attempted to test his invention of a parachute by jumping off the Eiffel Tower in 1912. His biography is available in 27 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 25 in 2019). Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Franz Reichelt has received more than 990,899 page views. 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. Franz Reichelt (16 October 1878 – 4 February 1912), also known as Frantz Reichelt or François Reichelt, was an Austro-Hungarian-born French tailor, inventor and parachuting pioneer, now sometimes referred to as the Flying Tailor, who is remembered for jumping to his death from the Eiffel Tower while testing a wearable parachute of his own design.
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