Louis-Sébastien Lenormand

Louis-Sébastien Lenormand (May 25, 1757 – April 4, 1837) is a French chemist, physicist, inventor and the world's first pioneer in modern sport parachuting.

He is considered as the first man to make a witnessed descent with a parachute and is also credited with coining the term parachute, from the Latin prefix para meaning "against", an imperative form of parare = to avoid, avert, defend, resist, guard, shield or shroud, from paro = to parry, and the French word chute for "fall", hence the word "parachute" literally means an aeronautic device "against a fall".

After making a jump from a tree with the help of a pair of modified umbrellas, Lenormand refines his contraption and on December 26, 17831 jumps from the tower of the Montpellier observatory in front of a crowd that includes Joseph Montgolfier, using a fourteen-foot parachute with a rigid wooden frame.

His intended use for the parachute is to help entrapped occupants of a burning building to escape unharmed.

Lenormand is succeeded by André-Jacques Garnerin who makes the first parachute descent from high altitude in a gondola detached from a balloon, with the help of a non-rigid or collapsible parachute on October 22, 1797, and his wife Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse who makes a similar descent two years later.

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