Parachute
A parachute is a device designed to slow an object's descent through an atmosphere by creating drag or aerodynamic lift. It is primarily used to safely support people exiting aircraft at height, but also serves various purposes like slowing cargo, aiding in space capsule recovery on Earth, landing spacecraft on other planets, and stabilizing vehicles or objects. Modern parachutes are typically made from durable fabrics like nylon and come in various shapes, such as dome-shaped, rectangular, and inverted domes, depending on their specific function.
The concept of the parachute dates back to ancient attempts at flight. In AD 852, Armen Firman, in Córdoba, Spain, made the first recorded jump with a large cloak to slow his fall. Renaissance figures like Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Leonardo da Vinci later sketched designs resembling modern parachutes, but it was not until the 18th century that the first successful jumps occurred. French Louis-Sébastien Lenormand made the first public jump in 1783, and he coined the term "parachute" in 1785. In the following years, key advancements were made by figures like André Garnerin, with parachutes becoming lighter, more reliable, and easier to deploy.
By the time of World War I, parachutes had become essential for aviators, and significant improvements were made to their designs, including the introduction of the backpack-style parachute by Charles Broadwick and Gleb Kotelnikov's knapsack parachute. After World War II, parachuting became a popular sport, and new materials like nylon replaced silk. Today, parachutes are used in military, recreational, and emergency situations, continuing to evolve with advances in technology and design.
History
Middle Ages
In 852, in Córdoba, Spain, the Andalusian Armen Firman attempted unsuccessfully to fly by jumping from a tower while wearing a large cloak. It was recorded that "there was enough air in the folds of his cloak to prevent great injury when he reached the ground."Early Renaissance
The earliest evidence for the true parachute dates back to the Renaissance period. The oldest parachute design appears in a manuscript from the 1470s attributed to Francesco di Giorgio Martini, showing a free-hanging man clutching a crossbar frame attached to a conical canopy. As a safety measure, four straps ran from the ends of the rods to a waist belt. Although the surface area of the parachute design appears to be too small to offer effective air resistance and the wooden base-frame is superfluous and potentially harmful, the basic concept of a working parachute is apparent.The design is a marked improvement over another folio, which depicts a man trying to break the force of his fall using two long cloth streamers fastened to two bars, which he grips with his hands.
Shortly after, a more sophisticated parachute was sketched by the polymath Leonardo da Vinci in his Codex Atlanticus dated to. Here, the scale of the parachute is in a more favorable proportion to the weight of the jumper. A square wooden frame, which alters the shape of the parachute from conical to pyramidal, held open Leonardo's canopy. It is not known whether the Italian inventor was influenced by the earlier design, but he may have learned about the idea through the intensive oral communication among artist-engineers of the time. The feasibility of Leonardo's pyramidal design was successfully tested in 2000 by Briton Adrian Nicholas and again in 2008 by the Swiss skydiver Olivier Vietti-Teppa. According to historian of technology Lynn White, these conical and pyramidal designs, much more elaborate than early artistic jumps with rigid parasols in Asia, mark the origin of "the parachute as we know it."
The Croatian polymath and inventor Faust Vrančić, examined da Vinci's parachute sketch and kept the square frame but replaced the canopy with a bulging sail-like piece of cloth that he came to realize decelerates a fall more effectively. A now-famous depiction of a parachute that he dubbed Homo Volans, showing a man parachuting from a tower, presumably St Mark's Campanile in Venice, appeared in his book on mechanics, Machinae Novae, alongside a number of other devices and technical concepts.
It was once widely believed that in 1617, Vrančić, then aged 65 and seriously ill, implemented his design and tested the parachute by jumping from St Mark's Campanile, from a bridge nearby, or from St Martin's Cathedral in Bratislava. Various publications incorrectly claimed the event was documented some thirty years later by John Wilkins, one of the founders of, and secretary of, the Royal Society in London, in his book Mathematical Magick or, the Wonders that may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry, published in London in 1648. However, Wilkins wrote about flying, not parachutes, and does not mention Vrančić, a parachute jump, or any event in 1617. Doubts about this test, which include a lack of written evidence, suggest it never occurred, and was instead a misreading of historical notes.
17th to 19th centuries
reported the existence of devices similar to parachutes used in the Ayutthaya Kingdom during the reign of King Narai in the late 17th century. He reported in his 1691 book that a man would jump from a high place with two large umbrellas to entertain the king of Siam, landing into trees, rooftops, and sometimes rivers. The report was later read a century later by French physicist Louis-Sébastien Lenormand and would later be used to create the modern parachute.The modern parachute was invented in the late 18th century by Louis-Sébastien Lenormand in France, who made the first recorded public jump in 1783. Lenormand also sketched his device beforehand.
Two years later, in 1785, Lenormand coined the word "parachute" by hybridizing an Italian prefix para, an imperative form of parare = to avert, defend, resist, guard, shield or shroud, from paro = to parry, and chute, the French word for fall, to describe the aeronautical device's real function.
Also in 1785, Jean-Pierre Blanchard demonstrated it as a means of safely disembarking from a hot-air balloon. While Blanchard's first parachute demonstrations were conducted with a dog as the passenger, he later claimed to have had the opportunity to try it himself in 1793 when his hot air balloon ruptured, and he used a parachute to descend.
On 12 October 1799, Jeanne Geneviève Garnerin ascended in a gondola attached to a balloon. At she detached the gondola from the balloon and descended in the gondola by parachute. In doing so, she became the first woman to parachute. She went on to complete many ascents and parachute descents in towns across France and Europe.
Subsequent development of the parachute focused on it becoming more compact. While the early parachutes were made of linen stretched over a wooden frame, in the late 1790s, Blanchard began making parachutes from folded silk, taking advantage of silk's strength and light weight. In 1797, André Garnerin made the first descent of a "frameless" parachute covered in silk. In 1804, Jérôme Lalande introduced a vent in the canopy to eliminate violent oscillations. In 1887, Park Van Tassel and Thomas Scott Baldwin invented a parachute in San Francisco, California, with Baldwin making the first successful parachute jump in the western United States.
Eve of World War I
In 1907 Charles Broadwick demonstrated two key advances in the parachute he used to jump from hot air balloons at fairs: he folded his parachute into a backpack, and the parachute was pulled from the pack by a static line attached to the balloon. When Broadwick jumped from the balloon, the static line became taut, pulled the parachute from the pack, and then snapped.In 1911 a successful test took place with a dummy at the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The puppet's weight was ; the parachute's weight was. The cables between the puppet and the parachute were long. On February 4, 1912, Franz Reichelt jumped to his death from the tower during initial testing of his wearable parachute.
Also in 1911, Grant Morton made the first parachute jump from an airplane, a Wright Model B piloted by Phil Parmalee, at Venice Beach, California. Morton's device was of the "throw-out" type where he held the parachute in his arms as he left the aircraft. In the same year, Russian Gleb Kotelnikov invented the first knapsack parachute, although Hermann Lattemann and his wife Käthe Paulus had been jumping with bagged parachutes in the last decade of the 19th century.
File:Albert Berry parachute.jpg|right|thumb|Albert Berry collapses his parachute on Kinloch Field at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, after his jump on 1 March 1912.
In 1912, on a road near Tsarskoye Selo, years before it became part of St. Petersburg, Kotelnikov successfully demonstrated the braking effects of a parachute by accelerating a Russo-Balt automobile to its top speed and then opening a parachute attached to the back seat, thus also inventing the drogue parachute.
On 1 March 1912, U.S. Army Captain Albert Berry made the first parachute jump in the United States from a fixed-wing aircraft, a Benoist pusher, while flying above Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, Missouri. The jump utilized a parachute stored or housed in a cone-shaped casing under the airplane and attached to a harness on the jumper's body.
Štefan Banič patented an umbrella-like design in 1914, and sold the patent to the United States military, which later modified his design, resulting in the first military parachute. Banič had been the first person to patent the parachute, and his design was the first to properly function in the 20th century.
On June 21, 1913, Georgia Broadwick became the first woman to parachute-jump from a moving aircraft, doing so over Los Angeles, California. In 1914, while doing demonstrations for the U.S. Army, Broadwick deployed her chute manually, thus becoming the first person to jump free-fall.