Today, let's fall safely out of the sky. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
By WW-I, parachutes were
pretty well developed, but fighter pilots didn't
get to use them. That was only partly because they
were bulky in a cramped cockpit. Generals were
afraid the hope of escape would undermine a pilot's
courage in battle. Lookouts in front-line
observation blimps did get parachutes, and they
made heavy use of them. Blimps were shot down with
tedious regularity.
Parachutes had been around for hundreds of years
before we had airplanes. The earliest human
experiment we know about was made by an anonymous
Asian acrobat who jumped with a pair of large
parasols. The French daredevil Lenormand parachuted
from a tower in 1783, about the same time the
Montgolfier brothers made their first balloon
ascent. Lenormand also invented the word
parachute. It literally means
a-thing-that-opposes-falling.
In 1797 another Frenchman, André Garnerin,
was first to jump from a balloon. Garnerin talked
his wife into making one jump. Then his niece took
up exhibition jumping for a living. And women kept doing exhibition jumps
all through the 19th century.
Leonardo da Vinci had included a pyramidal cloth
parachute in a 1485 sketchbook, so we credited him
with the idea of the parachute. Then historian Lynn
White discovered an anonymous set of Renaissance
Italian manuscripts on technology. He dated them
near 1470 -- about fifteen years ahead of Leonardo.
Those notebooks included two sketches of
parachutes. One was a brace of long cloth streamers
that clearly could've broken a fall. The parachute
was very similar to Leonardo's -- conical in shape
instead of pyramidal, but identical in all its
other features.
So how did the idea reach Leonardo? It was unlikely
that he ever saw those manuscripts because, without
patent protection, 15th-century inventors were
secretive. Renaissance engineers had what White
called "an intensely oral tradition." They traded
information in conversations, and the idea of the
parachute was, as White wryly put it, "in the air"
during the Renaissance.
Europe would wait another three hundred years
before parachutes were more than a theoretical idea
-- before Garnerin would actually step off into the
air from a balloon. And the parachutes that
actually worked from high altitude were ones made
of loose fabrics just as those Italian engineers
had suggested.
So the technology had been well-honed by WW-I. It's
really an appalling fact that countless pilots went
to their death simply to satisfy some morbid
concept of heroism. Why, I wonder? Perhaps it is
that parachutes had, by then, played so long on the
stage of aerial showmanship that no one was
inclined to mix them with the images of medieval
chivalry surrounding early aerial warfare. Perhaps
it was simply the dilemma we face so often -- of
being unprepared to move a technology from one
arena to another.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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