Umbrella-jumping entertainers in Siam helped inspire the modern parachute
A French envoy reported in 1691 that at the Siamese court of King Narai, a performer would leap from a height holding two large umbrellas, drifting down into trees, onto roofs or into rivers. A century later the physicist Louis-Sébastien Lenormand read that account, made the first recorded public parachute jump in 1783 and coined the word parachute.
Earlier attempts were more hopeful than designed. In 852, Armen Firman leapt from a tower in Córdoba wearing a big cloak, which reportedly trapped enough air to spare him serious injury. The first deliberate design appears in a 1470s manuscript credited to Francesco di Giorgio Martini: a conical canopy on a wooden frame, probably too small to work. Leonardo da Vinci's pyramid-shaped version of around 1485 was better proportioned, and in 2000 the British skydiver Adrian Nicholas showed it could actually fly.
Around 1615 the Croatian inventor Faust Vrančić published a design he called Homo Volans, the flying man, swapping Leonardo's flat canopy for a bulging sail. A popular story says he tested it by jumping from a tower in Venice in 1617, but the book usually cited as proof does not mention him or any jump, and the event probably never happened.
Lenormand built his word from the Italian para, to shield, and the French chute, a fall. Jean-Pierre Blanchard first demonstrated parachutes from balloons with a dog as passenger. On 12 October 1799 Jeanne Geneviève Garnerin became the first woman to parachute, cutting her gondola free at 900 metres. Silk replaced linen and wooden frames, and in 1804 Jérôme Lalande added a vent to the canopy to stop wild swinging.
The twentieth century made the device portable. Charles Broadwick packed his into a backpack pulled open by a line in 1907, and Grant Morton made the first jump from an aeroplane in 1911. That year Gleb Kotelnikov invented a knapsack parachute, and in 1912 he opened one behind a speeding car, inventing the braking drogue chute. Georgia Broadwick pulled her own ripcord in 1914, becoming the first person to free-fall. After the Second World War nylon replaced silk and parachuting became a sport.
Source: Parachute
