"Just an Amusement Device": The Tower That Helped Win a War

With National Aviation Day landing this week, we went back into our own archives to tell a story most people at Switlik today have never heard in full. It starts with an idea that wasn't even ours.

In 1934, Amelia Earhart was traveling abroad when she saw something unusual: tall steel towers in Russia where people practiced parachute jumps without ever boarding a plane. She thought the concept deserved a home in the United States, and it was her husband, George Palmer Putnam, who brought the idea to a New Jersey parachute maker named Stanley Switlik. Switlik was, by his own account, in the middle of considerable financial and legal trouble when Putnam's letter arrived that August. He got interested anyway. By November 15, 1934, he, Putnam, and a handful of backers had formed a company in New York City with about the most honest name a startup has ever had: Parachute Jumps, Inc.

The finished tower at Lahaway Plantation, with a jumper descending under canopy.

Building Something That Didn't Yet Exist

The project began long before any tower rose above the New Jersey landscape. Switlik’s engineers started by dropping loads from an airport beacon tower, gathering the data they’d need to design the real thing. Drawings for the first tower were finished by late October 1934, and by December, Switlik was writing to his partners that early testing was going "way beyond my expectations." Engineers ran dummy drops with different parachute sizes, then began live tests. A patent attorney was already on his way to Trenton to file the paperwork.

This was never meant to be a publicity stunt. It was a serious engineering effort to find a safe, repeatable way to introduce people to parachuting.

The First Tower in America

The finished structure went up at Lahaway Plantation, Stanley Switlik’s own country estate, and stood roughly 115 feet tall — the first parachute tower of its kind ever built in the United States. It was also a real improvement over the design that had inspired it. In Russia, a jumper had to climb a long stairway to the top of the tower and descend still attached to a cable. Switlik’s version skipped that entirely: a person was hoisted straight to the top already rigged in a fully inflated parachute, then released either automatically or by their own hand. Early trainees descended along guide wires for control; more advanced jumpers were allowed to drift free.

A trainee suspended from the tower's frame during a practice drill.

Not Everyone Was Convinced

Switlik first tried to put the tower at Mercer Airport, near Trenton. The county board said no, and the reason, preserved word for word in Switlik’s own files, stung a little: they considered it "only an amusement device" and wanted no part of it. Switlik pushed back, pointing out that towers like his were about to become standard equipment at paratrooper centers everywhere and that Mercer would regret turning away the business. The board didn’t budge, and the tower went up on Switlik’s own farm instead

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Amelia Earhart Takes The Leap

The tower had its big day on June 2, 1935. It was a full public demonstration, complete with newsreel cameras. Commander Charles Rosendahl of the U.S. Navy was there, along with Gene Vidal from the Department of Commerce, State Aviation Director Gill Robb Wilson, and Major James McDonald representing the U.S. Army. Amelia Earhart, the woman whose idea had started the whole project, made the first jump, becoming the first woman to test the tower. She landed, brushed herself off, and called it "loads of fun." Aviator Fay Gillis and stage performer Margaret Perry tested the chute in the weeks that followed.

The publicity was everything Switlik and Putnam could have hoped for. What came next was harder

A Commercial Challenge

All that press didn’t translate into the flood of orders everyone expected. Within weeks, Switlik, Putnam, and retired Navy Commander J. H. Strong (who had helped engineer the tower) were scrambling to scrape together $5,000 just to cover outstanding bills. Two more towers went up anyway: a 125-foot tower outside Hightstown, New Jersey, and a 150-foot tower in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. But the business itself never really found its footing.

In November 1936, less than a year and a half after Earhart’s famous jump, the original Lahaway tower was quietly dismantled and sold for scrap.

That could have been the end of it. Instead, the idea found a second life just a few years later. As the United States built up its airborne forces, parachute towers turned out to be exactly what the military needed. The tower at Hightstown trained the U.S. Army’s first infantry officer parachute instructors at Fort Benning in the summer of 1940, and towers just like it became permanent fixtures at paratrooper training centers across the country straight through World War II.

From a Training Tower to the War Effort

The tower experiment did something else, too: it put Switlik at the center of American parachute-making right as the country needed it most. When the United States entered World War II, Switlik became one of the largest parachute manufacturers in the country, at one point producing roughly 70 percent of all American parachutes used during the war. Production ramped up to nearly 2,500 parachutes a week after Pearl Harbor, and the company earned the Army-Navy "E" Award for production excellence in every year the United States was at war, a distinction only a handful of American plants achieved.

The original Lahaway tower, the one in the footage and photographs we still have, didn’t survive long enough to see any of that. It was gone before the war that made this technology essential had even reached America. But the idea it proved, and the reputation it built, helped carry Switlik straight into the effort that followed.