A parachute is a device used to decrease the movement of an object through an atmosphere by creating entertainment (or in the case of hot air parachutes, aerodynamic lifting). Parachutes are usually made of light, strong cloth, originally silk, now most commonly nylon. Parachutes often take the form of a dome, but the shapes can vary including some that take the form of an inverted vault. Depending on the situation, parachutes are used with a variety of loads, including people, food, equipment, space capsules and bombs.
Drogue slides are used to assist the horizontal deceleration of a vehicle (a fixed wing aircraft or a runner), or to provide stability (certain types of light aircraft in danger, tandem free fall).
The first evidence of the parachute dates back to the Renaissance period. The earliest design of the parachute appears in an anonymous manuscript of the 1470s of the Italian Renaissance (British Museum Add. MSS 34,113, fol. 200v), showing a free hanging man picking up a crossbar frame attached to a canopy conical. As a safety measure, four belts range from the ends of the rods to a belt. The design is a marked improvement over another folio (189v), which depicts a man attempting to break the force of his fall by means of two long cloth streamers fastened to two bars which he grabs with his hands. Although the surface of the parachute design appears to be too small to provide effective resistance to air friction and the wooden frame is superfluous and potentially harmful, the revolutionary character of the new concept is obvious.
Shortly afterwards, a more sophisticated parachute was sketched by the polymath Leonardo da Vinci in his Codex Atlanticus (fol 381v) dated to ca. 1485. Here, the scale of the parachute is in a proportion more favorable to the weight of the bridge. Leonardo's canopy was kept open by a square wooden frame, which alters the shape of the parachute from conical to pyramidal. It is not known whether the Italian inventor was influenced by the earlier design, but may have learned about the idea through intensive oral communication between artist-engineers of the time. The viability of Leonardo's pyramidal design was successfully tested in 2000 by Britain's Adrian Nicholas and again in 2008 by Swiss paratrooper Olivier Vietti-Teppa. According to technology historian Lynn White, these conical and pyramidal designs, far more elaborate than the first artistic jumps with rigid umbrellas in Asia, point to the origin of the "parachute as we know it."
The Polish and Croatian inventor Faust Vrančić (1551-1617) examined Da Vinci's skydiving drawing, and set out to implement one of his own. He kept the square frame, but replaced the canopy with a piece of cloth bulging like a candle that realized that it slows down the fall more effectively. A now famous representation of a parachute he called Homo Volans, showing a man parachute from a tower, presumably Bell Tower of St. Mark's in Venice, appeared in his book on mechanics, Machinae Novae (1615 or 1616), Along with a number of other devices and technical concepts.
It was widely believed that in 1617, Veranzio, then 65 years old and seriously ill, implemented his design and tested the parachute by jumping from the Campanile of San Marcos, from a nearby bridge or from St. Martin's Cathedral in Bratislava. In several publications it was falsely claimed that the event was documented some thirty years later by John Wilkins, founder and secretary of the Royal Society in London in his book Magick Mathematics or the Marvels that can be Made by Mechanical Geometry, published in London in 1648. However, in this book, John Wilkins wrote about flying, not about parachutes. Neither does Fausto Veranzio mention a parachute jump or any event in 1617, and doubts about this test together with any written evidence of its occurrence lead to the conclusion that it never occurred, and was caused by an erroneous reading of historical notes.