Parachute

A parachute is a fabric canopy that slows the fall of a person or object by catching air. It is used for emergency escape from aircraft, military airborne operations, sport jumping and the delivery of cargo. Designs were sketched in the 1400s, and the first documented successful public descent took place in 1783.

History of the parachute

The oldest documented designs appear in an anonymous Italian manuscript of the 1470s. One sketch shows a conical canopy with crossing bars, a form that is said to underlie modern parachutes, although it was too small to slow a human fall enough to prevent injury. Leonardo da Vinci drew a pyramid-shaped canopy with a central rod around 1485 in his Codex Atlanticus. It was never built until Adrian Nicholas tested a version that flew on July 25, 2000.

Fausto Veranzio published a related design, the Homo Volans or Flying Man, in his book Machinae Novae around 1615, and one account says he jumped from a tower in Venice. In 1783 Louis-Sebastien Lenormand tested a conical canopy about 14 feet across, partly with the aim of helping people escape from burning buildings. He made a public demonstration on December 28 of that year, jumping from the Montpellier Observatory in France, and he coined the word parachute from the Latin para, meaning against, and the French chute, meaning fall.

The Montgolfier brothers also tested canopy designs in 1783 before turning to balloons. Andre-Jacques Garnerin developed a frameless silk canopy and made a descent from a balloon in October 1797, which is widely credited as the first genuine parachute jump. One source places it over Paris, while another says London. The scientist Lalande proposed a vent at the top of the canopy to reduce its swinging. Robert Cocking, who used an inverted cone-shaped canopy in 1837, became parachuting’s first fatality.

Inventor and origins of the parachute

No single inventor can be named. The 1470s drawings predate Leonardo, and historians do not know whether he saw them. Veranzio built on the same idea, but sources disagree on whether he made his design around 1615 or 1617 and whether he ever tested it. Lenormand’s 1783 demonstration is credited as the first successful public one, and Garnerin gave the parachute the frameless form that later designs followed.

Charles Broadwick designed a pack worn on the aviator in 1901 that opened on a static line. Georgia Tiny Broadwick made her first jump from a balloon in 1908, and in 1913 she became the first woman to jump from an airplane and made a free-fall jump with a manually operated parachute. She completed about 1,100 jumps in all, and Käthe Paulus in Germany had already been billed as a professional parachutist in 1890.

How a parachute works

A canopy catches air and slows the descent, so the wearer lands softly. Early systems used a static line, a cord fixed to the aircraft that pulled the canopy open as the jumper fell away. Later manual systems opened with a ripcord pulled by the jumper. Vents reduce the oscillation of the canopy, and large cargo canopies are designed to open more slowly.

The ram-air parafoil traps air between two membranes, which keeps it in the shape of a wing and allows it to be steered.

Types of parachutes

Most military canopies are round and non-steerable, because hundreds of steerable canopies in the sky at once would risk collisions. The ribbon parachute was developed by the German engineers Knacke and Madelung and tested in 1937 as a landing brake on a Junkers W-34 aircraft. The ringslot canopy, developed at Wright Field in 1951, replaced the ribbon type as a lower-cost design.

Steerable designs followed. Francis Rogallo of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics flew a prototype wing in 1948 and patented it in 1951, and in 1965 the Army’s Golden Knights were the first to jump the parawing. Domina Jalbert, a kite maker, invented the ram-air parafoil in the mid-1960s, and it replaced the parawing in the late 1970s.

The U.S. Army Parachute Section under Major E. L. Hoffman led development in 1919. The Model S of the Irving Air Chute Company became the basis for many years of parachute configurations, and the later C-9 canopy is described as a copy of it.

Impact of the parachute

The parachute changed aviation safety and warfare. Germany recognized the need to save aircrews in World War I, and an Austrian pilot jumped from a burning plane in 1916. Parachutes were authorized late in the war, and Germany equipped its aircraft with static-line parachutes. The U.S. Army formed a Parachute Section in October 1918, and J. Floyd Smith designed the pack that was tested on April 28, 1919, when Leslie Irvin made a live jump in which the canopy filled in about 1.4 seconds. Harold R. Harris made the first manually operated emergency jump from a powered aircraft on October 22, 1922.

At Brooks Field in Texas, a September 1929 demonstration showed that parachutists could land and set up Lewis machine guns in four minutes. Cargo parachutes became standardized in World War II. The 24-foot G-1 canopy, standardized in December 1942, carried up to 300 pounds, and the G-2 to G-5 types had canopies of 24 to 48 feet and carried up to 3,000 pounds, with canopy colors indicating the type of cargo.

Uses of parachutes today

Parachutes remain the basis of airborne operations, aerial delivery and sport jumping. Tests of C-124 aerial delivery were completed at El Centro, California, in May 1953, and the cargo canopies that followed grew out of those early programs. Charles Lindbergh, who parachuted to safety four times in the two and a half years before his 1927 Atlantic flight, showed how often early aviators needed them. Steerable ram-air canopies now dominate sport use because they can be flown to a chosen landing spot.

Editorially reviewed by Specialty Digest Editorial TeamLast reviewed November 4, 2026Researched and drafted with AI assistanceReport an issue