Were Parachutes Invented Before Airplanes

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Da Vinci: Who is it?
Narrator: Hi, Mr. Da Vinci. It’s me, the Trusty Narrator. May I come in?
Da Vinci: Fine.
Narrator: Here you go, Leo. That book you wanted from the library, Painting for Dummies.
Da Vinci: Thanks. I needed a hobby. Inventing stuff, it isn’t working out.
Narrator: You’ve got ideas for scuba gear, air conditioning, a self-supporting bridge, a helicopter, even a robotic knight. You are a true genius.
Da Vinci: Oh, stop. No, please go on.
Narrator: Trust me, one day you’ll be so famous they’ll name a turtle warrior after you.
Da Vinci: I don’t know what that means.
Narrator: You’ll also be featured on the Who Smarted? podcast, where tons of Smarty Pants will learn all about your works of greatness.
Da Vinci: Smarty Pants? Pants that make you smarter? I love it. Painting can wait. I get right to work on designing a smarty pants.
Narrator: You’re taking Smarty Pants a little too literally. Smarty Pants are the listeners of Who Smarted? Psst. Smarty Pants, as you can hear, I’m with the great Leonardo da Vinci in the mid 1480s, and he seems to be in a bit of a creative funk. Say, what’s this drawing in your sketchbook? Is this a new kind of umbrella?
Da Vinci: Huh? No, that’s a man holding it open. The pier made of wood and the poles covered by linen cloth. I call it the fall slower.
Narrator: The fall slower. What does that do?
Da Vinci: If you hold this over your head, you can leap from any great height without hurting yourself.
Unknown speaker: I am okay.
Da Vinci: Of course I’m not sure if anyone could actually leap from a great height. There isn’t a building in town taller than 20 feet. Never mind, it’s useless.
Narrator: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Believe it or not, your fall slower invention is actually a really good idea. Not for now, but for the future.
Da Vinci: Oh, how do you know so much about the future?
Narrator: Let’s just say I get around. Anyway, I know for a fact that your fall slower drawing would lay the groundwork for an invention that would change the world or at least make it a little safer. Smarty Pants, do you know what invention I’m talking about? Did you say the parachute?
Da Vinci: Parachute? Huh? I like that almost as much as smarty pants.
Narrator: Let’s forget the smarty pants. No, no, no, no. Not you Smarty Pants listening. I mean smarty pants you wear. Instead, let’s focus on the parachute, which also became pants back in the 1980s.
Da Vinci: Parachute pants.
Narrator: We’ll get to that. But first, let’s answer how do parachutes make you fall slower? What are parachutes made of and how have parachutes evolved over the years? It’s time for another whiff of history and science on…
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Narrator: Okay, Leonardo, before we talk about the evolution of parachutes, let’s talk about how parachutes actually slow you down when you’re falling. It all has to do with what? Is it:
A. Creating air resistance.
B. Making you lighter than air.
C. Making you fall sideways.
The answer is A, parachutes create air resistance, also known as drag. And the amount of drag a parachute creates is mainly based on what Smarty Pants? The color of the parachute, the material it’s made of or how much surface area it has?
Da Vinci: Oh, I know this one. It’s the surface area. The bigger a fall slower is, I mean a parachute, the more air molecules it can trap underneath it, which causes more air resistance or drag.
Narrator: Nice job Leonardo. Smarty Pants did you get either of those right? Nice job if you did. The way it works is like this. If you jump out of an airplane, gravity causes you to fall toward the earth at about 125 miles per hour.
Unknown speaker: Yikes. That’s fast.
Narrator: But thanks to drag, a parachute can slow you down to just 12 miles per hour. Slow enough to land on your feet.
Da Vinci: Wow. Also, what’s an airplane?
Narrator: We’ll get to that, but first, let’s jump ahead in time to another key moment in the history of the parachute.
Da Vinci: Wait, you invented a Time Machine?
Narrator: Just go with it, Leo. Welcome to France in the year 1783. Believe it or not, Leo, you were so far ahead of your time. It took 300 years before anyone improved on your initial parachute design, and they’re about to test it for the first time, right? No.
Da Vinci: Wait. Why is that guy standing on the roof of that observatory? Is he insane?
Narrator: That is Louis-Sebastien Lenormand. He’s the inventor who actually coined the word parachute, putting the Italian prefix “para” meaning to resist together with the French word “chute,” which means fall. Para-chute, the invention that helps you resist falling. Right now, he wants to demonstrate how a parachute could be used to escape from a burning building.
Da Vinci: Mona Lisa. He is about to jump.
Narrator: Lenormand would become known as the father of the modern parachute.
Da Vinci: Hold on. He gets credit for the parachute, but his looks almost exactly like mine. It’s basically just a big wooden frame, the umbrella covered with a cloth.
Narrator: Don’t worry, Leo. People still credit you with the original design. Anyway, the next big advancement in parachute design came about 15 years later when they got rid of the frame and started making parachutes from silk, which was stronger and lighter.
Da Vinci: Ooh, silky.
Narrator: Today, modern parachutes are made mostly of nylon, and in the 1980s, parachute pants made from a similar nylon material were very popular. They also had a lot of zippers. But back to the early parachutes, Smarty Pants, any idea how they tested them? Did they leap off cliffs, jump out of hot air balloons or shoot themselves out of cannons? If you said hot air balloons, nice. In 1907, Charles Broderick gained fame by jumping out of hot air balloons at fares. He was the one who came up with the idea of folding a parachute into a backpack.
Da Vinci: You are kidding, right? How could you possibly know how to fold a parachute correctly? I can’t even fold a fitted sheet and I’m a genius.
Narrator: Luckily, there are people called riggers who were specially trained and certified at folding parachutes. However, today people who skydive regularly are trained to pack their own main parachutes.
Da Vinci: Wait, you just said the main parachute, people have more than one?
Narrator: Yep. Modern skydivers actually have three: a main chute, a reserve chute in case the main one doesn’t open, and a pilot chute. Say, what do you think the pilot chute does Smarty Pants? Does it:
A. Help to open your main parachute.
B. Fly above your parachute to help others spot you.
C. Float back up to the plane for the pilot to use.
The answer is A. When a skydiver is at the height where they want to deploy their parachute, usually about 3,000 to 5,000 feet, they release their pilot chute, which flies up and pulls their main parachute out of their backpack so it can open.
Da Vinci: Parachutes certainly have gotten fancy, but do they really have any good practical uses? I mean, why would anyone want to jump out of a perfectly good flying machine?
Narrator: Airplane.
Da Vinci: Whatever.
Narrator: Well, sure, there are people who skydive for adrenaline or as a thrill seeking hobby, but the parachute has been used for all kinds of stuff. Air Force pilots use them to safely eject from their jets if something goes wrong. And there’s a type of soldier called a paratrooper. Back in World War II, not only did soldiers parachute down behind enemy lines or onto battlefields, we also dropped thousands of dummies with parachutes in other places to confuse the enemy.
Da Vinci: Brilliant.
Narrator: In Idaho, they once relocated hundreds of beavers in the wilderness by dropping them out of planes with parachutes, which is both an amazing idea for helping wildlife and for a Pixar movie.
Da Vinci: Pixar? ,
Narrator: Never mind. Smarty Pants there’s also a sport called drag racing where cars speed down a track at over 300 miles an hour. They use special parachutes called drogues to slow them down at the finish line. They also use drogue parachutes to slow down space capsules when they reenter our atmosphere.
Da Vinci: How are these drogue parachutes different from regular ones?
Narrator: Let’s see if the Smarty Pants can guess. Which of the following is true about a drogue parachute? It’s smaller than a regular parachute. It can be used at higher speeds or it produces less drag. The answer is all three.
Da Vinci: Pretty sneaky Trusty.
Narrator: A normal parachute will rip apart if the object it’s attached to is going faster than 172 miles per hour. The air resistance is just too strong. That’s when you have to go drogue.
Da Vinci: Did you say a space capsule? You know I dabbled a bit in astronomy.
Narrator: Yes. Believe it or not, Leo, in the mere 600 years since your lifetime, we’ve not only learned to fly, but we’ve landed on the moon. In fact…
Da Vinci: What are you doing?
Narrator: I’m setting my time machine for October 24th, 2014. You’re not gonna believe this. Any idea what I’m going to show Mr. Da Vinci Smarty Pants? Well, you’ll find out right after this quick break.
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Narrator: Here we are.
Da Vinci: Are we where I think we are?
Narrator: Yep. The edge of outer space.
Da Vinci: My heavens.
Narrator: Precisely, AKA the stratosphere. And if you look over there, you’ll see a guy in a spacesuit attached to the bottom of a gigantic super high tech, high altitude balloon.
Da Vinci: Who’s that and what’s he doing?
Narrator: His name is Alan Eustace. He’s an American computer scientist who is about to break a record. Smarty Pants any guesses what Alan is trying to do? Is it:
A. Be the first person to float to the moon.
B. Execute the world’s highest free fall.
C. Find a really quiet place to read.
Da Vinci: There’s got to be quieter and safer places to read.
Narrator: For sure. Now, Alan has ridden a giant balloon 135,898 feet up above the earth to break the world record for the highest skydive ever. But while he needs a balloon to go up, he’ll also need a very good parachute to get back down. Luckily, he has two.
Da Vinci: Drogue or regular style?
Narrator: Both. He has a very large parachute to help slow him down. Also, because Alan is not in a capsule, he needs a specially designed spacesuit that weighs over 400 pounds. But he also has a drogue parachute that will help stabilize him from spinning in circles more than 100 times per minute.
Da Vinci: Why would he start spinning like that?
Narrator: Because he’ll be falling over 820 miles per hour.
Da Vinci: Oh.
Narrator: It took Alan hours to float up this high, but it’ll just be a matter of minutes for him to fall back to Earth. When he reaches an altitude of about four to 5,000 feet, his main chute will deploy.
Da Vinci: That’s still pretty high up.
Narrator: Yes, but you need to be at a high enough altitude when you open your parachute, otherwise it won’t fully open and you’ll hit the ground too fast.
Da Vinci: Nope. Don’t want that to happen.
Narrator: No Siri. The lowest an experienced skydiver will open their chute is around 2,500 feet. Anyway, here he goes. Wow. He’s going faster than the speed of sound. But look, thanks to the drogue he isn’t spinning,
Da Vinci: But all that weight plummeting downwards that fast. Is his parachute really going to stop him?
Narrator: He did it. He survived a free fall from space higher than any person has ever gone without a spaceship, and he made it safely back to earth. Thanks in large part to your invention, Leonardo.
Da Vinci: Wow. I’m glad my fall slower has been put to good use. Now I just have one question, Trusty. We don’t have parachutes, how are we getting down?
Narrator: Just kidding.
A triple shout out to three smarty siblings, Reuben, Amber, and Jaren in Belgrade, Montana. We’re so happy you love listening, laughing and learning together. Thanks for smarting with us Smarty Pants, Pants and Pants. This episode Parachutes was written by Steve Melcher and voiced by *Teg Garland* and Jerry Kolber. Technical direction and sound design by Josh Hanh, Who Smarted? is recorded and mixed at the Relic Room Studios. Our associate producer is Max Kamaski. The theme song is by Brian Suarez, with lyrics written and performed by Adam “Tex” Davis. Who Smarted? was created and produced by Adam “Tex” Davis and Jerry Kolber. This has been an Atomic Entertainment production
Theme song: Who Smarted?
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