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A parachute is usually a soft fabric device used to slow the motion of an object through an atmosphere by creating drag. Parachutes are generally used to slow the descent of a person or object to Earth or another celestial body within an atmosphere. more...

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Drogue parachutes are also sometimes used to aid horizontal deceleration of a vehicle (a fixed-wing aircraft or space shuttle after touchdown, or a drag racer). The word parachute comes from the French words para, protect or shield, and chute, the fall. Therefore parachute actually means "fall protection". Many modern parachutes are classified as semi-rigid wings, are quite maneuverable, and can be flown as a glider.

Parachutes were once made from silk but now they are almost always constructed from more durable woven nylon fabric, sometimes coated with silicone to improve performance and consistency over time. Originally silk was used for parachute suspension lines, but was replaced by nylon during the World War II. When square (aka ram-air) parachutes were introduced, manufacturers switched to low-stretch materials like Dacron or zero-stretch materials like Spectra, Kevlar, Vectran or high modulous aramids. Kevlar is rarely seen except on reserve canopies.

History

A few medieval documents record the use of parachute-like devices to allow a person to fall (somewhat) safely from a height. In 852, an Andalusian-Arab daredevil named Armen Firman jumped from a tower in Cordoba using a loose cloak stiffened with wooden struts to arrest his fall, sustaining only minor injuries. In the 9th century, another Muslim Abbas Ibn Firnas attempted a similar feat. According to Joseph Needham there were working parachutes in China as early as the 12th century.

Leonardo da Vinci sketched a parachute while he was living in Milan around 1480-1483. However, the idea of the parachute may not have originated with him: the historian Lynn White has discovered an anonymous Italian manuscript from about 1470 that depicts two designs for a parachute, one of which is very similar to da Vinci's. The first successful test of such a parachute was made in 1617 in Venice by the Croatian inventor Faust Vrančić which he named Homo Volans (Flying Man). A 1595 sketch of Vrančić's parachute is at left.

The parachute was re-invented in 1783 by Sébastien Lenormand in France. Lenormand also coined the name parachute. Two years later, Jean-Pierre Blanchard demonstrated it as a means of safely disembarking from a hot air balloon. While Blanchard's first parachute demonstrations were conducted with a dog as the passenger, he later had the opportunity to try it himself when in 1793 his hot air balloon ruptured and he used a parachute to escape.

Subsequent development of the parachute focused on it becoming more compact. While the early parachutes were made of linen stretched over a wooden frame, in the late 1790s, Blanchard began making parachutes from folded silk, taking advantage of silk's strength and light weight. In 1797, André Garnerin made the first jump using such a parachute. Garnerin also invented the vented parachute, which improved the stability of the fall. Gleb Kotelnikov invented the first knapsack parachute, later popularized by Paul Letteman and Kathchen Paulus.

Read more at Wikipedia.org