Leonardo da Vinci’s pyramid-shaped cloth canopy is a parachute design intended to slow a person’s descent.
Leonardo recorded the design in the Codex Atlanticus around 1485. His drawing shows a rigid pyramidal frame covered with cloth, with the suspended person positioned beneath it. The idea used air resistance to reduce falling speed, a principle that remains central to modern parachutes.
The design was not a modern soft, round parachute. Its wooden frame would have made it heavy and awkward, and Leonardo did not provide a complete experimental report proving that it worked. In 2000, British adventurer Adrian Nichols made a replica and tested it from a hot-air balloon; it descended successfully, although he used a separate modern parachute for safety.
Leonardo’s design is often called the first recorded parachute concept, but it was not the first parachute ever used. Fausto Veranzio published and reportedly tested a different design in the early seventeenth century.