Leonardo da Vinci's pyramid-shaped design for slowing a person's fall was a parachute.
Around 1485, Leonardo sketched a canopy made from linen stretched over a rigid wooden frame. His notes proposed that a person could descend safely from a great height using the structure. The design is usually described as a theoretical parachute rather than a documented, tested device.
Leonardo's design differs from modern parachutes in an important way: it was rigid and pyramidal, not a soft, flexible canopy packed into a container. In 2000, British skydiver Adrian Nicholas constructed and tested a full-scale replica, reporting that it descended successfully, although he used a modern parachute for the final landing because of safety concerns.
The sketch belongs to Leonardo's wider study of flight, which also included wings, gliders, and an aerial screw. The parachute concept is often credited as an early engineering treatment of controlled descent.