On October 22, 1797, a Frenchman named André-Jacques Garnerin climbed into a basket beneath a hot-air balloon over the Parc Monceau in Paris. A huge silk umbrella, 23 feet across, hung above the basket on a long pole. The balloon rose to about 3,000 feet - higher than the top of a modern skyscraper. Crowds in the park craned their necks. Then Garnerin pulled a cord, the balloon shot up away from him, and he plunged toward the ground beneath nothing but the floppy silk canopy.
The parachute swung wildly back and forth as it fell. Garnerin gripped the basket hard. People on the ground gasped - some thought he was about to die. But the silk caught enough air to slow him down, and after a wobbly three-minute drop he landed safely in a nearby field, jumped out, climbed onto a borrowed horse, and rode back through cheering crowds to the launch site. He was bruised but grinning. He had become the first human ever to use a parachute.
Garnerin had been thinking about the idea for years, ever since being captured during a war and imagining how he might escape from a high prison tower. He went on to make dozens more jumps across Europe, sometimes from balloons over 8,000 feet up. His niece Élisa became the first famous female parachutist. Every skydiver today, every smoke-jumper fighting wildfires, every astronaut whose capsule drifts down on three big chutes - they all trace their craft back to a silk umbrella over Paris and one brave inventor's leap of faith.
