 
The Modern Parachute
Floyd Smith and Leslie L. Irvin, working with a
research team at what then was McCook Field in Dayton, developed the dominant
parachute of the twentieth century. The device received a patent on May 18, 1920
and became the basis for parachutes used throughout the rest of the Century. The
Ohioans' invention not only saved the lives of thousands of aviators forced to
abandon doomed aircraft; it changed military history. The Smith-Irvin designed
parachute led to formation of paratrooper corps, elite troops who typically have
launched the first assaults in warfare.
 Like
most technological achievements, the history of parachutes is complex. We know
that parachutes existed in the human imagination for centuries before the team
began work at McCook, now Wright Field, at the U.S. Air Force’s Wright-Patterson
Air Force Base. Sebastien Lenormand, of France, usually gets credit for
inventing the first practical parachute in 1783.
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The United States military launched its research
and development program after Germany equipped its World War I pilots with
parachutes. Existing parachutes relied on a cord attached to the aircraft. When
the aviator jumped, the cord coiled out until the slack was gone. Then the cord
yanked out the folded parachute, which billowed open. Everyone thought the
attached cord was essential. Humans, they felt, could not survive a free fall
through the air. If aviators did survive, they would be in no condition to
deploy manually the parachute themselves.
The attached-cord parachute, however, created
problems. It deployed relatively close to the aircraft. That was dangerous when
the airplane was in flames or exploded right after bailout. Aviators had little
chance to get a safe distance away from the aircraft.
Packing it in
Smith and Irvin realized that the existing "static-line actuated"
parachutes, attached to the interior frame of the aircraft, were
unsuitable. They developed a revolutionary new 'chute with canopy and lines
packed into a container worn on a body harness. |
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Bailing Out In History
1000 AD -- Chinese send
condemned prisoners over cliffs with like-like device.
1495 - Leonardo Da Vinci sketched designs for a parachute.
1783 -- Sebastien Lenormand invented the modern parachute.
1793 -- Jean Pierre Blanchard first used a parachute in an emergency,
escaping from an exploded hot air balloon.
1837 -- Robert Cocking became the first person to die from a parachute
accident.
1887 -- Thomas Baldwin safely parachuted to the ground from a balloon
5,000 feet above San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
1919 – Col. Billy Mitchell suggested using parachutes for a new corps of
assault troops who would be dropping from airplanes.
1928 -- Six of Gen. Mitchell’s troops jump from a bomber, and set up a
machine gun, demonstrating that parachute forces are practical. |
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 Aviators
activated it manually, with a ripcord yanked while falling freely through the
air with no attachment to the aircraft. It had a 28-foot diameter silk canopy
with silk suspension lines, folded into a backpack container. A yank on the
ripcord opened flaps on the backpack, and deployed a small pilot-chute and then
the main parachute.
On April 28, 1919, a member of the design team named Leslie L. Irvin, wearing a
prototype of called Model A, jumped from a USD-9 airplane piloted by Smith.
Irwin became the first person to make a free-fall parachute jump from an
aircraft with the device that would be the 'chute of the future.
Smith received
U. S. Patent No.1,340,423
on the parachute, which he manufactured and sold at the Floyd Smith Aerial
Equipment Co. in San Diego, California. Brigadier General William ("Billy")
Mitchell first conceived the idea of parachuting troops into combat during World
War I. Eventually, under the leadership of Major William Lee at Fort Benning,
Georgia, members of the
Parachute Test
Platoon pioneered methods of combat jumping in 1940.
Modern parachutes are best
characterized as parawings and parafoils, some with separate, controllable
panels.
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