The earliest theoretical parachute designs date back over 600 years and not surprisingly Leonardo Da Vinci was involved. In addition to sketching plans for aeroplanes, machine guns and diving suits, Leonardo designed a pyramid-shaped parachute framework, draped with cloth.
It would be three centuries before the idea was put to practical use. On 26 December 1783 Louis-Sébastien Lenormand added spice to his Christmas celebrations with the first ever parachute jump from the top of the Montpellier observatory. Among the watching crowd was Joseph Montgolfier, who only a few months before had launched the world’s first manned hot air balloon. It was Lenormand who coined the word parachute (from the Greek para (against) and French chute (fall), and his experiment brought to an end a remarkable year for human invention.
We would have to wait until 1911 for the first parachute jump from a plane. Only one year later, Gleb Kotelnikov, the Kiev Military School graduate, patented the “knapsack parachute”. Kotelnikov devoted several years of his life and all of his personal savings to this product after being deeply affected by the death of a pilot in an airplane crash. He later become a driving force for the Russian Airborne Troops, the world’s first airborne units, established in the 1930s. By the time of World War 2 the military use of the parachute was a key feature of battle. In 1944 Operation Market Garden saw more than 20,000 troops parachuted into the Netherlands and Germany in an attempt to capture strategically important bridges. Immortalised in the epic film A Bridge Too Far, this was the largest ever airborne troop deployment.
In peacetime parachuting has become a popular sport. Each year in the United States alone there are some 3 million jumps. Skydiving legend Don Keller has jumped more than 40,000 times. In 2006, 400 skydivers set a record by descending with hands linked over Thailand, and in 2012 Felix Baumgartner broke the record for the world’s highest parachute jump, taking off from almost 39 kilometers.
Designs have of course become increasingly sophisticated, but the original work of Leonardo Da Vinci still has its merits. In 2008 Olivier Vietti-Teppa jumped from a helicopter 650 metres above Geneva airport and landed safely thanks to a parachute that followed Leonardo’s 1485 blueprint exactly.
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