How did Parachuting get Off the Ground?
by Karl Pillham
Today, skydiving is a popular sport, with thousands of people taking the leap every year. But it wasn't until around a hundred years ago that this became an acceptable thing to do, rather than an insane and perilous stunt. The idea of this concept probably started a thousand years ago in China. It was here that the explorer Marco Polo first saw kites being used to raise people up and lower them down to earth. This image would become a well-known part of his miraculous stories by the time of the Italian Renaissance in the 1400s.
In the Italian renaissance period Leonardo da Vinci designed a parachute which, though not used at the time, proved to be a success in recent tests. Similarly Fausto Loranzio sketched a quick design in the 1600s for something that looks remarkably like a modern parachute, and there are even rumours that he tried it out. Parachuting itself, and indeed the name 'parachute,' came about from French pioneers in the 1700s. The name is a neogelism of the Greek stem 'paracete' which means 'to protect' and the French word 'chute' for 'fall.'
That said, these designs were more in the margins of hypothetical books that something people regularly did. It wasn't for another two hundred years or so that people came to put the ideas into practice. A rigid umbrella-like device was used by Louis-Sbastien Lenormand to glide down from a rooftop in 1783. He also invented the word parachute, meaning 'protect from a fall' in Greek and French. The aeronaut Andr-Jacques Garnerin used frameless silk parachutes to eject from his balloons in the 1800s, and even delivered some letters for the Prince Regent in this manner.
With the advent of powered flight in the early 1900s people began requesting something that pilots could use to descend to safely earth. After some notable failures, including Franz Reichelt's ill-fated jump from the Eiffel Tower in 1911, the Americans and Russians hit upon successful ideas.
Grant Morten of the USA did the first parachute jump from a plane in 1911, and Gleb Kotelnikov made the first backpack parachutes in the same year. From there parachutists have never looked back.
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New Unique Article!
Title: How did Parachuting get Off the Ground?
Author: Karl Pillham
Email: uawdir@hotmail.co.uk
Keywords: extreme sports, extreme activities, sports
Word Count: 361
Category: Hobbies
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