Jumping Jacques and the Yorkshire Flyer

On this day in 1797, French balloonist André-Jacques Garnerin made the first documented parachute jump using a frameless parachute of his own design. Crowds gathered at the Parc Monceau in Paris to witness him rise in a hydrogen balloon to an altitude of 3200 feet and then make the jump. Garnerin landed shaken but unhurt half a mile from the balloon's takeoff site. 

He apparently came up with the idea after being captured during the French Revolutionary Wars and confined in a prison in Hungary where the high ramparts provided no opportunity to escape - except by air. 

In 1798 he announced that on his next flight he would take a woman passenger with him. This caused outrage among officials who claimed that the effect of reduced air pressure might be damaging to the 'frail and delicate female body'. But Garnerin persisted, permission was eventually given, and his future wife - Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse - became the first female parachutist. 

Garnerin was subsequently given the honorary title of 'Official Aeronaut of France'. But , tragically, he was killed in 1823 while working on a new balloon. Walking around the construction site, he was struck by a falling beam which killed him instantly. He was only 54 years old. 

Ok, so that's interesting stuff but it's a bit off target for this blog, isn't it? Isn't this meant to be celebration of all things British? 

Well yes. But Garnerin's achievement is worth mentioning because it provides historical context. 

We tend to think of human flight as a very 20th century thing. But Garnerin jumped out of a balloon 225 years ago. And you might be surprised to learn that primitive airplanes were about in the 18th century too. And they were British.

Yorkshire's Sir George Cayley experimented with fixed wing gliders for over 50 years and, sometime in the mid-1800s, he persuaded a boy (sadly, name unrecorded) to pilot one of them. This was the first recorded manned flight in an airplane.

Cayley then wrote a book - On Ariel Navigation - which contained his 50+ years of research and the evidence to prove that a fixed-wing aircraft with a power system for propulsion, and a tail to assist in the control of the airplane, would be the best way to allow man to fly. He also identified the four forces which act on a heavier-than-air flying vehicle: weight, lift, drag and thrust. 

The Wright brothers, who would go on to achieve the first powered and controlled flight in 1903, acknowledged his importance in the development of their aircraft.

A replica of Cayley's glider in Yorkshire's Air Museum (photo: Nigel Coates) 

But then the 2007 discovery of sketches in Cayley's school notebooks (held in the archive of the Royal Aeronautical Society Library) revealed that, even at school, Cayley was developing his ideas on the theories of flight. These images suggest that Cayley identified the principle of a lift-generating inclined plane as early as 1792 - around the same time that Garnerin made his historic parachute jump and only 11 years after the Montgolfier Brothers made their historic first flight by balloon. 

So there you go. The father of modern aircraft is, in fact, British. While the Wright Brothers did achieve a remarkable and rightly celebrated first, they could not have done it without Cayley's pioneering work. 

He was the giant upon whose shoulders they stood ... and yet his name is barely known, even here in the UK. 

Today's blog is my one small attempt to help fix that.