10/23/2026
The Very First Skydive.
And, 2 Years Later, Andre’s Wife, Jeanne-Genevieve Labrosse, was the First Jump by Women.
Today, October 22, we recognize the 229th anniversary of the first skydive. On this date, a French physicist, Andre Jacques Garnerin made a planned exit from an aircraft in flight using an aerodynamic decelerator to successfully return to the surface of the earth. His aircraft was a hydrogen balloon, his aerodynamic decelerator was a 22 foot diameter round parachute made of very light canvas covered with paper weighing 34 pounds and instead of a harness, he stood in a small wicker basket weighing only 19 pounds with Garnerin himself weighing 113 pounds. The parachute apparatus was suspended beneath the balloon and was cut away by Garnerin at an altitude estimated in excess of 3,000 feet. The location was the Parc Monceau in Paris and was observed by literally thousands of people. A newspaper account gives a description of the event:
From the newspaper Le Moniteur:
"Citizen Garnerin yesterday at the garden of Mousseaux consummated the experience which an unfortunate accident had prevented him from carrying out three months ago at the garden of Biron. Since that time he had already made two aerial journeys which had been perfectly successful. He rose yesterday at half-past five in the evening from the garden of Mousseaux, having reached the height of about 500 fathoms, he cut the ropes which attached his basket to the balloon, he immediately opened his parachute, at the area from which it descended. At the first moments, the basket and the parachute followed the perpendicular line fairly regularly, but after having traversed about a quarter of the space which separated it from the earth, the parachute hovered, and caused the basket oscillations which increased as it got closer to the earth; the rocking was so terrible that it was feared at every moment that the unfortunate astronaut was, by the effect of the tremors, thrown out of the basket at a considerable distance; there was even a moment when, by the violence of the swings, the link which joined the parachute to the nacelle was placed in an almost horizontal line, of which the parachute and the nacelle formed the two ends. However, the gravity of the latter made him resume his place, his fall accelerated more as he approached the earth, and finally the citizen Garnerin fell in the plain of Clichy, about 200 fathoms from the place where he had risen, without the slightest harm having happened to him; only it seems that the acceleration of the fall had hampered his breathing, and one might have feared, if he had been longer in the descent, that he would have suffocated.
"Citizen Garnerin was received with great interest by all those who had followed him, and esteeming his courage and his ardent love for science, and blaming the temeity which led him to risk his days in this way. He returned to the Mousseaux garden to the sound of the applause of a huge crowd.
"We think that Citizen Garnerin's descent would have been more regular, less precipitous, less subject to the dangerous oscillations he experienced, if his parachute had embraced a column of air of greater circumference, and above all if he had been more concave at its top.
"Citizen Garnerin's experiment deserves so much the more praise because he made it against the advice of the most educated men in physics, who had made every effort to dissuade him from exposing himself to such a great peril, and that he executed it in very uncertain and very unfavorable weather."
Attached are a woodcut of Garnerin's jump and pictures of my challenge coin.
Unfortunately, we missed the October 12, 1799 date of the first parachute jump by a women, Garnerin's wife, Jeanne-Genevieve Labrosse.
On October 22, 1797, André-Jacques Garnerin rose over Parc Monceau ...
