The list of inventors is constantly being revised: Marconi and the radio, Bell and the telephone, Edison and the light bulb, Benz and the automobile… All are debatable and debated because, often, what they did was simply register the patent before others or develop a commercially viable model. The parachute is another example of multiple authorship, although one of the names involved deserves special consideration for daring to personally test his contraption and prove that it worked: Louis-Sébastien Lenormand.

In reality, Lenormand did not make a great contribution in terms of design; after all, a parachute does not have complex mechanisms, and the basic principle of how it works has hardly changed since the earliest known attempts.

Those attempts date back quite far in time, as the first references are found in the Han Dynasty of China more than two millennia ago. The Records of the Grand Historian, a general history of the Eastern country written around 94 BC by imperial chronicler Sima Qian, recount how the legendary Emperor Shun escaped being murdered by his own father by jumping from the top of a granary using two enormous bamboo hats to cushion his fall.

Lenormand parachute
The Italian parachute of 1470. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

It was also on Chinese soil (or rather, in its skies, to be precise) that, seven centuries later, Emperor Gao Yang forced several prisoners to jump from a tower while attached to kites. One of them, Yuan Huangtou, the son of the previous ruler, managed to survive. Gliding with a device—fabric wings with a wooden frame—was also attempted by the Andalusian sage Abbás ibn Firnás in the 9th century. He launched himself from the hill where the Cordoban palace of Medina Azahara would later be built. He flew for ten minutes, though at the cost of breaking his legs upon landing, at which point he realized he needed to add a tail to achieve stability and reduce speed.

However, the idea of a parachute is more about falling gently than flying. In that sense, the Renaissance and its vibrant cascade of discoveries and technical advances also produced notable episodes. For example, the oldest surviving drawing of a parachute is anonymous but Italian, dating to around 1470.

It almost certainly influenced the drawing that Leonardo da Vinci would include in his Codex Atlanticus a decade later. Both depict a structure supporting the canopy, with the user secured at the waist. Surprisingly, and at least in the version by the famous polymath, recent tests have shown that it would indeed have worked.

Lenormand parachute
The Homo volans depicted in the Machinae novae of Fausto Venanzio. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

The Dalmatian Fausto Veranzio replaced that structure with fabric attached to a square frame by ropes and illustrated it in an engraving in his book on mechanics, Machinae Novae, under the caption Homo volans (Flying Man), where an individual—perhaps himself—is seen jumping from the campanile of St. Mark’s in Venice. Whether he actually tested it remains unknown. However, the concept of a parachute as a kind of umbrella, just as Leonardo had imagined it, would be the one that endured. In fact, it was the one used in the first definitively documented jump, which took place in 1783 and whose protagonist we mentioned at the beginning of this article: Louis-Sébastien Lenormand.

A native of Montpellier, France, where he was born in 1757, he was the son of a watchmaker and studied physics and chemistry in Paris under none other than the prestigious Antoine Lavoisier and Claude Louis Berthollet. His degree allowed him to work in the saltpeter industry, which, interestingly, was related to flight because potassium nitrate was used to manufacture gunpowder and explosives. He then returned to his hometown to work in the family watchmaking business but spent his free time conducting research, with a particular interest in conquering the skies—one of the great challenges of the time.

In fact, on June 4, 1783, the Montgolfier brothers made the first public demonstration of the hot air balloon they had been working on for a year. In the Place d’Armes of the Palace of Versailles, before tens of thousands of astonished spectators—including King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette—a fabric-and-paper aerostat rose into the air, carrying a rooster, a sheep, and a duck in its gondola. Since the test was successful, human passengers would soon replace the animals.

Lenormand parachute
The Montgolfier brothers’ balloon rising at Versailles in 1783. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

However, Lenormand pursued his own line of work, focusing on the development of a parachute. The term is not an anachronism, as he was the one who coined it by combining the prefix para (from the Latin parare, to stop) with the suffix chute (to fall, in French). As mentioned earlier, Leonardo’s design became the dominant model, but the concept was also explored in other parts of the world. Specifically, Lenormand was inspired by the performance of a Thai tightrope walker who used an umbrella to help maintain balance on the wire. Consequently, he crafted a parachute with that shape: a handle, ribs, and fabric, with a diameter of just over five feet.

He conducted preliminary tests with weights, and in November 1783, only weeks after the Montgolfiers’ triumph, he himself jumped from the top of a tree on Rue des Cordeliers, holding two umbrellas—one in each hand. Combined with the relatively low height, the result was a positive one.

But, of course, it was necessary to take things a step further. Applying his knowledge of physics, he calculated the required weight to test at a greater height, and the following month he conducted a new trial, this time with animals, which he launched from the top of the Montpellier observatory tower. The outcome was also satisfactory. Only the definitive test remained.

Lenormand parachute
Diagram of Garnerin’s parachute. Credit:Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

He carried it out on the 26th of that same December, before a crowd of curious onlookers, among whom was Joseph-Michel, one of the successful Montgolfier brothers. Since his work aimed to provide people trapped on a high floor during a fire with a method of escape, Lenormand jumped from the same observatory tower he had used in his tests. This time, he did not carry two umbrellas but one large one, over four meters in diameter. He survived the experience, so it must be concluded that his calculations were precise enough.

However, his invention would not endure as he had envisioned it. A fellow countryman named André-Jacques Garnerin, another pioneer of aerostatics, also took an interest in parachuting and continued working with umbrella-shaped parachutes but later reoriented his design. In October 1797, he detached the gondola from the balloon he was flying in, allowing himself to fall with it while opening a parachute. This one was new: it no longer had a frame but was instead a free-hanging fabric, which was also made of silk instead of the usual linen (reducing its weight and making it easier to fold), thus incorporating an idea from a predecessor named Jean-Pierre Blanchard.

By then, Lenormand had gone through a series of extraordinary vicissitudes, having become a Carthusian monk, only to be forced to leave monastic life by the French Revolution. He settled in Albi, got married, and taught technology at the university his father-in-law had just founded. Later, he moved to Paris to work at the Ministry of Finance. During that period, he published scientific articles and registered several patents. After leaving his job, he focused on writing manuals on various techniques (bookbinding, watchmaking…) and, most notably, an ambitious thematic encyclopedia titled Le Dictionnaire technologique, which occupied him for about twenty volumes. In 1830, he separated from his wife and returned to monastic life, passing away in 1837.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on October 4, 2019: Louis-Sébastien Lenormand, el hombre que realizó en 1783 el primer salto documentado en paracaídas, que él mismo había inventado

SOURCES

Joost Mertens, Technology as the science of the industrial arts: Louis-Sébastien Lenormand (1757-1837) and the popularization of technology

Michael R Lynn, The sublime invention. Ballooning in Europe, 1783–1820

William Sangster, Umbrellas and their history

Wikipedia, Louis-Sébastien Lenormand

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