Louis-Sébastien Lenormand, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetLouis-Sébastien Lenormand
French physicist
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Montpellier, Occitania, France
About Louis-Sébastien Lenormand
- Louis-Sébastien Lenormand (May 25, 1757 – April 4, 1837) was a French chemist, physicist, inventor, and a pioneer in 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 refined his contraption and on December 26, 17831 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 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 made a similar descent two years later.
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