Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Parachutes

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

Centuries ago, someone decided jumping from a great height and trying to land without being injured would be a good idea.  …and in a few cases, it actually worked….although in many more cases, it didn’t.  Once humans figured out how to actually fly, they realized that there might be an actual use for this stunt.  Learn more about parachutes, parachuting, and how and why this particular technology was developed on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors BetterHelp Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month ButcherBox Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free steak for a year and get $20 off."  Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Centuries ago, somebody decided that jumping from a great height and trying to land without being injured would be a good idea. And in a few cases, it actually worked, although in many more cases, it didn't. Once humans actually figure out how to fly, they realize that there might actually be a use for this stunt. Learn more about parachutes, parachuting, and why this particular technology was developed on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. On behalf of myself and the Greater Everything Everywhere Daily family, I would like to start this episode by formally thanking all of the people throughout history who flung themselves off buildings and cliffs in the name. of science and developing the technology that we know today as parachutes. There are certain things that we as a species know that must have been very difficult to learn. For example, how do we know which plants and mushrooms are poisonous and which ones are safe? That required a lot of trial and error over thousands of years. And there must have been a lot of people that, how shall I put it, took one for the team. Parachuting, I think, falls into that camp.

Today, parachuting is pretty much down to a science, but it's something that doesn't allow for a whole lot of trial and error. If you fling yourself from a great height, you only get to fail once. So with that being said, one of the earliest and probably apocryphal descriptions of an early parachute dates back 4,000 years. A historian from the Chinese Han dynasty wrote of the legendary emperor Shun, who as a young man was the target of a plot by his father to kill him. His father was planning to kill him by getting him to the roof of a building and then setting the building on fire. Shun managed to escape by holding two large conical bamboo hats and jumping off the building. It was said that the hats acted like the wings of a bird and brought him safely to the ground. There is no indication as to how high the building was.

The next reference to something akin to a parachute was in the year 852 in Cordoba, Spain. The great Islamic polymath Abbas Ibn Fyrnaz created a large cloak that was stiffened by wood and used to break his fall when he jumped out of a tower. According to reports of the event, quote, there was enough air in the folds of his cloak to prevent great injury when he reached the ground. This event, too, might not have happened. There's only one mention of it published years after he lived, and it may have been confused with another attempt he later made to fly by creating his own pair of wings.

There are mentions of Chinese acrobats around the 11th to 13th centuries who jumped from heights and landed safely as part of their performance. All of these examples are impossible to verify, and they may never have happened. And if they did, it certainly didn't result in widespread parachuting. The first real evidence we have of something akin to a parachute designed for the purpose of slowing a fall came from an anonymous manuscript from the 15th century. A sketch in it shows a man holding a wooden frame at the bottom of a conical parachute. The design wouldn't have worked in practice, but it definitely showed that the idea of using air resistance to slow a fall was something that was being considered. In 1485, Leonardo da Vinci sketched a design for a parachute that was designed in the shape

of a pyramid. While not an optimal design, in 2000, a British parachutist by the name of Adrian Nichols used Da Vinci's design to do a 10,000-foot jump, and in 2008, a Swiss parachutist by the name of Olivier Tepa did the same thing and jumped out of a helicopter. Both landings were rough, but it worked. In the early 17th century, a Venetian inventor by the name of Faustio Varanzeo designed a parachute

that was much broader and had an area closer to that of a sail. I should note that with all the cases I've mentioned so far, there's no real evidence that anyone actually tested these ideas, There are stories and legends and little else. The person who took these ideas and turned them into something real was the French inventor Sebastian Le Normand. On December 26, 1783, he made the first publicly documented jump when he leaped off the observatory tower in Montpellier, France, using a rigid frame that was 14 feet or 4.3 meters across. Today, we'd probably call it something more like a glider than a parachute, but hats off to him.

He put his money where his mouth was and jumped out of a tower which was 26 meters or 85 feet tall. It was Lain Armand who in 1785 coined the word parachute. It came from the Latin word para, meaning against, and the French word shoot, meaning fall. That same year, Jean-Pierre Blanchard demonstrated his parachute by throwing a dog out of a hot air balloon. The dog landed safely on the ground. The first jump that we could call a real modern parachute jump, took place on October 22nd, 1797 by André Jean Garnary, the inventor of the frameless parachute, the type of parachute that you would recognize today. His parachute, which was 30 feet or 10 meters

in diameter, was attached to a basket and hoisted below a balloon. He was dropped from a height of 8,000 feet or 2,400 meters. Two years later, his wife, Jean, became the first woman to parachute. These parachutes were pre-deployed, meaning that they weren't packed away like a modern parachute. I should note that on July 24, 1837, Robert Cocking became the first recorded person to die in a parachute accident. He perished in front of a large crowd after falling from a height of 5,000 feet. His death reduced the popularity of parachuting for several decades. There was actually little innovation in parachutes over the next century. They were primarily used for demonstrations and to wow crowds at festivals. It wasn't until 1907 that the American inventor

Charles Broadwick developed several parachute innovations that totally changed how parachutes worked and how they would be used. The first major innovation was packing a parachute into a backpack. Until this point, parachutes were just loose and opened like a balloon. Broadwick's backpack was worn with a full body harness to make sure that you were attached to the parachute. His second innovation was a cord that attached to the backpack that would open the backpack when it was taught. This static line opening system, was used in many early military parachute systems, and it's still sometimes used today. Broadwick made these innovations while jumping out of balloons at fares.

However, it soon became obvious that Broadwick's parachute system would be ideal for this new invention that was known as airplanes. The first parachute jump from an airplane was done by Grant Morton, who jumped out of a Wright brother's Model B in 1911. That same year, a Russian by the name of Gelb Kotelnikov independently invented the NAPE sack parachute. This new design of a parachute that was worn and stowed on the jumpers back allowed for a parachute to be opened at any arbitrary time during a fall, not just immediately after a jumper left the aircraft. In 1914, a woman by the name of Georgia Tiny Broadwick,

the adopted daughter of Charles Brodwick, did demonstration jumps, and in one jump, her static line got tangled, so she cut it off. In that jump, she inadvertently made the world's first free fall, and she manually pulled the cut static cord, creating the rip cord. During the First World War, artillery spotters and hot air balloons were easy targets, so parachutes were used as a safety measure for the spotters. In 1918, the Germans deployed parachutes for their pilots as a safety measure, but it was far from perfect. A full third of pilots who had to jump from their aircraft ended up dying even though they had parachutes. After the war, improvements were made to parachutes, which improved safety for pilots and allowed for easier exiting in the aircraft.

However, safety was only one of the uses for parachutes. In 1927, Italy began experimenting with using parachutes to drop troops behind enemy lines. This idea radically changed warfare by integrating infantry with aviation, and it created a new category of soldier known as the paratrooper. There were very limited uses of parachutes dropping soldiers behind enemy lines in the First World War, but they were usually single individuals who were spying or conducting reconnaissance. There were many innovations to parachutes during the interwar period. The biggest was probably a shift of material from silk to nylon, and this was largely done because of restrictions on the supply of silk from Japan.

Different designs were created, which allowed for different uses, including drag shoots for aircraft and parachutes that could drop equipment. During the Second World War, paratroopers were used extensively. Paratroopers were the first troops sent on D-Day. The largest airborne drop of the war occurred with Operation Market Garden, which I covered in a previous episode. Over 20,000 men were dropped behind enemy lines in the market phase of the operation using parachutes. The parachutes used during World War II were rather round in shape. They were designed to land someone safely, but they weren't very maneuverable.

They could maneuver the parachute somewhat by pulling on the cords that connected their harness to the parachute, but that was about it. And this wasn't necessarily a bad thing, as when a drop was made, one of the primary objectives was to ensure that everyone landed in roughly the same spot. It wasn't until 1963 that the problem of parachute maneuverability was solved with the development of the RAM Air Multi-Cell Airfoil, also known as the parafoil. A paraphoel is basically a soft wing that inflates with air, and they tend to be more rectangular than round. The ability of the parafoil to be steered and controlled was a huge innovation. Now you could jump out of an airplane in one location and land in another location that was far from the original drop point. A type of military jump known as a high-altitude, high-opening jump could allow a paratrooper to travel as far as 40 miles or 64 kilometers from where you're a military jump, from where they initially left the aircraft.

Another type of jump is a high-altitude, low-opening jump, or a halo jump. These jumps often occur at altitudes over 40,000 feet, above the range of many anti-aircraft defenses. Halo jumps can provide more stealthy drops by minimizing the amount of time that the shoot is open. The parafoil also allowed for landings with a high degree of precision. Trained parachutists can literally land on a bullseye, and this has led to the development of parachuting teams like the U.S. Army Golden Eagles who often put on public performances.

There have been several jumps that have tested the limits of how parachutes can be used. On August 16, 1960, Joseph Kittinger conducted a jump from 102,800 feet, or 31,33 meters, from a high-altitude balloon on the edge of the stratosphere. He spent a full four minutes and 36 seconds in free fall. That record stood until Felix Baumgartner made a jump from an altitude of 127,000 feet, or about 39,000 meters in 2012. He achieved a top speed of 833.9 miles per hour, or 1,342 kilometers per hour in freefall, the equivalent of Mach 1.1.

His record only stood for two years, however, when it was broken by Alan Eustis, who jumped from 135,889 feet, or 41,000, 419 meters. Today, anyone can parachute. You can do recreational parachute jumps at many airports, and they can cater to complete novices. Parachutes have revolutionized warfare, forest fighting, and airplane safety.

And all it required was someone having enough nerve to strap something to their back and jump from an extremely high height. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Keefer. I wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who supports the show on Patreon. Your support helps me put out a new show every day.

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