They jumped out of an airplane to battle a blazing fire. Today, more than 5,000 men and women are smoke jumpers, risking their lives during the hot and dry fire season to get up close and personal with raging wildfires to try to control them.
Forest fires predate humanity and the methods used to battle blazes are as old as mankind.
But aerial methods are a very recent strategy. The idea of parachuting into a fire was considered, well, a little crazy. A professional parachutist made a few demonstration jumps in 1934, but the idea was just too outlandish for the times. Not so in 1939, when David P. Godwin, assistant chief of fire control in Washington, D.C., approved conducting parachute experiments. The result of those experiments was the smoke jumper program, launched after two weeks of training, between June 22 and July 3, 1940.