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 t…