The man who conquered many skyscrapers without insurance and his followers (8 photos)

Harry Gardiner - the first person to conquer skyscrapers without insurance. The man and many of his followers were called "man-flies".





As they say now, his "trick" was that he could climb without any insurance in the most ordinary clothes on vertical walls of high-rise buildings, which have already begun to be actively built in the United States. On the photos below he hangs from one arm on the 24th floor of the Broadway hotel.



Harry began to trade in this occupation in 1905 and for his truly dizzying career successfully "conquered" more than 700 buildings in Europe and North America. In an interview with the Muscle Builder newspaper, he said:

“One hundred and twenty people imitating me died. It is simply impossible to rehearse your performance in advance. Every new building is a new unknown task. If you don't guess right answer, death will be waiting for you below.



It is said that the then President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, nicknamed him "the human fly." I’ll talk about Harry’s imitators a little lower, but for now I’ll explain why he did it at all. Well, fame and popularity - that's understandable. But it's also a matter of that his ascents always gathered crowds of onlookers, which means that he could them, in the meantime, to advertise a product or service.

As a rule, he and subsequent "fly people" advertised banks, films and, of course, insurance companies. Of course!



Just as an example. On November 11, 1918, Gardiner climbed the Bank of Hamilton building, to celebrate the end of World War I. Climbing up the wall building, the man, who was then 47 years old, stuck his head into open window, signed an insurance policy, and also purchased a bond on 1000 dollars. Can you imagine the attention the Bank received afterwards? Hamilton, if a crowd like this was watching below:



And the culmination of his career was September 1916 in Detroit, when over 150,000 citizens came to watch him climb the 14-story Majestic Building.



See Harry? And he is!

As mentioned above, Gardiner's success in this field spawned a swarm of, pardon the pun, "human flies". And to bypass your mastermind and draw attention to your person, to them I had to go even further. For example, in the photo below, a certain John Reynolds balances on chairs at the very edge of the roof:



1920

And this is a later follower named George Willig in May 1977 climbs the 110-story South Tower of the World mall in New York:



At the time, it was the third largest building in the world. True, George already had some insurance, and at the very top of his already the police were waiting to arrest. By that time, such "amateur" has long been banned.

When this law was passed in the USA, our main character Harry Gardiner moved to Europe, where he continued to perform in this genre until until 1926. Then he suddenly disappeared. Later it was said that the man matching his description was found lifeless at the foot of Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1933. But it is not known for certain whether is it actually Harry "The Fly Man" himself or some unlucky tourist.