Louis-Sébastien Lenormand successfully performed the first parachute jump from a 26-meter tall tower in Montpellier, France, in 1783, paving the way for the rapid development of parachuting.
On December 26, 1783, a crowd gathered outside an observatory in Montpellier, a city in France near the Mediterranean coast. The observatory was located in the Medieval Tour de la Babotte tower, one of the two rare towers still standing from the walled city of Montpellier. This structure, approximately 26 meters tall, was used to study astronomical phenomena such as eclipses.
Illustration of Louis-Sébastien Lenormand’s parachute jump at the Tour de la Babotte (left) in 1783 and André Garnerin’s parachute design in 1797 (right). (Photo: Amusing Planet).
However, on that December afternoon, the Tour de la Babotte was used for an entirely different purpose. Inventor Louis-Sébastien Lenormand, the son of a watchmaker, prepared to perform a demonstration before the eager crowd.
Lenormand had developed a device that allowed people to jump from burning buildings and land safely without injury. His device consisted of two large umbrellas attached to a rigid wooden frame. Lenormand practiced this jump for a long time from lower heights, including from tree branches. He also experimented with the device using animals before he felt confident enough to try it himself.
Right on time, Lenormand appeared at the top of the tower. He waved to the increasingly excited crowd, then grasped the handle of the giant umbrella, jumped down, and landed successfully.
Lenormand was not the inventor of the parachute, but he was the first to trust and stake his life on an idea that had existed for thousands of years. The earliest records of parachutes are fictional. The historian of the Western Han Dynasty, Sima Qian, recounted the story of Shun, a mythical Chinese emperor, who escaped from his cruel father by climbing to the top of a high granary and safely jumping down by holding onto two bamboo hats.
The earliest description of a parachute appears in an anonymous manuscript from the 1470s in Italy, depicting a man grasping a horizontal frame attached to a conical canopy, suspended in mid-air.
A decade later, Leonardo da Vinci sketched a more sophisticated parachute model, in which the canopy was stretched out by a square wooden frame instead of a conical shape. The sketch was accompanied by a description: “If a man has a linen tent with the openings sealed, about 7 meters wide and 7 meters deep, he can jump from a great height without injury.”
The Croatian inventor Fausto Veranzio (1551 – 1617) studied da Vinci’s parachute sketch, retaining the square frame but replacing the canopy with a sail-like piece of fabric, as he found it slowed descent more effectively. In his design drawing titled Homo Volans (The Flying Man), Veranzio depicted a man parachuting from a tower, possibly the St Mark’s Campanile in Venice.
The drawing led some historians to believe that Veranzio, then 65 years old and seriously ill, actually tested his design by jumping from the St Mark’s Campanile. However, the lack of textual evidence suggests that this event did not occur, and the drawing was merely a simulation.
Design drawing of the parachute titled Homo Volans (The Flying Man). (Photo: Amusing Planet).
Two years after Lenormand’s jump in Montpellier, he coined the term “parachute”, combining the Italian prefix “para”, meaning “against,” and the French word “chute,” meaning “fall,” to describe the practical function of this device.
After Lenormand’s demonstration, parachute designs developed rapidly. In 1785, the same year Lenormand coined the word parachute, Jean-Pierre Blanchard demonstrated that a parachute could safely land from a hot air balloon using a dog. In 1793, Blanchard had the opportunity to test the reliability of the parachute himself when his balloon tore. He also created a parachute that could be folded from silk instead of linen stretched over a wooden frame. In 1797, André Garnerin made the first jump with a “frameless” silk parachute.
In the early 20th century, Charles Broadwick introduced two significant innovations to parachuting. He packed the parachute in a backpack and deployed it using a static line attached to the balloon. When Broadwick jumped from the balloon, the static line stretched, pulling the parachute out of the pack, and then breaking. This integrated system that could be worn on the back became standard for all modern parachute systems. Today, parachutists still use static line parachutes.
