After Leonardo's drawings of the parachute nothing was done in that field until about 100 years later, and after one jump the idea was left until the Montgolfier Brothers
In the year 1617 a man named Fauste Veranzio built a parachute on a frame very similar to Leonardo’s drawings, and jumped successfully from a tower in Florence. He called it Homo Volans which I am translating very roughly and speculatively as the “human leaf“, but not being that well versed in Italian I may be wrong on that. Nevertheless, it worked, but it was over a century and a half before anybody else took up the idea of parachutes. Probably under the same interdict from their father against risking their lives testing their inventions which would keep them from piloting their hot air balloons, Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier tested parachutes with frames by dropping sheep and other livestock from rooftops in 1783.
Ten years later, a Frenchman named Jean-Pierre Blanchard claims to have jumped from a balloon with a foldable silk parachute, and it is fairly certain that his dog made such a jump. This was the earliest predecessor of the modern parachute without a frame. Andrew Garnerin further pioneered the silk parachute, and with advise from a physicist and astronomer named Joseph de Lalandes cut a hole in the top of his parachute which reduced air turbulence that had caused the chute to oscillate and sometimes behave erratically. Garnerin jumped from 8000 feet which was surprisingly high for the time.
In 1837 an Englishman named Robert Cocking fell to his death while parachuting, thus claiming fame as the first recorded parachute fatality. Another Englishman named Thomas Baldwin invented the first parachute harness in 1887. By 1911 men were jumping from airplanes, but in WWI even pilots riding in open cockpits did not usually wear parachutes since it was deemed an unreliable and expensive technology by most commands. However, by WWII most pilots had parachutes, some even had ejection seats, and paratroopers could be deployed into combat with a certain degree of accuracy. Nylon soon improved parachute technology, and several modern designs are superior to the round silk chute of the WWII era. Advanced parachutes were developed for spacecraft re-entry deceleration, and other special purposes.
