Jasper County Democrat, Volume 11, Number 53, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 December 1908 — PECULIAR ACCIDENTS. [ARTICLE]

PECULIAR ACCIDENTS.

The “Irony of Life” Illustrated In Stories of Falls. The “irony of life" was strikingly illustrated recently lu the news of a rustic who slipped from a six barred gate and broke his neck and of an Italian aeronaut who fell 1,000 feet with his collapsed balloon with no worse result thau u sprained ankle. A Frenchwoman, Mme. Morel, and her daughter, while climbing In the Alps, near Zermatt, fell a distance of 1,200 feet, not much less than a quarter of a mile, and, although the mother was killed on the spot, her daughter escaped with a few bruises. Mr. Whymper, the famous mountaineer, had a similarly miraculous deliverance from what seemed to be certain death when scaling the Matterhorn. Losing bls footing, he fell from rock to rock to the bottom of a precipitous gully, 100 yards lu depth, only to recover his feet with uo worse damage thau a badly cut head. And M. Parville, a .French writer, tells the story of an East Indian Hying in the island of Oghl» who fell over a precipice 1.000 feet deep with no more serious consequence than a good shaking, his fall being broken by the dense vegetation which grew at the foot of the cliff. While climbing a waterworks tower 240 feet high in Chicago a steeplejack dislodged a loose stone and was precipitated to the ground from a height of 175 feet, fortunately striking telegraph wires forty feet above Ihe street and thus breaking his fall. The spectators gasped with borror as they saw the man drop swiftly to destruction. A rush was made to pick up his shattered remains only to discover that he was practically unharmed. Not a boue was broken, and a week later be was walking about as if nothing had happened.

More remarkable and indeed almost incredible was the experience of Charles Woolcot when he was tuaklag a parachute descent in Venezuela. At a height of 3.000 feet Woolcot flung himself off bis balloon into space, when, to the horror of the thousands of onlookers, the parachute failed to open. The man dropped like a stone with terrible speed until, when about 200 feet from the earth, the parachute flew open and at once collapsed. He was dashed to the ground, his right thigh and hip were broken, both ankles and knees were tlhdly crushed. and his spinalxdlttmn wus dislocated, aud yet. after »i>eiit in hospital. Woolcot was restored to soundness of limb after surely the most terrible adventure of which any man has lived to tell the story.

But it is in the history of ballooning that one encounters the most remarkable cases of sensational drops from the clouds. When Mr. Wise, a famous aeronaut of the early nineteenth century, was once making an ascent his balloon exploded at an altitude of 13.000 feet and liegan to drop sSiftly to the earth, more than a couple of miles below “The descent at first was rapid.” Mr. Wise writes, “and accompanied by a fearful moaning noise caused by air rushing through the network and the gas escaping from above, tn another moment 1 felt a slight shock, and, looking up to see what caused it, I discovered that the balloon was canting over, being nicely ddtfbled in. the lower half into the upper.” The balloon had, in fact, formed itself into a parachute and. oscillating wildly, continued its descent until it struck the earth violently, throwing the aeronaut ten yards out of the car. "The car had turned bottom upward, and there I stood.” says Mr. wise, *lcongratulating myself and the perspiration railing down my forehead In profusion.”—St Leals Post-Dlsuatch.