Leonardo da Vinci designed a parachute to slow a person's fall from a great height.
His late-15th-century sketch shows a pyramid-shaped canopy made from linen cloth held open by a wooden frame. Leonardo proposed that a person could descend safely with this structure, although he did not record a documented test of the design.
The drawing appears in the Codex Atlanticus, a large collection of Leonardo's notes and sketches. Its design is different from modern round parachutes, which use flexible fabric and suspension lines rather than a rigid pyramidal frame.
A common mix-up is calling Leonardo the inventor of the modern parachute. The modern parachute developed much later, but his design is an important early theoretical solution to controlled descent.