Fifty-seven metres
The fall people can be shown was filmed. The counter is mostly people over 60, and it often begins at the height of their own body.
This counter uses 740,000 deaths a year. Two published figures sit on either side of that round. The WHO fact sheet still says 684,000. A 2021 Global Burden of Disease analysis puts the deaths at about 800,000. The card sits between those two published points. It is not a third measurement. The WHO calls falls the second leading unintentional injury after the road, and says the highest death rates are in people over 60. More than 80% are in low- and middle-income countries. The same sheet is careful about what it is not counting: falls from assault or self-harm, from animals, inside a burning building, in a crash, or into fire, water or machinery. Those belong on other cards, or on none of these cards.
The first platform
Franz Reichelt was a tailor in Paris, France, born in Bohemia, in what was then Austria-Hungary. He had fixed on a coat that would open into a parachute for pilots. He had dropped dummies from his own building. He was allowed to use the Eiffel Tower on 4 February 1912. The next day's paper, Le Gaulois, said everyone else understood the test to be a dummy, and that he meant to take the place of the dummy himself. Friends tried to talk him down. He hesitated on the rail of the first platform, then jumped. The coat half-opened and collapsed onto him. He fell 57 metres. He was 33. The fall was filmed. The footage shows the hole in the frozen ground being measured, about 15 centimetres deep.
Five, not a floor each
A building site is the other picture people reach for. During the construction of the Empire State Building in New York City, in the United States, the official account is five worker deaths. Higher figures circulated at the time: fourteen in one paper, and as many as forty-two in a rumour. Five is still a building site. It is not this number. At 740,000 a year, a death passes about every forty-three seconds, and the ordinary one has no crowd, no camera and no tower.
A fall from a moving vehicle is on the road card. A fall into water is on the drowning card. What is left here is often a person who was standing, on a floor, in a house.
This is not safety advice. It is a story about a population statistic. It says nothing about any one person's risk of a fall.
Sources
- Le Gaulois, 5 February 1912, on the jump and on the permission being understood as a dummy test.
- The WHO fact sheet on falls, including 684,000 deaths and what that count excludes.
- A 2021 Global Burden of Disease analysis putting fall deaths at about 800,000.
- Engineering News-Record on the five deaths during construction of the Empire State Building in New York City, in the United States.
- The annual figure used on the counter is the Ledger's own rounding, set out on the methodology page.