A WWI Diary That Never Was

WWI Diary was to have brought you the whole of World War I as it was reported in the papers of the day, exactly 100 years later. For a year I blogged news leading up to the big war, thinking if there was any real interest regular readers would trickle in. They did not. Count: zero. So I stopped blogging the war news. For students of the time, 1914-1918 editions are available on the Web as thousands of individual articles via a Times service called Spiderbites.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Parachute For Airmen.

New York Times 100 years ago today, December 23, 1912:
Apparatus Tried from the Eiffel Tower Works Perfectly.
    PARIS, Dec. 22.— An ingenious automatic parachute for aeroplanes was demonstrated from the Eiffel Tower to-day.
    The contrivance, which consists of a vast umbrella, forty feet in diameter, is spread by a system of springs, operating instantaneously and automatically directly the fall begins.
    The parachute was dropped to-day from the first platform of the tower, with a sandbag to represent an aviator. The apparatus opened fully before it had fallen sixty feet. It landed gently, taking sixteen seconds to drop 190 feet.

A WWI Diary That Never Was

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Parachute For Airmen.

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