Sheep might fly: parachutes in a new light

It is quite widely known that the inventors of the hot-air balloon were two French brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier. Their first balloon was launched in 1783, amid much acclaim and press coverage on both sides of the Channel.

According to the definition of balloon in this sense in the First Edition of the OED, written over a century later, Montgolfier hot-air balloons were still being used in the late 19th century for ‘observing atmospheric phenomena, [and] for military reconnoitring’, although the editors added, somewhat plaintively, that while ‘to large balloons a car strong enough to carry human beings can be attached’, they had met with ‘little success at present, as a means of travelling through the air’. Be that as it may, the Montgolfiers' invention was undoubtedly a success, and a landmark in the history of aviation.

Perhaps less well-known is the fact that Joseph-Michel Montgolfier was behind another 18th-century invention with far-reaching aeronautical consequences. The First Edition of the OED gave as its first example of the word parachute a quotation from 1785 from the European Magazine, in which it was stated that ‘in Mr. Blanchard's late visit to this country [France], he brought his Parachute to England’. While revising the OED entries for a series of words beginning with para- recently, we came across a 1784 article from the Gloucester Journal which makes it clear that the elder Montgolfier was reponsible for the design behind this first parachute. (He is also, unsurprisingly, credited in the Trésor de la Langue Française as having first used the original French word parachute, in a letter written only a few months before the Gloucester article.) According to the report, ‘after having thrown a sheep six times from the top of a tower..by the aid of a machine called a parachute, without the animal receiving any damage, he [sc. Montgolfier] prevailed upon a man..to try the experiment, which was performed with the utmost safety.’

While the requirement of a convenient tower made the parachute for many years impractical as a military tool, it continued to be experimented with, as shown in an account of 1837 which describes a parachute being launched from a balloon, and one of 1864 in which it was described how an unfortunate Mr Cocking (unlike Montgolfier's human parachutist) ‘had cast himself into space in a parachute and..was smashed to death’. By the end of the First World War, and with the increasing use of aircraft in battle, the parachute had come into its own, and silk parachutes were regularly carried by aviators. By the '60s and '70s the parachute was being used for sport as well as in warfare, and even to return space capsules to earth.

Joseph-Michel Montgolfier's intrepid sheep, although apparently unharmed by its experience, probably died of fright shortly afterwards, but it had the honour of being the ancestor of today's parachutists, paragliders, parascenders, and earth-bound astronauts.