Men Who Jumped From Balloons

On October 22, 1797, André-Jacques Garnerin became the first person to successfully fall to the earth from a high altitude using a parachute. It was during a period in France of “balloon mania,” where the people turned away from the bloodshed of the revolution and the guillotine and looked to the skies to witness history as eccentric visionaries built larger and more magnificent flying machines seemingly every day. Garnerin was a special kind of innovator, who saw merit not only in gaining altitude, but in coming back down in style. 

Garnerin wasn’t the first parachutist in history; astonishingly another man had already thought it an interesting notion to try jumping from a height that could kill him. Louis-Sébastien Lenormand first demonstrated his hand-held parachute in 1783 by jumping from an observatory tower in front of a crowd. His rigid-framed parachute, which looked like a fourteen-foot patio umbrella, conveyed him safely to the ground, saving those in the crowd the displeasure of watching a madman jump to his death. Lenormand would continue developing parachuting apparatuses, testing the riskier ones on his dog, but took himself out of the running for further world records when he decided to become a Carthusian monk in devotion to the science of “pure technology.”

With the concept of parachutes proven, Garnerin was happy to pick up the torch. A ballooning enthusiast and former soldier, Garnerin pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in the early world of flight. He wasn’t so much pushing physical boundaries, but societal ones. He caused a stir when he announced that he planned to take a female companion along with him on his next flight. Moral outrage ensued, with complaints that the two would be too close to each other in the small basket and in such a visible location, while others feared the astronomical effects increased altitude would have on a woman’s delicate constitution. Garnerin succeeded in having the police drop their injunction against his flight, and it went off without a hitch. 

But Garnerin wasn’t satisfied just risking his social standing; he wanted to risk it all. He designed a contraption, the first frameless parachute, that would allow him to rise high in the air and then coast to the ground under the supportive span of a canvas canopy. Essentially, it was a circular parachute with a balloon attached at the center. The balloon carried the whole affair about a kilometer high, then Garnerin cut the rope and began to drop. It was a rough fall and even rougher landing, but the parachute did its job and Garnerin walked into the history books unscathed.