When reenacting or acting as a historical interpreter, its good to have a few historical dates and stories to share. This series will publish a few.

On October 22, 1797, French balloonist  André Garnerin, made the first safe descent with a silk parachute from a balloon

André-Jacques Garnerin was ballooning pioneer of great regard and eventually earned the acclaim of Emperor Napoleon as Official Aeronaut of France.  His biggest accomplishment in aviation was long distance flights and he made several.  On October 3, 1803, Garnerin flew 300 km between Moscow and Polova by balloon. Then on November 22 and 23, 1807, he completed a 395 km balloon flight between Paris and Pirmasens.  In his career as a balloonist made many emergency landings which led him to consider how he could escape a midair disaster.  During the Coalition Wars, Garnerin was imprisoned by the Austrians in the Buda Fortress for three years. During his imprisonment, Garnerin occupied himself with designing parachutes that would help him escape a balloon failure.

Garnerin started experimenting with umbrella-shaped parachutes based on the untried designs of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci wrote in detail about his ideas of a parachute device in Codex Atlanticus during the 15th Century but his ideas were never tested.  André Garnerin, performed the first parachute descent from a balloon over Parc Monceau in Paris with a device made of silk on October 22, 1797.  His construction was basically a closed umbrella with a pole running down in the middle. He attached a basket to it and at an altitude of about 400 metres, he severed the rope that connected his parachute to the balloon. Since there was no opening at the apex of his parachute, the compressed air flowed over the edge of the chute and caused dangerous, strong pendulum movements. His balloon continued its journey into the skies while he fell with his parachute downwards. Even though the landing was very rough, Garnerin was not injured and his first silk parachute flight was a success.  He landed in front of a crowd admiring him and was brought to the city in triumph. Later designs of his parachute would include an apex opening and his jumps would descend from ever higher altitudes.

Bold Garnerin went up
Which increased his Repute
And came safe to earth
In his Grand Parachute.

Since Garnerin did not die, we now have hundreds of intrepid fools who each year are willing to jump from perfectly good airplanes that are going to land anyway.

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