Creative History

  Sometime in the 1780’s, just after America had won its hard fought independence from Great Britain, a young Irishman returned home after several years abroad fighting with George Washington’s Continental Army. He had gone to the rebellious colonies several years before as little more than a boy, seeking to escape grinding poverty and an overbearing and mentally unstable mother back home in County Roscommon, Ireland.  While in America he had fought bravely; saved all of his money and grown into a man. Elizabeth Sugrue, the returning soldier’s estranged mother, was destitute and desperate.  Her husband, a hard-scrabble, abusive alcoholic and subsistence farmer had died unexpectedly several years before; her son had left home as a runaway for parts unknown and she had taken to drinking, petty theft and prostitution to survive.  She ran a boarding house in Roscommon city, which as all local residents knew, was in actuality little more than a thinly disguised brothel....

  Despite being referred to as “The Flying Tailor” by many French newspapers in somewhat mocking reference to his day job, Austro-Hungarian born inventor and naturalized French citizen Franz Reichelt, who also often went by the more Francophied named of Henri Francois Reichelt, was considered a pioneer in the burgeoning field of parachute technology and development during the first decade of the twentieth century. Over the years Reichelt had experimented with winged parachute-suits that he believed would help a man to glide safely to the ground after being forced to jump out of a flaming dirigible or a stalled airplane that was about to come crashing down to earth. As of the year 1912 all the tests on the prototypes of  his winged parachute suits had been little short of abject failures.  Some in the media wondered if any of Reichelt’s winged parachute-suits were ever intended to work in the first place, or if the whole thing--leaping off of low rooftops and throwing ...