page_title: Paris in the 18th century
section_title: Inventions
hierarchical_section_title: Paris in the 18th century / The Enlightenment / Inventions
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Le premier parachute de Jacques Garnerin, essayé par lui-même au parc de Mousseaux, le 22 octobre 1797 English: Jacques Garnerin's first parachute, which he tested on himself at Parc Monceau, Paris, on 22 October 1797). Caption translation: (Figure 1) Canopy of the parachute; (figure 2) Parachute position at the instant of departure (from the ground into the air); (figure 3) Parachute deployed at the instant of separation from the balloon.
context_page_description: Paris in the 18th century was the second-largest city in Europe, after London, with a population of about 600,000 people. The century saw the construction of Place Vendôme, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Élysées, the church of Les Invalides, and the Panthéon, and the founding of the Louvre Museum. Paris witnessed the end of the reign of Louis XIV, was the center stage of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, saw the first manned flight, and was the birthplace of high fashion and the modern restaurant.
context_section_description: The 18th century in Paris was a particularly inventive period. Some of the discoveries of Paris scientists, particularly in the field of chemistry, were quickly put to practical use; the experiments of Lavoisier were used to create the first modern chemical plants in Paris, and the production of hydrogen gas enabled the Montgolfier Brothers to launch the first manned flight in a hot-air balloon on 21 November 1783, from the Château de la Muette, near the Bois de Boulogne.
  The invention of the balloon led directly to the invention of the parachute. André-Jacques Garnerin, who had flown in a Montgolfier balloon in 1790, wanted to find a vehicle by which a pilot could abandon a balloon in case of an accident. On 22 October 1797 he made the first descent with a frameless silk parachute, dropping from a balloon seven hundred meters above Parc Monceau. On 10 November 1798 his future wife, Jeanne-Genevieve Labrousse, became the first woman to ascend alone in a balloon, and the first woman to make a parachute jump.
  A more modest but highly useful invention, the folding umbrella, was introduced in 1710 by a Paris merchant named Jean Marius, with his shop at the barrier of Saint-Honoré. He obtained a monopoly on the manufacture of umbrellas which opened and closed like modern models, and weighed less than one kilogram. A model was purchased in 1712 by the Princess Palatine, who wrote about it to her friends and helped make it a popular fashion item. An important improvement was reported to the French Academy of Sciences in 1759; an umbrella combined with a cane, with a small button the side to open the umbrella.
caption: A drawing of the first frameless parachute, tested by André-Jacques Garnerin above Parc Monceau on 22 October 1797.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Windows", "Image DateTime": "2009:02:19 13:36:58", "Image Artist": "Library of Congress", "Image ExifOffset": "196", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "334", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6994", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "4359", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "4604"}