The Man Who Jumped Out of a Balloon — and Invented the Parachute
On October 22, 1797, French balloonist André-Jacques Garnerin cut loose from a hydrogen balloon 3,000 ft over Paris and floated down under silk — the first successful high-altitude parachute descent.
The crowd in Paris's Parc Monceau had gathered to watch a man fall out of the sky. On the afternoon of October 22, 1797, André-Jacques Garnerin, a 28-year-old French balloonist, climbed into a wicker basket hanging beneath a folded silk canopy, and the whole apparatus was lifted aloft by a hydrogen balloon. When he reached about 3,000 feet, he did what no one had ever done: he cut the rope and trusted the air to catch him.
Garnerin had been dreaming of this moment for years. Captured during the wars of the French Revolution and held as a prisoner of war in Buda, Hungary, he had spent his captivity imagining a way to escape from high places — a canopy that would slow a falling man the way an umbrella slows the rain. After his release he became a student of ballooning, and by 1797 he had built his answer: a frameless parachute of white canvas some 23 feet across, attached by suspension lines to a basket, the whole thing folded like an umbrella beneath a balloon.
The descent was anything but graceful. With no vent at the top of the canopy, air spilled out unevenly from beneath it, and Garnerin swung violently from side to side as he fell. Witnesses gasped in terror at the sight. But the silk held, the swinging eased, and he landed shaken but unhurt about half a mile from where he had taken off, while the freed balloon drifted on skyward without him.
He did not stop there. Garnerin refined the design, adding a vent at the top of the canopy to steady future descents, and went on to make some 200 jumps — including a spectacular leap from 8,000 feet during an exhibition in England in 1802. France named him its Official Aeronaut. Two years after the Parc Monceau jump, his wife Jeanne-Geneviève became the first woman to parachute from a balloon. He died in 1823, still devoted to the flying machines he loved.
Others had imagined parachutes before him — Leonardo da Vinci sketched one, and the Frenchman Louis-Sébastien Lenormand had jumped from a tower in Montpellier with a rigid wooden frame in 1783. But Garnerin was the first to prove that a parachute could save a life falling from high altitude. Every canopy that has carried a skydiver, a paratrooper, or a spacecraft safely home descends, in a straight line, from the silk umbrella he opened over Paris that October afternoon.
No public-domain illustration of Garnerin's 1797 jump could be verified at a usable size, so this story is published without an image.