Who invented the parachute?

Search: who invented the parachute

Why: One of Zack's customers is a really bad BASE jumper. He's just about crippled beyond repair.

Answer: It went like this:

• 1452-1519 (sometime) - Leonardo da Vinci imagined and sketched parachutes.
• 1617 - Faust Vrancic (Croatia) jumped from a tower wearing a frigid-framed parachute. He published Machinae Novae, including descriptions and pictures of 56 advanced technical constructions, including a parachute he called the Homo Volans.
• 1783 - Sebastien Lenormand (often credited with invention of the practical parachute) demonstrated the parachute principle.
  
• 1785 - Jean Pierre Blanchard (France) dropped a dog from a balloon. The dog was in a basket attached to a parachute.
• 1793 - Blanchard claimed to have escaped a hot air balloon with a hot air balloon, but no one saw. In any case, he invented the first silk parachute - until then, all were made with rigid frames.
• 1797 - Andrew Garnerin was the first person to jump using a parachute without a rigid frame. He jumped from hot air balloons as high as 8,000 feet in the air. He also designed the first air vent in a parachute intended to reduce oscillations:

Source: Inventors.About.com

The More You Know: More ChuteFactz:

• 1837 - Robert Cocking became the first person to die from a parachute accident.
• 1887 - Captain Thomas Baldwin invented the parachute harness.
• 1890 - Paul Letteman and Kathchen Paulus invented the method of folding or packing the parachute in a knapsack to be worn on the back before its release. Kathchen Paulus also invented the intentional breakaway, which is when one small parachute opens first and pulls open the main parachute.
• 1911 - Both Grant Morton and Captain Albert Berry claimed to be the first person to jump from an airplane.
• 1920 - Georgia "Tiny" Broadwick made the first freefall jump.