Today in 1769, the birth of André-Jacques Garnerin, the man who helped bring about the rise – and, I guess, fall – of the parachute.
And his vision came to him at a very unusual time.
Garnerin is not the guy who starts the story of the parachute.
There are stories of an inventor in Moorish Spain building a proto-hang glider to safely jump from a tower more than a millenia ago, and Chinese acrobats using parachute-like parasols as early as the 11th Century.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote about a pyramid-shaped parachute in the 1480s; a little over a century later, a guy in Venice built a device based on that design and tried it out and lived to tell the tale.
That’s all long before Garnerin enters the story, in 18th Century France.
He was part of the French military, where he tried to encourage more military ballooning.
But during the French Revolution he spent three years in a Hungarian prison – a tall one.
Garnerin thought up a parachute as a way he might escape.
Now, others in France, like Louis-Sébastien Lenormand, had already been designing and testing parachutes as a way for people to get out of building fires.
Garnerin had his sights set higher in the air.
And he made several contributions to the field to that effect: his parachute design used lightweight silk, instead of linen stretched over a wooden frame, and it had a vent for stability.
Then he tested his creation from a balloon about 3,200 feet into the air, much higher than people had been testing up to that point.
It wasn’t exactly a smooth trip down, but he did land safely.
And he went on to make hundreds of additional jumps; his wife, Jeanne Genevieve Garnerin, became the first woman parachute jumper.
But the parachute only really hit its stride about a century after the Garnerins, when they were regularly used by military observers during World War I and by stunt performers.
I guess you could say that for the parachute, there was nowhere to go but down until then.
Starting tomorrow in Scottsdale, Arizona, it’s the Parada del Sol Parade & Trail’s End Festival.
In the morning, it’s a big Western-style parade through the historic district; after that, it’s a big festival with live music, arts and crafts and plenty of food.
Any room for French people parachuting out of hot air balloons?
1797 – The modern world’s first parachute jump (Fédération Aéronautique Internationale)
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Illustration by Christoph Haller von Hallerstein – Philadelphia Museum of Art, Public Domain, via Wikicommons
