Leonardo de Vinci (1452-1519) was thought until recently to have been the first to design a parachute. But drawings have now been found that were made five years before da Vinci’s sketches, possibly by an engineer in Siena central Italy.
However, the first man to make and successfully use a parachute was a Frenchman, Andre Garnerin (1770-1825), who stretched cloth across a bamboo framework and parachuted from a balloon over Paris in 1797. It was an uncomfortable descent as the fabric was too thick o spill out any wind, and the parachute came down swinging violently like a pendulum. Garnerin was is a tiny basket, to which he clung tightly until his rough landing on the plain of Monceau. The parachutes of those days were developed from the crude canvas devices used to descend from hot air balloons.
Modern parachutes are made of pure silk or good-quality nylon in small panels and have a small pilot parachutes which open first and helps to pull out the main parachute.
Picture credit: google