On December 26, 1783, before a large public gathering at the base of the Montpellier Observatory in Paris, the French scientist and physicist Louis-Sebastien Lenormand jumped from the observatory's tower clinging to a 14-foot (4.2 m) parachute attached to an improvised wooden frame. Lenormand's leap of faith was the first ever documented use of a parachute and followed on from an earlier attempt at a slowed descent when he leaped from a tree holding on to nothing more than two modified parasols.
Lenormand's inspiration likely came from the popular writings of a former French ambassador to China whose memoirs included an account of Chinese acrobats floating to earth using umbrellas. Chinese legends dating to 90 B.C.E. also tell of a group of prisoners who cheated death by leaping from a tower and slowing their descent with the aid of conical straw hats. Leonardo da Vinci sketched his famous pyramid- shaped sealed linen parachute in 1485, but there is no evidence that his idea ever progressed beyond a sketch. Recently uncovered Renaissance manuscripts from 1470 depict a parachute not unlike Da Vinci's version, and yet predate his drawings by fifteen years.
The first descent from a great height was performed by the French balloonist Andre-Jacques Garnerin, who in 1797 leaped from the basket of a hot- air balloon beneath a silk parachute designed, like Da Vinci's, without an aperture, descending 2,230 feet (680 m) to Pare Monceau in Paris and landing entirely without injury before a large crowd. Gamier later adapted his design by adding an aperture to reduce the parachute's oscillations during descent.
