The Parachute

Parachute History

The purpose of a parachute is to enable a person or object to fall from a great height and safely land on the ground. It does this by increasing the lift and drag, which results in a reduced rate of fall.

History

Renaissance Period
The early history of the parachute dates back to the Renaissance Period. The earliest draft of a parachute is found in an anonymous Italian manuscript from the 1470s. It shows a conical parachute with a cruciform rod under which a man is hanging freely in the air, clinging to the rod with his hands. A waist strap that is connected via four straps to the ends of the frame serves to safely connect him to the parachute.

This construction can be seen as a step forward from an earlier illustration, in which a man tried to slow his free-fall by grasping two long, cloth banners, using them as arm extensions. Not only was the surface of the parachute too small to cause any effective air resistance, the wood frame is unnecessary and even potentially dangerous. The new design was obviously revolutionary.

Only a short time later, around 1485, Leonardo da Vinci presented the polymath in his Codex Atlanticus, a technically sophisticated sketch that puts the size of the parachute more favorable in relation to the weight of the jumper. Leonardo’s parachute cap is held open by a square, wooden frame, making the cap change from a tapered to a pyramid form.

It is not possible to determine definitively whether the Italian inventor was influenced by the former parachute design; the idea could have originated from an intensive exchange of ideas between artist/engineers of that time.
The feasibility of Leonardo’s pyramidal design was successfully demonstrated in 2000 by the Briton Adrian Nicholas and in 2008 by another skydiver.

In 1595, the Venetian scholar Veranzio Fausto (1551-1617) decided to prepare his own parachute according to the study of Leonardo’s drawing. He retained the rectangular frame, but replaced the cap with an arched parachute of sail-cloth, which he assumed, rightly, would be better to slow the fall. His design was implemented in a parachute jump in Venice, in 1617.

According to the American art historian Lynn White, these sophisticated parachute designs, which were far more complicated than the early artistic leaps made in Asia with stiffened umbrellas, are the origins of the parachute as we know it today.

Modern Period

In 1783, the Frenchman Louis-Sebastien Lenormand jumped in Montpellier from the tower of the observatory with a self-designed parachute. This event is considered the beginning of the modern parachute and its actual evolution. On October 3, 1785, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, in Bornheim, a district of Frankfurt, dropped his dog with a parachute from a balloon, and on August 23, 1786, in Hamburg, he did the same with a sheep.

On October 22, 1797, the Frenchman Andre-Jacques Garnerin became the first man to voluntarily jump by parachute from a balloon. The jump took place from a homemade hydrogen balloon at 400 feet above the Parc Monceau in Paris.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, the German aviation pioneer Katherine Paul invented the foldable parachute. From 1893, she led more than a hundred so-called “parachute crashes” from about 1,000 meters altitude. She is considered one of the first women to have jumped with a parachute.

In 1912, the Russian Gleb Kotelnikov invented the backpack parachute. On March 1, 1912, U.S. Army Captain Albert Berry became the first man to jump from an airplane. From the German airship engineer Otto Heinecke came the principle of double hulls and the static line attached to the airplane. This is still used today. It allows a safe takeoff, during which the parachute can not get caught on the aircraft.

As the first pilot in the history of aviation, the Frenchman Adolphe Pegoud jumped with a parachute on August 20, 1913, from his Bleriot.

On April 28, 1919, the American Leslie Leroy “Sky High” Irvin jumped for the first time with a parachute that had a manual release, i.e., a parachute not attached to the back of the airplane.

In 1930, Richard Kohnke set a new record with a jump from 7,800 meters in a freefall of 142 seconds. He later produced rescue cargo parachutes in his parachute factory in Heidelberg-Ziegelhausen.

On August 16, 1960, American Joseph Kittinger jumped with a special parachute from a balloon at 31,332 meters and, landed after 9½ minutes. At the time, this was the highest parachute jump in history.