Parachute

A parachute is a device designed to slow an object's descent through the air by creating drag, used for personal descent, cargo drops and recovering spacecraft. The earliest recorded jump using a device to slow a fall was made in Cordoba, Spain in 852 AD by Armen Firman, using a large cloak. Leonardo da Vinci and Francesco di Giorgio Martini later sketched parachute designs during the Renaissance, but the first public jump with a functional parachute was made in 1783 by the Frenchman Louis-Sebastien Lenormand, who coined the word parachute in 1785 by combining the Italian para, to defend against, with the French chute, fall.