Leonardo Da Vinci has the earliest documented conception of a parachute – not just a drawing, but entire schematics – but as with much else of his inventions, the technology of the time did not allow for the realization of those plans. Croatian Faust Vrancic possibly constructed the first workable prototype, which he illustrated in a famous “homo volans” drawing and reportedly tested by jumping off a tower. Vrancic’s model and those like it still had one major drawback: they were bulky and rigid, unable to open or close as the modern ones do.

On this day, October 22, in 1797, Andrew Garnerin made the first jump with a parachute without a rigid frame. Garnerin made several subsequent jumps from parachutes attached to hot air balloons, some as high as 8,000 feet in the air.

A century later the parachute as we know it today came one step close to existence, not by the military or by a brilliant engineer, but by two German circus performers. Kaethe Paulus and Paul Letterman jumped from a balloon wearing parachute packed in a bag. Granted the “bag-packed” model was not their invention, but of the Russian Gleb Kotelnikov, but they more than anyone helped popularize it.