Parachutes Were Invented Before Airplanes

Parachutes were invented before airplanes.

Most grade school students can tell you that the first airplane was flown by Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1903. 

But the origins of the parachute go back further, much further, depending on your criteria.

The Shiji, composed by Chinese historian Sima Qian, describes how as a young man the legendary third-century BCE Emperor Shun jumped from the roof of a burning building, using bamboo hats as a makeshift parachute. 

Leonardo da Vinci famously sketched a design for a pyramid-shaped parachute made from linen around 1485. Approximately 130 years later, Venetian Bishop Fausto Veranzio unveiled his own design in his Machinae Novae, and allegedly even tested the contraption himself.

But the first modern parachutist is generally considered to be France's Louis-Sebastien Lenormand. 

Along with actually coining the term "parachute," Lenormand initially tested gravity by leaping from a tree with two umbrellas, before flinging himself from the Montpellier Observatory with a 14-foot parachute in December 1783. 

Fourteen years later, another Frenchman, André-Jacques Garnerin, delivered the first truly death-defying parachute exhibition when he plunged from a hydrogen balloon some 3,200 feet above Paris, and rode out the bumpy descent with his 23-foot silk net to a safe landing.