Regan Wheat

They Made a Delicate Object that Defied Gravity, 2012

One day, when the empress was sipping tea under a mulberry tree, a cocoon fell into her cup and began to unravel.
Many think that the fi rst parachute design had been imagined and sketched by Leonardo Da Vinci in the 15th century.
One aspect of the long-term conversion of the Florentine economy in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was undoubtedly the expansion, in grand style, of the silk manufacturing industry.
Nylon was intended to be a synthetic replacement for silk and substituted for it in many different products after silk became scarce during World War II.
Nylon was created by DuPont Co. shortly after the company ended more than a century of making gunpowder.
DuPont’s chemical engineers were in charge of the production of plutonium,
the main component of the Nagasaki bomb.
The fi rst military use for the parachute was on tethered observation balloons in World War I.
On 21 June 1913, Georgia Broadwick became the fi rst woman to parachute
jump from a moving aircraft.
The women’s cooperation also created a seemingly impossible reality;
they made a delicate object that defi ed gravity to support the weight of a human body in mid air.
Movie star Betty Grable set a patriotic example by auctioning her nylon stockings for war purposes. They earned $40,000.
The Apollo 15 spacecraft landed safely despite a parachute failure.
On November 24, 1971 was recorded the only case of skyjacker on USA territory that remained unscathed by FBI. The thief, jumped with a parachute from a Boeing 727 with 200,000 USD. He hasn’t been found since.