1st base jumper ever??

[Huckin Idiot]

Hey, was Faustus Verancic (sp?) officialy the first base jumper ever? Was the location St. Martin's Cathedral in Bratislava? 1603? Does it still stand? If so, has it been jumped much since? How cool would that jump be to do!
What about Stefan Banic? Was he the second base jumper? Apperently he jumped from a building in 1914. That seems like a long time in between. Anyone know this history offically?

[guest]

http://www.slovakopedia.com/s/stefan-banic.htm

[guest]

www.bratislava.sk/ANGLICKY/VITAJTE/SVMARTIN.HTM

[guest]

Learn more about famous Croat Faust Vrancic from:

http://www.croatians.com/parachute_invention__faust_vranc.htm


http://library.thinkquest.org/C0127004/TQnovo/engilsh/vran.htm


http://www.hr/darko/etf/et22.html

[Huckin Idiot]

Hey thanks for the info links you guys. Quality stuff. However, I still wonder what the hell was going on for the 300 years in between the two jumps! I just can't believe that no one did any during that time. Once Faust did it you would think that others would follow sooner than 300 years later! Maybe there is just no documentation of it. Does anyone else have any ideas? Or was Faust #1 and Sefan #2 officially?

[Nick]

Trying to name the first BASE jumper is tough, it's like asking who hit the first rock with a stick and called it baseball.

However, there are some generalities that can be made.

The very first parachute jumps were NOT made from balloons or any other kind of flying machine. The first parachute jumps are made from fixed objects.

This is a fact modern aviation historians ignore as they keep tying the parachute with the invention of aircraft. The official, and wrong, citing for the first parachute jump is by a Frenchman who jumped from a hot air balloon over Paris in the late 1800s. USPA says this is the first parachute jump. It's like they are saying if there is no flying machine involved no parachute jump can be made.

As for who actually made the first fixed object jumps (you really can't call them BASE jumps until the early 1980s) there is a short list of people who might qualify, but there is one person in particular who came closer to actually completing the BASE award than anyone else in pre-BASE history.

Fredrick Rodman Law was a New York steeple jack who's business was bad so he thought doing a parachute jump from the torch of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor might get the phone ringing.

The year is 1912.

Law not only made the jump from Lady Liberty, a newsreel company paid him fifteen hundred bucks to it again. This was more than he made in a typical year of climbing flag poles and suddenly Law wasn't in the steeple jack anymore. Law went on to jump from the Brooklyn Bridge and also the Banker's Trust Building on Wall Street.

If we stretch a bit and call the Statue of Liberty a tower and with Law’s previous bridge and building jumps all he needed for a BASE cycle was a cliff jump.

After those successful jumps Law left New York for a new town in California where Law was told his skills might make him some money. Law went to Hollywood, where the film industry is just beginning, and he became one of the first movie stunt men.

I can't prove it, but there is an old film of a fellow who rides a motorcycle off a Californian bluff wearing a parachute that was shot not long after Law arrived in California. I've studied the film and compared it to pictures of Law himself and I think it's him. BTW, you can see this piece of film in one of Norm Kent's old skydiving films. (It might be "Ride a Cloud" or "From Dreams Came Flight.")

So while it's not official, in my mind, Fredrick Rodman Law is the first BASE jumper. I even had Jean Boenish almost talked into issuing him a number, but she finally said, and rightly so, there wasn't enough hard proof on the cliff jump.

Since Law’s jumps and before Kent Lane made the very first "modern" fixed object jump (modern means using a ram-air canopy and the ability to track) from El Capitan in 1978 there were many single stunt type fixed object jumps made.

There was a Milwaukee aircraft mechanic who made a indoor fixed object jump (probably the first indoor jump ever) from the ceiling of a blimp hangar. This was in the 1940s. The canopy was said to have opened just before he hit the floor and when he was offered money to repeat the jump he refused.

There was a Dentist who jumped in the Italian Dolomites using gut gear in about 1958. Owen Quinn jumped the World Trade Center in 1975 and that same year, Don Boyles jumped the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado.

And there have been a handful of earlier ones like those mentioned up board.

It’s also worth a mention that when British Paratroops were training for World War II, and because England’s weather didn’t always allow flying, they jumped from tethered balloons inside tall blimp hangars. Hundreds of these semi-BASE jumps were made.

C-ya, :P
Nick Di Giovanni
BASE 194

[Skypuppy]

It is generally recognized that da Vinci designed the first parachute in the 1480's, but apparently his drawings were misplaced until the late 1800's and had no impact on parachute design until then (Lucas, the Silken Canopy, p.15).

Faustus Veranzio published his book containing the 'Homo volans' in 1595. His idea that the size of the frame should vary depending on the cargo was a step forward. Some believe there is little truth to support the claim he jumped it(Sellick, the Wonderful World of Parachutes and Parachuting, p.2). Others claim he did jump it in a square in Venice from a tower in 1617vand died as a result of oscillations (Darby, the Space Age Sport, Skydiving, p22).

Joseph Montgolfier was suggested to have jumped a parachute from a housetop near Lyons, and did drop a sheep under a 7-foot diameter parachute from a tower in Avignon in 1779 (Lucas and Sellick).

The next name I find was Sebastien Lenormand. While Darby claims Lenormand never jumped his designs himself, instead using various cargoes, Lucas claims he is credited with a jump from a tower in Montpellier in 1783, a claim echoed by Sellick and also mentioned in Dan Poynter's 'Parachuting, the Skydivers' Handbook', p.
43. Incidently, Lucas claims he also demonstrated from the windows of a house that the parachute could be used to escape fire.

Somewhere around 1790 an Englishman named Murray did a jump from a church tower in Portsmouth. After this he tried one from the Bell Tower of Chichester Cathedral, but oscillations caused him to have a very hard landing. He may have died (Lucas, p20).

In the 1800's parachute seem to have mainly been from balloons.

In 1879 Ben Oppenheimer of Tennessee patented a 'New and Improved Fire Escape', and 4 or 5 ft. diameter parachute harnessed to the jumpers head. To our knowledge it was never used(Lucas).

I have found newspaper clippings from 1908 indicating an expatriate Englishman jumped from the Upper Steel Arch Bridge in Niagara Falls, using a home-made un-bagged round, essentially static-
lined similarly to the picture in the Photo Gallery(Span) , of the 1917 Tower Bridge jumps.

Frederick Rodman Law jumped the Statue of Liberty in Feb, 1912 by draping his parachute across the rail and then jumping (no pilot chute). He also
jumped several other bridges and buildings. He later did demo jumps for Leo Steven's Life-Pack from airplanes.

On 6 Feb., 1912 Franz Reichelt, an Auatrian, tried out a new parachute-cum-overcoat from the Eiffel Tower, He had permission to do a dummy drop, but instead put the rig on himself and jumped 180 ft to his death. I have scanned an image in to the Photo Gallery (Accidents).

Then would come Stefan Banic, in 1914.

In 1917, Lieutenant Lieutenant Bowen and Major Orde-Lees did static lines from Tower Bridge to demo Everard Calthrop's Guardian Angel to the Admiralty, as pictured in the Span foto.

In 1927, a year after Bobby Leach died, New Zealander Vincent Taylor repeated his parachute jump from the Upper Steel Arch Bridge in Niagara Falls.

Hopefully this didn't bore you too much.

Skypuppy BASE92








:+ :+

[guest]

yes yes yes, but....

I think you know where I am going with this, for it was Me! who first made a BASE type jump. I did it in Paraguay, of course! It was done with my famous invention, "Del Las Puego de la jefe de Oso", which translates roughly to "Paraguan Flinger". I invented it to prove my manhood and win a free llama. It hurled me about 230 feet up and about 10 feet downrange. It was powered by a large charge of gunpowder. For a parachute I used a Raven 3. How I did all this over 500 years ago when I am only 35 years old I am not sure. But it MUST have been me so there must be some rational explanation. I just thought I should set the record straight.

p.s. I was also first with that motorcycle thing.

[Skypuppy]

I believe the mystery jumper on the motorcycle was Danish-born stuntman John Tranum. I've heard of him from a couple of sources, one of which was Harry Ward's book about his life with an Air Circus in the 20's, 'The Yorkshire Birdman".

In Lucas' book 'The silken Canopy', p. 95, 'Once, for a film company, he rode a motorcycle with a parachute attached off a cliff. As soon as it was airborne he opened the parachute, let the motorcycle crash, and landed unharmed in a 1,000 ft. deep canyon below'.

He had also jumped from a bridge in Pasadena 154' over the Arroyo Seco, and duplicated Major Ordes-Lees 1917 jumps from Tower Bridge.

Tranum died in 1935 of a heart attack, in a plane at 27,000' on the way up to set a new world freefall record from 30,000' over Copenhagen.

Modern BASE

I think you might be able to make a case for Rick Sylvester's El Cap jump in 1972 on skis (with the union jack pc) to be a modern type BASE jump.

Skypuppy BASE92:+

[guest]

All this history is fascinating. I think Rick Sylvester's jump for the bond movie "The Spy who loved me" was actually from Mt.Asgard on Baffin Island. Yes, he did it from El Cap too, but the movie shot is Baffin Island.

[Skypuppy]

Yeah - I find this fascinating. We had 3 stunt jumpers doing both plane and fixed parachute jumps to demonstrate various systems for military gov'ts, one of which (the British) refused to equip their pilots with parachutes for years.

Their was Rod Law representing Irvin's Life-pack; Orde-Lees for Calthrop's Guardian Angel( Calthrop died a bitter and broke man in 1927); and John Tranum jumping Russell's Lobe canopy.

There were a couple of other manufacturers trying to break into the market too, one of which was Holt's Autochute; It would be fascinating to know in more detail what testing and fixed object jumps were done on these other systems.

I saw on the Vertigo site that Sylvester did the Bond jump from Mt. Asgard, but as you said he did jump El Cap and indeed did it several times. He may not have used modern tracking, but his skis took him far away from the cliff.

Skypuppy BASE92:+

[460]

I remember reading about this about 5 to 10 years ago in a journal called Physics Today regarding the physics of parachute openings. The article had some history in it about Veranzio claiming something similar. More interestingly, however, were the test jumpers before Veranzio himself did the jump. First he used a weighted bag before using a live animal - a SHEEP. I'm actually not kidding. --Chris, physicist



>>Faustus Veranzio published his book containing
>the 'Homo volans' in 1595. His idea that the
>size of the frame should vary depending on the
>cargo was a step forward. Some believe there is
>little truth to support the claim he jumped
>it(Sellick, the Wonderful World of Parachutes
>and Parachuting, p.2). Others claim he did jump
>it in a square in Venice from a tower in
>1617vand died as a result of oscillations
>(Darby, the Space Age Sport, Skydiving, p22).
>
>

[guest]

I KNEW IT!!!!!!

[guest]

I didn't cite Rck Sylevester as "modern" as there is less to seperate him from us than there is between Lane Kent and us . . .

And he jumped a Thunderbow.

Nick

[guest]

Of course, I meant Kent Lane, Lane Kent is a BASE jumper too . . . and I always screw that up.

Nick