Creative History

  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 ...

  It is the Saturday after Thanksgiving off the New England coast.  November 26, 1898. The sea is calm and temperatures are seasonably cool and crisp.  Weather stations all along the eastern seaboard note nothing out of the ordinary that day except for one thing: the color of the sky.  The sky that evening is yellow.  It is glowing with an ominous and almost surreal luminescence as the sun begins to set. Sailing Master, Joseph Kemp, employed aboard a steamship in Boston Harbor noted that the yellow sky off the coast of Massachusetts on November 26, 1898 looked like, “The greasiest evening you ever saw.” On that “greasy” evening two low pressure fronts, one charging eastward from the Great Lakes, and the other, a warm weather system moving northward from the Gulf of Mexico are about to collide off the Massachusetts coast and create one of the most ferocious and destructive nor’easters in American history. Late 19th century forecasters know through baromet...