The French balloonist Garnerin had spent several years experimenting with parachutes based on umbrella-shaped devices. On October 22, 1797, he rose from the Parc Monceau beneath a hydrogen balloon, riding in a basket hung below a folded white canvas canopy about 23 feet across. At a height of roughly 3,000 feet he cut the rope that tied the parachute to the balloon, and the canopy opened and carried him down to a safe landing in front of the crowd.
Other inventors had sketched parachutes or tested them from towers, but Garnerin's design was different: a soft canopy with no rigid frame, opened by the air itself, and dropped from a height at which failure meant death. The descent, on the 1st of Brumaire in the Republican calendar, made him a celebrity overnight.
He went on to stage regular demonstrations at the Parc Monceau. In 1798 he announced that his next ascent would include a woman as a passenger, and the police tried to forbid it on the grounds that she could not understand the risk. Government ministers overturned the ban, ruling that there was no more scandal in a man and a woman going up in a balloon than in their riding in a carriage together.
Garnerin became Official Aeronaut of France, and during the Peace of Amiens in 1802 he toured England with his wife, Jeanne Geneviève, making several flights and, on September 21, a parachute descent over London that ended in a field near St Pancras.
Key people: André-Jacques Garnerin