The virtues of the parachute were first tried upon animals. Thus, Blanchard allowed his dog to fall in one from a height of 6,500 feet. A gust of wind caught the falling parachute, and swept it away up above the clouds. Afterwards, the aeronaut in his balloon fell in with the dog in the parachute, both of them high up in the cloudy reaches of the sky, and the poor animal manifested by his barking his joy at seeing his master. A new current separated the aerial voyagers, but the parachute, with its canine passenger, reached the ground safely a short time after Blanchard had landed from his balloon.
Experience has proved that, in the case of a descending parachute, if the rapidity of the descent is doubled the resistance of the air is quadrupled; if the rapidity is triple the resistance is increased ninefold; or, to speak in language of science, the resistance of the air is increased by the square of the swiftness of the body in motion. This resistance increases in proportion as the parachute spreads, and thus the uniformity of its fall is established a minute after it has been disengaged from the balloon. We can, therefore, check the descent of a body by giving it a surface capable of distension by the action of the air.
Garnerin, in the year 1802, conceived the bold design of letting himself fall from a height of 1,200 feet, and he accomplished the exploit before the Parisians. When he had reached the height he had fixed beforehand, he cut the rope which connected the parachute with the balloon. At first the fall was terribly rapid; but as soon as the parachute spread out the rapidity was considerably diminished. The machine made, however, enormous oscillations. The air, gathering end compressed under it, would sometimes escape by one side sometimes by the other, thus shaking and whirling the parachute about with a violence which, however great, had happily no unfortunate effect.
The origin of the parachute is more remote than is generally supposed, as there was a figure of one which appeared among a collection of machines at Venice, in 1617.
Another species of parachute, less perfect, to be sure; than that of Garnerin, but still a practical machine, was described 189 years before the great aeronaut’s feat at Paris. We read in the narrative of the ambassador of Louis XIV at Siam, at the end of the seventeenth century, the following passage—“A mountebank at the court of the King of Siam climbed to the top of a high bamboo-tree, and threw himself into the air without any other support than two parasols. Thus equipped, he abandoned himself to the winds, which carried him, as by chance, sometimes to the earth, sometimes on trees or houses, and sometimes into the river, without any harm happening to him.”
Is not this the idea of our parachutes?
Chapter IV. First Public Trial of the Balloon.
(Montgolfier’s Balloon Annonay, 5th of June of 1783.)
We are accustomed to rank the brothers Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier as equally distinguished in the field of science. The reason for thus associating these two names seems to have been the fraternal friendship which subsisted in an extraordinary degree in the Montgolfier family, rather than any equality of claim which they had to the notice of posterity. After special investigation, we find that Joseph Montgolfier was very superior to his brother, and that it is to him principally, if not exclusively, that we owe the invention of aerostation. Nevertheless, we shall not insist upon this fact; and seeing that a sacred amity always cemented a perfect union in the Montgolfier family, we will regard that union as unbroken in any sense, and will not insinuate that the brother of Montgolfier was undeserving of the honoured rank which in his lifetime he held.