This tidbit of information did not directly affect Early American Women, but it did become of some importance to their ancestors, so I will mention it here. On this day in 1787, the first parachute jump of note is made by Andre Jacques Garnerin from a hydrogen balloon 1000 meters above Paris.
Leonardo da Vinci conceived the idea of the parachute in his writings, & the Frenchman Louis Bastien Lenormand fashioned a kind of parachute out of two umbrellas & jumped from a tree in 1783, but Andre Jacques Garnerin was the first to design & test parachutes capable of slowing a man's fall from a high altitude.
Garnerin first conceived of the possibility of using air resistance to slow an individual's fall from a high altitude while a prisoner during the French Revolution. Although he never employed a parachute to escape from the high ramparts of the Hungarian prison where he spent three years, Garnerin never lost interest in the concept of the parachute. In 1797, he completed his first parachute, a canopy 23 feet in diameter & attached to a basket with suspension lines.
On 22 October 1797, Garnerin attaches the parachute to a hydrogen balloon & ascends to an altitude of 1000 meters. He then climbs into the basket & severs the parachute from the balloon. As he failed to include an air vent at the top of the prototype, Garnerin oscillated wildly in his descent, but he landed shaken but unhurt 800 meters from the balloon's takeoff site. In 1799, Garnerin's wife, Jeanne-Genevieve, became the first female parachutist. In 1802, Garnerin made a spectacular jump from 2400 meters during an exhibition in England. Unfortunately, he died in a balloon accident in 1823, while preparing to test a new parachute.
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