History

Early Renaissance Forms

The earliest evidence for the parachute dates back to the Renaissance period.^[1] The oldest parachute design appears in an anonymous manuscript from 1470s Renaissance Italy (British Museum Add. MSS 34,113, fol. 200v), showing a free-hanging man clutching a cross bar frame attached to a conical canopy.^[2] As a safety measure, four straps run from the ends of the rods to a waist belt. The design is a marked improvement over another folio (189v) which depicts a man trying to break the force of his fall by the means of two long cloth streamers fastened to two bars which he grips with his hands.^[3] Although the surface area of the parachute design appears to be too small to offer effective resistance to the friction of the air and the wooden base-frame is superfluous and potentially harming, the revolutionary character of the new concept is obvious.^[3]
Only slightly later, a more sophisticated parachute was sketched by the polymath Leonardo da Vinci in his Codex Atlanticus (fol. 381v) dated to ca. 1485.^[2] Here, the scale of the parachute is in a more favorable proportion to the weight of the jumper. Leonardo's canopy was held open by a square wooden frame, which alters the shape of the parachute from conical to pyramidal.^[3] It is not known whether the Italian inventor was influenced by the earlier design, but he may have learnt about the idea through the intensive oral communication among artist-engineers of the time.^[4] The feasibility of Leonardo's pyramidal design was successfully tested in 2000 by the British Adrian Nicholas and again in 2008 by another skydiver.^[5] According to the historian of technology Lynn White, these conical and pyramidal designs, much more elaborate than early artistic jumps with rigid parasols in Asia, mark the origin of "the parachute as we know it".^[1]
The Venetian inventor Fausto Veranzio (1551–1617) examined da Vinci's parachute sketch, and set out to implement one of his own. He kept the square frame, but replaced the canopy with a bulging sail-like piece of cloth which he came to realize decelerates the fall more effectively.^[3] A now-famous depiction of a parachute that he dubbed Homo Volans (Flying Man) appeared in his book on mechanics, Machinae Novae (1615 or 1616), alongside a number of other devices and technical concepts. It is widely believed that in 1617, Veranzio implemented his design and tested the parachute by jumping from St Mark's Campanile in Venice and that the event was documented some thirty years later by John Wilkins, founder and secretary of the Royal Society in London in his book Mathematical Magick or, the Wonders that may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry, published in London in 1648. However, in this book, John Wilkins wrote about flying, not about parachutes. He neither mentions Fausto Veranzio nor a parachute jump nor any event in 1617. Furthermore, the story does not explain how Veranzio could have managed to get the wooden frame out of the tower and into a horizontal position with himself underneath without the device tilting and collapsing. No evidence has been found that anyone ever tested Veranzio's parachute.^[6]

Modern parachutes

18th and 19th centuries

The modern parachute was invented in the late 18th century by Louis-Sébastien Lenormand in France, who made the first recorded public jump in 1783. Lenormand also sketched his device beforehand.
Two years later, in 1785, Lenormand coined the word "parachute" by hybridizing the prefix para-, for "defense against," and chute, the French word for "fall," to describe the device's function, the word literally meaning "that which protects against a fall."
Also in 1785, Jean-Pierre Blanchard demonstrated it as a means of safely disembarking from a hot air balloon. While Blanchard's first parachute demonstrations were conducted with a dog as the passenger, he later claimed to have had the opportunity to try it himself in 1793 when his hot air balloon ruptured and he used a parachute to descend (this event was not witnessed by others).
Subsequent development of the parachute focused on it becoming more compact. While the early parachutes were made of linen stretched over a wooden frame, in the late 1790s, Blanchard began making parachutes from folded silk, taking advantage of silk's strength and light weight. In 1797, André Garnerin made the first descent using such a parachute. Garnerin also invented the vented parachute, which improved the stability of the fall.

Eve of World War I

In 1911 a successful test was done with a dummy at the Eiffel tower in Paris. The puppet's weight was 75 kg; the parachute's weight was 21 kg. The cables between puppet and the parachute were 9 m long.^[7] The following year Franz Reichelt fell to his death from the tower during initial testing of his wearable parachute.
Also in 1911, Grant Morton made the first parachute jump from an airplane, a Wright Model B, at Venice Beach, California. The pilot of the plane was Phil Parmalee. Morton's parachute was of the 'throw-out' type where he held the chute in his arms as he left the aircraft. In the same year, a Russian inventor Gleb Kotelnikov invented the first knapsack parachute,^[8] although Hermann Lattemann and his wife Käthe Paulus had been jumping with bagged parachutes in the last decade of the 19th century.
In 1912, on a road near Tsarskoye Selo, years before it became part of St. Petersburg, Kotelnikov successfully demonstrated the braking effects of parachute by accelerating a Russo-Balt automobile to the top speed, and then opening a parachute attached to the back seat, thus inventing also the drogue parachute.^[8]
On 1 March 1912, U.S. Army Captain Albert Leo Stevens made the first (attached-type) parachute jump in the United States from a fixed-wing aircraft, a Benoist pusher, while flying above Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, Mo. The jump utilized a 'pack' style chute with the chute being stored or housed in a casing on the jumper's body.
Štefan Banič from Slovakia invented the first actively used parachute, patenting it in 1914.^[9] On 21 June 1913, Georgia Broadwick became the first woman to parachute jump from a moving aircraft, doing so over Los Angeles.^[10]

World War I

The first military use for the parachute was for use by artillery detectors on tethered observation balloons in World War I. These were tempting targets for enemy fighter aircraft, though difficult to destroy, due to their heavy anti-aircraft defenses. Because they were difficult to escape from, and dangerous when on fire due to their hydrogen inflation, observers would abandon them and descend by parachute as soon as enemy aircraft were seen. The ground crew would then attempt to retrieve and deflate the balloon as quickly as possible. The main part of the parachute was in a bag suspended from the balloon with the pilot wearing only a simple waist harness which was attached to the main parachute. When the balloon crew jumped the main part of the parachute was pulled from the bag by the crew's waist harness, first the shroud lines, followed by the main canopy. This type of parachute was first adopted on a large scale by the Germans for their observation balloon crews, and then later by the British and French for their observation balloon crews. While this type of unit worked well from balloons it had mixed results when used on fixed wing aircraft by the Germans where the bag was stored in a compartment directly behind the pilot. In many instances where it did not work the shroud lines became entangled with the spinning aircraft. Although a number of famous German fighter pilots were saved by this type of parachute including Hermann Göring,^[11] no parachutes were issued to Allied "heavier-than-air" aircrew, since it was thought at the time that if a pilot had a parachute he would jump from the plane when hit rather than trying to save the aircraft.^[12] Airplane cockpits at that time also were not large enough to accommodate a pilot and a parachute, since a seat that would fit a pilot wearing a parachute would be too large for a pilot not wearing one. This is why the German type was stowed on the fuselage, rather than being of the "backpack" type. Weight was also a consideration, since planes had limited load capacity. Carrying a parachute served to lessen performance and reduced the useful offensive and fuel load.
In the U.K., Everard Calthrop, a railway engineer, and breeder of Arab horses, invented and marketed through his Aerial Patents Company a "British Parachute." Thomas Orde-Lees, known as the "Mad Major," demonstrated that parachutes could be used successfully from a low height (he jumped from Tower Bridge in London) which led to their being used by the Royal Flying Corps.
In 1911, Solomon Lee Van Meter, Jr. of Lexington Kentucky, submitted for and in 1916 received a patent for a backpack style parachute - the Aviatory Life Buoy, Patent # 1192479, July 25, 1916.^[13] His self-contained device featured a revolutionary quick-release mechanism—the ripcord—that allowed a falling aviator to expand the canopy only when safely away from the disabled aircraft.^[14]
The German air service, in 1918, became the world's first to introduce a standard parachute and the only one at the time. Despite Germany issuing their pilots with parachutes, their efficiency was relatively poor. As a result, many pilots died whilst using them, including aces such as Oberleutnant Erich Lowenhardt (who fell from 12,000 feet (3,700 m) after being accidentally rammed by another German aircraft) and Fritz Rumey who tested it in 1918, only to have it fail at a little over 3,000 ft (910 m).

Post-World War I

Tethered parachutes were initially tried but caused problems when the aircraft was spinning. In 1919, Leslie Irvin invented and successfully tested a parachute that the pilot could deploy when clear of the aircraft. He became the first person to make a premeditated free-fall parachute jump from an airplane.^[15]
An early brochure of the Irvin Air Chute Company credits William O'Connor as having become, on 24 August 1920 at McCook Field near Dayton, Ohio, the first person to be saved by an Irvin parachute.^[16] Another life-saving jump was made at McCook Field by test pilot Lt. Harold H. Harris on 20 October 1922. Shortly after Harris' jump, two Dayton newspaper reporters suggested the creation of the Caterpillar Club for successful parachute jumps from disabled aircraft.
In 1924 Gleb Kotelnikov became the first parachutist to apply the soft packing of a parachute instead of a hard casing.^[17]
Beginning with Italy in 1927, several countries experimented with using parachutes to drop soldiers behind enemy lines. The regular Soviet Airborne Troops were established as early as 1931 after a number of experimental military mass jumps starting from the August 2, 1930.^[8] Earlier the same year, in 1930, the first Soviet mass jumps led to the development of the parachuting sport in the Soviet Union.^[8] By the time of World War II, large airborne forces were trained and used in surprise attacks, as in the Battle for The Hague, the first large scale deployment of airborne troops in military history, by the Germans (whose operation failed totally)^[18] and in 1941 Battle of Crete and in 1944 the Operation Market Garden, again in the Netherlands and again a complete failure but still the largest airborne military operation ever carried out.^[19] Aircraft crew were routinely equipped with parachutes for emergencies as well.^{[citation needed]}
In 1937, drag chutes were used in aviation for the first time, by the Soviet airplanes in the Arctic that were providing support for the famous polar expeditions of the era, such as the first manned drifting ice station North Pole-1. The drag chute allowed to land safely on the ice-floes of smaller size.^[8]