Leonardo da Vinci designed a parachute to protect a person from falling through the air.
His parachute sketch appears in the Codex Atlanticus, a large collection of Leonardo’s notes and drawings. The design has a pyramid-like wooden frame covered with linen cloth. Leonardo wrote that a person could throw themselves from a great height with such a structure and avoid injury, provided the device was large enough.
The design was not a practical parachute in the modern sense because Leonardo did not test it, and the materials and construction methods of his time would have made it extremely heavy. Its importance is conceptual: it shows that Leonardo reasoned about air resistance and controlled descent centuries before aviation developed.
A modern parachute uses a flexible canopy rather than Leonardo’s rigid pyramidal frame. In 2000, British skydiver Adrian Nicholas tested a reconstructed version made with historically plausible materials and reported that it descended successfully, although he used a modern parachute for safety during the final landing.