What Absolute Madman Invented the Parachute?

With most inventions, if it doesn’t work, you just try again. With the parachute, that’s difficult, due to your brain’s recent exit from its normal operating location. That’s why it’s such a morbidly funny idea to think about someone “inventing,” because the basic idea behind it isn’t particularly groundbreaking. All you have to do is watch a leaf fall off a tree, or knock a paper off a tabletop, to realize that the same science might let a human fall at a more pleasant, bone-friendly speed.

Now, actually putting it to the test? That takes a serious screw loose or supreme confidence in your brand of physics. So it’s not surprising that the man credited with the first successful parachute jump became obsessed with the idea during a time of extreme duress. A man named Andre-Jacques Garnerin was somewhere that afforded ample thinking time and motivation: a Hungarian prison. It was while he was there that he started conceiving a parachute that would let a person float down from high altitudes safely. Like, say, the towering walls that surrounded him.

Garnerin would spend only three years in prison, perhaps not enough to risk his life on his hunch. After his release, it seemed he couldn’t shake his fascination, and eventually, he made a decision — a gamble of mortal proportions on the parachute he’d cooked up in his head. With the help of a hydrogen balloon, Garnerin got himself up to an entirely medically inadvisable height in the year 1797. At 3,000 feet and change, he cut off the balloon, leaving him in a basket with only a 23-foot diameter canopy of cloth preventing him from becoming human tartare.

One disconcerting but successful descent later, a healthy Garnerin returned to earth as the world's first skydiver of sorts. Which you probably could have predicted, given that this article isn’t called “Here’s the French Dumbass Who Died in A Basket.” 

God bless you, Andre-Jacques — and your incredibly poor decision-making.