Which Leonardo da Vinci design proposed a parachute with a pyramid-shaped wooden frame?

Leonardo da Vinci’s pyramid-shaped parachute design was Leonardo’s parachute. He described it in a manuscript generally dated to around 1485, proposing a rigid wooden frame covered with tightly woven cloth.

The sketch shows a pyramid roughly 7.2 metres high and 7.2 metres wide at its base. Leonardo wrote that a person could jump from a great height while protected by the structure. His design had no modern harness, suspension lines, or flexible canopy, so it was unlike the parachutes used today.

The idea was based on the observation that a large surface moving through air creates resistance. Leonardo’s notebooks repeatedly connect practical engineering with direct study of nature, and the parachute is an example of that method. It remained a paper design for centuries.

In 2000, British adventurer Adrian Nicholas built and tested a full-scale version using materials similar to those Leonardo specified. The test showed that the structure could descend, although it was considered unsafe to land with, so Nicholas cut away from it before reaching the ground.