To Resist a Fall: the Strange History of the Parachute
Three centuries of floating toward the ground
The parachute’s a weird thing, isn’t it?
For aviators, it’s a safety device that they hope to never use — if they do, it means their airplane is plummeting toward certain destruction. For military strategists, it’s a tool of war, a way to drop soldiers onto battlefields anywhere in the world. For skydivers, jumping from an airplane with a parachute on their back is a way to seek thrills, a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
It’s not a device designed to take you up into the air, nor is it a device designed to keep you there. It’s a device designed to make your transition from in the air to on the ground as painless as possible. The parachute is a one-way ticket from up there to down here.
It’s a simple technology based on a simple idea — a canopy of fabric slows your descent as you fall from a height. Its operation is based on physical principles that you can demonstrate whenever you try to run in baggy clothing. But the parachute didn’t emerge in concept until the Renaissance, and nobody seems to have tried to use one until the eighteenth century. That’s understandable — though parachutes work, it doesn’t seem like something that light and thin would actually do the job.
For most of human history, nobody seems to have thought that jumping from a great height, with only a bit of fabric to keep you from hurtling to your death, was a very good idea. But in the last few centuries, the idea of drifting slowly toward the ground, suspended beneath a canopy of cloth, has become thinkable, even common.
The earliest drawing of a parachute-like concept comes from Italy in the 1470s. Mariano di Jacopo detto il Taccola sketched the conical device you see below. It wouldn't have worked — the parachute is too small, the wood would be too heavy — but the idea is there:
About a decade later, Leonardo da Vinci sketched a similar idea — a pointy cloth parachute held open by a wooden frame. Though da Vinci’s design was never actually used in the Renaissance, it apparently works; a British skydiver named Adrian Nicholas tried it out in 2000.
About a century later, a Croatian inventor named Fausto Veranzio came across da Vinci’s drawing and refined it even more, enlarging the surface area of the parachute. His drawing of “homo volans” — flying man — shows a rather glum-looking guy floating to the ground, having jumped off of a tower. He seems eager to feel the solid earth under his feet.
So the basic theory behind the parachute was well-established by the 1500s. But it was one thing to make a sketch or speculate about the physics of the parachute. It was another thing entirely to actually throw yourself from a height at the ground and trust some textiles to keep you intact.
The first guy to entrust his life to a parachute was Louis-Sébastien Lenormand, who was interested in parachutes as a way to escape from buildings that had caught fire. He first leapt out of a tree with a couple of umbrellas to see if that would work. It worked well enough, I guess, because then he tried jumping from the Montpellier Observatory. A nineteenth-century postcard artist envisioned it looking very Mary Poppinsy:
Lenormand, by the way, gave the parachute its name — it means “to resist a fall.”
Around the time that Lenormand was jumping from trees and buildings, intrepid adventurers were ascending much higher than the top of the Montpellier Observatory. Aeronauts in hot-air and hydrogen balloons were taking to the skies, becoming the first humans to leave the ground, albeit temporarily.
One of these balloonists, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, was the first to use parachutes and balloons together. But he didn’t want to take the risk himself, so he took a dog up with him, and forced the dog to descend via parachute (Blanchard later claimed to have made a parachute descent himself, but had no witnesses to confirm this).
André-Jacques Garnerin, having heard of the exploits of Blanchard (or at least his poor dog), continued the development of the parachute. Garnerin continued the tradition of subjecting animals to terrifying experiences, using a kitten as his test subject at least once.
But he eventually took the risk himself, making a number of intrepid parachute jumps. Here we see him, in 1797, deflating his balloon and coming down safely in a basket.
Garnerin became something of a celebrity. He and his wife, Jeanne, toured France and England. Their performance consisted of them ascending in their balloon and coming back down in a parachute. One particularly dicey descent over London in 1802 caused British people to sing a little song about him:
Bold Garnerin went up
Which increased his Repute
And came safe to earth
In his Grand Parachute.
I quite like this postcard of Garnerin’s parachute, made about a hundred years later. It captures something of the precarity of his descents, showing a little man beneath a big parachute, apparently headed right toward a body of water:
Garnerin and his wife would make over 200 parachute jumps, descending from altitudes as high as 8,000 feet. He completed them all more or less safely before he was killed by a falling piece of wood in his workshop in 1823.
Though Garnerin died, this wasn’t quite the end of the Garnerin family’s association with the parachute. His niece, Elisa, decided to capitalize on the family name. She put on a number of parachute descents which were considered quite daring, not least because she was a woman operating solo. Here she is parachuting in 1815:
Elisa’s descents were very popular — they were witnessed by a number of royals around Europe, and often attracted big crowds. She and her father worked hard to make money from her exploits, advertising her descents.
After Elisa Garnerin, parachute descents became a relatively common form of nineteenth-century entertainment. I love this French circus poster advertising one from the 1890s:
Though parachute descents were often portrayed as elegant, cartoonists did enjoy poking fun at the practice. Here’s a ninteenth-century cartoon spoofing Eugene Godard, a prominent parachutist:
The invention of the airplane allowed parachutists to try even more daring stunts. One of the most famous early parachutists was Georgia “Tiny” Broadwick, who made her first jump out of a balloon in 1908 and then moved on to jumping from aircraft. Here she is, getting ready to jump from a plane over Chicago:
You’ll notice that Broadwick’s parachute isn’t packed into a backpack, the way modern parachutes are. Several inventors tried to create a more practical, compact chute in the early 1900s. A French tailor named Franz Reichelt made a “parachute suit” that looked like this:
Or, when unfurled, like this:
Reichelt’s idea didn’t work. In 1912, he jumped from the Eiffel Tower in front of a huge crowd. The parachute failed to deploy, and he was killed instantly.
Other inventors claimed credit for “knapsack parachutes” that actually worked. Around 1910, Tiny Broadwick’s co-star and possibly husband Charles developed one, while a Russian named Gleb Kotelnikov, a Russian inventor did the same. These compact parachutes made it easier for parachutes to be used in war.
There are, broadly speaking, two types of photos of paratroopers from the wars of the twentieth century. The first shows the soldiers all lined up and ready to go, moments before they jump into a warzone. They’re often smiling and apparently eager, although if you look closely you can see some thin, unconvincing smiles on their faces, as in this photo of British soldiers from World War II:
The other type of photo you get is a rather lovely one of soldiers suspended far above the landscape. Here’s one of a very early parachute U.S. Marine Corps descent from 1917:
Or you get something like this, with dozens or even hundreds of men lazily drifting through the air on their way to the battlefield:
When looking at photos like this, I sometimes wonder what’s running through the heads of the paratroopers. The photos appear so calm, a moment of strange quiet between their time in the roaring airplane and the battle that awaits them. Are they enjoying one of the best views of their lives as they float toward the ground, or are they feverishly surveying the terrain below and preparing for a dangerous battle?
Photos like these capture the essence of the parachute, I think. Parachuting is a temporary experience, an in-between place between flying and landing. It has been (and continues to be) a daredevil act, but, assuming everything works correctly, it can be a peaceful and even leisurely experience. No wonder people continue to be attracted to it — who among us wouldn’t want to float in an in-between place for a little while, with nothing in particular to do but enjoy the view?
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While much has been written on paratroopers, i have yet to come across a description of a night jump. The jump into the dark void, the snap of the static line breaking the final tie, the mad rush count of one thousand, two thousand , three thousand, check canopy and then the quiet of the night disturbed only by the sound of the air swooshing past the canopy. However, there is no time to enjoy the sensation, you are running through the checklist- release equipment toggle but first check for any other canopy, try and estimate the nature of the descent (if you are lucky enough to have some moonlight) or simply get into the para landing fall position and tighten up the posture as soon as you hear the thump of the equpment bag hitting the DZ. this is followed by a hard impact with mother earth, but, there is no time to worry about your knee/ankle or the back; spring into action release harness, roll the chute and stow it away, get your weapon into action and throw your rucksack on your back, locate the the RV and move.
It is on a different level altogether, personally a static line night jump is far more challenging than a night time HAHO or HALO oxygen aided jump.
thanks for the write up
Love this one!