Quite The Fall

Brian Phillips analyzes Felix Baumgartner's big jump:

I want to go back a hundred years, to the day in 1912 when Franz Reichelt jumped off the Eiffel Tower. Reichelt was an Austrian-born tailor who lived in Paris and became obsessed with the idea of designing a wearable parachute. There are black-and-white photos of him modeling his design — drooping antique mustache, mad inventor eyes, folds of fabric buckled to his chest and billowing out all around him. After conducting several failed experiments with dummies at low altitudes, Reichelt, who was convinced his design was perfect, decided to try the suit from a higher elevation and wear it himself. On February 4, he showed up at the Eiffel Tower, where he posed for some pictures and talked to the press. Then he jumped, trailing fabric like some sort of weighted ghost, and fell straight to his death. You can watch video of this moment online, too. The Eiffel Tower is the height of an 81-story building. The video includes footage of authoritative-looking men measuring the crater Reichelt made when he landed.
128,000 feet is: the height of 120 stacked Eiffel Towers.
Within the first 42 seconds of his fall, Baumgartner reached the speed of 834.4 miles per hour, making him the first human being to break the sound barrier without a vehicle. The typical commercial jet, for comparison's sake, flies at around 500 miles per hour. After screaming toward the Earth for another 218 seconds, Baumgartner deployed his parachute, drifted down for another several minutes, and landed safely on his feet. At which point he happily fell another two feet or so, onto his knees.
834 miles per hour is: 134 miles per hour faster than the flight on which Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, 65 years to the day before Baumgartner's jump.

I love the part about the Eiffel Tower.  I really thought he might say the guy's parachute worked.  I guess not.