I learned this today. Technically the first parachute jump was in 852. A man called Armen Firman, in Spain, jumped off a tower using a cloak as a parachute. Apparently, it did slow him down enough to avoid death and serious injury.
Having a parachute seems obvious, but I am thinking from a world where flight is common. This is one of those occasions where I am guilty of applying what we have and know now to the past.
Leonardo da Vinici is often credited with inventing the modern parachute, but the oldest design for a parachute comes from the 1470s. It is a man hanging from a crossbar frame and there is a conical canopy above that. He is connected to the crossbar by four safety ropes.
Da Vinci may have known about the earlier invention because his is similar, but saying that, there are not too many different ways to design a parachute. Da Vinci’s parachute design of 1485 is larger, which would bear the weight of the person underneath more safely. The canopy was held open by a square wooden frame and the parachutist was suspended underneath with ropes. Whether anyone tested this at the time is unknown. There are no written records of any tests, so probably not.
In the early 1600s, Fausto Veranzio of Venice, slightly updated da Vinci’s idea. He made the canopy much larger because he believed that a larger canopy would slow down the speed of someone falling more effectively.
The first recorded testing of a parachute was in 1783. The Frenchman Louis-Sebastian Lenormand jumped from a tree. He used two modified umbrellas with a wooden frame. He then repeated the feat from the tower of the Montpellier observatory, which is 26m high. He enlarged his umbrellas for this and he survived. His parachute wasn’t what we would call a parachute but, as he had the guts to jump off a 26m high building with two umbrellas, he got to name his device. He came up with “parachute” from the Italian para, meaning “against” and chute, meaning “fall” in French. So, “parachute” means “against falling”.
The problem with this kind of parachute was that it had a solid wooden frame and couldn’t be carried anywhere.
Frenchman, John-Pierre Blanchard, was a balloonist and he demonstrated the parachute as a means of safely escaping a hot air balloon in 1785. Admittedly he dropped a dog on the parachute instead of testing it himself, but it was the first recorded parachute jump from a hot air balloon. He got to test it himself in 1793, when his hot air balloon developed a puncture. His parachute had a wooden frame as well, and he suspended it below the basket of the hot air balloon. He started making his parachute canopies from silk instead of linen because silk was far stronger and lighter.
Frenchman, Andre-Jacques Garnerin came up with a design for a frameless parachute and he made the first jump with it in 1797. He didn’t know that he needed a vent in the top of it and the parachute was uncontrollable. He survived, although he would die in a ballooning accident 26 years later.
In 1804, Jerome Lalande cut a vent into the top of the parachute, which stopped it spinning and made it safer.
A giant silk parachute wasn’t a problem if it could be suspended under the basket of a hot air balloon, but all of the canopy would take up too much space if it was in the basket. In 1890, Katchen Paulus and Paul Letteman invented the first packed parachute. It was packed into a backpack and closed with breakcord that was tied to the balloon. The jumper’s weight would break the breakcord and release the parachute. They also used the intentional breakaway for the first time. This is a small parachute that is released first in order to pull out the main parachute.
In 1911, Grant Morton was the first person to make a parachute jump from an airplane. This new technology introduced a whole new set of problems. Airplanes could go much higher and faster than balloons. They also had a smaller cockpit. All of this came to a head in World War 1 because the parachutes were too large to be worn in the aircraft and had to be stowed in the fuselage. Parachutes were often too heavy for the plane to carry as well. Many pilots weren’t issued them. A common theory was that if pilots were given parachutes, they would jump out when shot, rather than try to save the plane.
In 1916, American Solomon Lee Van Meter invented a parachute that would fit in a backpack small enough to be worn in a plane and it had a ripcord for the first time. This allowed the pilot to wait until they were far enough away from the damaged plane before releasing the parachute.
After World War 1, parachutes were improved and made safer. In 1927, the first training to use parachutes to drop soldiers behind enemy lines started, something which would be used heavily in World War 2.
Since World War 2, parachutes have improved tremendously. These days there are two basic types of parachutes: the conical kind that were used in the war and the rectangular kind called ram-air. The ram-air type are steerable and much safer.
A modern parachute weighs about 10kg. They are packed into a soft backpack and there is a spare emergency parachute inside as well. They are steerable and they can be flared on landing to make touchdown extremely gentle. They have come a long way since the first jump in the 9th century. And this is what I learned today.
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Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-flying-on-parachute-near-green-trees-67298/
Sources:
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-first-parachutist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Blanchard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis-S%C3%A9bastien_Lenormand
https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-parachute-1992334
http://www.parachutehistory.com/women/paulusk.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cocking
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-weight-of-parachute-systems