Today, we fall safely out of the sky. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
By WW-I, parachutes were a
pretty well developed technology. Of course, they
weren't given to fighter pilots. That was because
they were still pretty bulky, but it was also
because some people felt they'd have a bad effect
on the morale and courage of pilots. On the other
hand, the lookouts who manned front-line
observation blimps were given parachutes, and they
made heavy use of them. Those blimps were shot down
with tedious regularity.
The parachute was actually around for hundreds of
years before the airplane was invented. The first
well-documented parachute drop was made by the
Frenchman Lenormand, who jumped from a tower in
1783. And it was also Lenormand who invented the
word parachute. It literally means
something that opposes falling. The usual accounts
credit Leonardo da Vinci with the idea because he
included a pyramidal cloth parachute in a one of
his sketchbooks in 1485.
But historian Lynn White has discovered an
anonymous set of Renaissance Italian manuscripts on
technology that he can date to about 1470 -- 15
years ahead of Leonardo. These include two sketches
of parachutes. One shows a brace of long cloth
streamers that clearly could've broken a fall. The
other shows a parachute that's very similar to
Leonardo's -- conical in shape instead of
pyramidal, but identical in all its other features.
White asks how the idea got from this author to
Leonardo. It's unlikely that Leonardo actually saw
the manuscript, because there were no patent laws
in those days, and people tended to be awfully
secretive about their writings. But Renaissance
engineers had what White calls "an intensely oral
tradition." A great deal of information was passed
by conversation, and the idea of the parachute was
-- as he wryly puts it -- "in the air" during the
Renaissance.
And who made the first jump? Well, that seems to
have been an anonymous Asian acrobat who used a
pair of large parasols. But the parachutes that
actually worked from large heights were made of
loose fabrics in much the way these Italian
engineers suggested.
It's worth emphasizing that the motivation of such
people was nothing more elevating -- if I may get
away with that word -- nothing more uplifting than
play. The parachute, like so much other worthwhile
technology, was given us by people who were simply
having fun.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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