Louis-Sébastien Lenormand

Who was Louis-Sébastien Lenormand?

Louis-Sébastien Lenormand was a French physicist, inventor and pioneer in parachuting. He is considered the first human to make a witnessed descent with a parachute and is also credited with coining the term parachute. After making a jump from a tree with the help of two modified umbrellas Lenormand refined his contraption and on December 26, 1783 jumped from the tower of the Montpellier observatory in front of a crowd that included Joseph Montgolfier, using a 14 foot parachute with a rigid wooden frame. His intended use for the parachute was to help entrapped occupants of a burning building to escape unharmed. Lenormand was succeeded by André-Jacques Garnerin who made the first parachute descent from high altitude with the help of a non-rigid parachute on October 22, 1797, and his wife Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse who made a similar descent two years later.