February 18, 2008
A Brief History of Skydiving
Discusses the history of parachuting all the way back to the 10th century Chinese.
Skydiving has an interesting history that can take up an entire volume, but this article will attempt to give a brief summary of this story. Most people consider skydiving a product of the twentieth century, but its history goes further back than that. The Chinese have tried to parachute in the 10th century, a thousand years before we did. Of course, there were no airplanes, so that the Chinese did what we today call the basis for diving, it is they jumped outcroppings or other training that will enable them to float, from a height on the ground. And then, of course, we have the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, which illustrated a parachute in the shape (more…)
