The First Parachute Jump

If we think the first person to attempt to eat a raw oyster was brave (this person as mentioned in my last post is lost to the dustbin of history), what about the first person to trust his life to a large bed sheet?

When I was a kid, I fashioned bits of plastic sheet from plastic bags into little parachutes for my toy plastic soldiers.  There were various degrees of success, but most of my soldiers went “splat” when I threw them out the second story window of our Mayfield Village, Ohio home.  I was hoping for an operation Market Garden like that in the photo below of the actual WWII airborne operation.  What I got?  Splat.

Even with my failures, perhaps my childhood play ended up inspiring me to pursue an aviation career?

Paratroopers of the First Allied Airborne Army descending over the Netherlands in Operation Market Garden, September 1944

On this day on October 22, 1797, the first parachute jump of note is made by André-Jacques Garnerin from a hydrogen balloon 3,200 feet above Paris.

According to History.com, “Leonardo da Vinci conceived the idea of the parachute in his writings, and the Frenchman Louis-Sebastien Lenormand fashioned a kind of parachute out of two umbrellas and jumped from a tree in 1783, but André-Jacques Garnerin was the first to design and test parachutes capable of slowing a man’s fall from a high altitude.

Garnerin first conceived of the possibility of using air resistance to slow an individual’s fall from a high altitude while a prisoner during the French Revolution. Although he never employed a parachute to escape from the high ramparts of the Hungarian prison where he spent three years, Garnerin never lost interest in the concept of the parachute. In 1797, he completed his first parachute, a canopy 23 feet in diameter and attached to a basket with suspension lines.

“On October 22, 1797, Garnerin attached the parachute to a hydrogen balloon and ascended to an altitude of 3,200 feet. He then clambered into the basket and severed the parachute from the balloon. As he failed to include an air vent at the top of the prototype, Garnerin oscillated wildly in his descent, but he landed shaken but unhurt half a mile from the balloon’s takeoff site. In 1799, Garnerin’s wife, Jeanne-Genevieve, became the first female parachutist. In 1802, Garnerin made a spectacular jump from 8,000 feet during an exhibition in England. He died in a balloon accident in 1823 while preparing to test a new parachute.”