Parachute
The earliest primitive parachute was made some 4,000 years ago, when the Chinese learned that using such a device air resistance would slow the fall of a person from a high place through the
atmosphere. According to the Historical Records by Sima Qian of the Western Han Dynasty, Shun, a legendary monarch in ancient China, was deeply hated by his father, a blind old man. When Shun was once working on top of a high granary, his father set fire to the granary from below, intending to kill Shun. Holding two cone-shape bamboo hats in his hands, Shun flied down and landed safely. This must be the first record of human attempts to use a parachute-like device. Yue Ke (1183- c.1242), a grandson of the patriotic general Yue Fei (1103-1142) of the Southern Song Dynasty, also recorded a similar episode in one of his essays. He writes: There was a very high mosque in Guangzhou. One day, people found that one leg of the golden rooster at the top of the mosque was stolen, and they wondered how the thief could manage to escape with such a big piece of gold. When the thief was caught, he confessed that he had used two umbrellas to descend from the top of the mosque. The umbrellas served as a parachute for the thief.
A French ambassador to Thailand in the 17th century also wrote about how a Chinese acrobat used umbrellas as a parachute: The acrobat, with two umbrellas tied to his waist, jumped through an iron-wire loop high above, and the wind would bring him to the ground, on a tree, or down in the river. In Europe it was Leonardo da Vinci who first proposed the use of parachute in 1483. The first person to demonstrate the use of a parachute in action was Louis-S6bastien Lenormand of France in 1783, who jumped from a tree with two parasols. |
