A Leap of Faith From the Eiffel Tower

09/23/22 • 33 min

2 Listeners

Inventor Franz Reichelt wants to test his novel "parachute suit" from as tall a structure as possible - and the Eiffel Tower seems ideal. Previous trial runs used a mannequin strapped to the chute and have not ended well. Despite this, his plan is to make the Eiffel Tower jump himself. Can he be persuaded to see sense?

Self-experimentation - particularly in the field of medicine - has a long and checkered history. Can we learn anything useful from such unorthodox experiments, or are they reckless acts of egotism and hubris?

For a full list of sources go to timharford.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For a full list of sources go to timharford.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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For more "unit conversion errors" check out Matt's book Humble Pi.

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To read more on this topic try Brian Christian’s “The Most Human Human”. For a full list of sources go to timharford.com.

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Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - A Leap of Faith From the Eiffel Tower

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:15.369

Pushkin the first floor of the Eiffel Tower, almost two hundred feet above the ground. Next to the railings a table. On top of the table a wooden chair, and standing on the wooden chair a man, Franz Reichelt. He places a foot on the railing, he leans forward and peers over the edge. The year is nineteen twelve and Franz Reichelt is a tailor, thirty three years old. Born in Austria, he moved to Paris as a teenager and built a modestly successful b