Leonardo da Vinci‘s brilliant mind was capable of imagining a wide range of inventions. He invented ways to divert rivers to prevent their flooding. He invented screw threads, transmission gears, hydraulic jacks, things that swivel. He built a revolving stage, a canal system with locks. In his notebooks he designed a submarine, a flying machine, solar power, a calculator, plate tectonics, a flush toilet.

Some of these inventions were realized and built. Others were just a series of designs that showed how much he was ahead of his time, imagining things that could not be built for hundreds more years. The parachute was one of the latter types.

In 1485, Leonardo drew a sketch of a pyramid-shaped parachute, consisting of four equilateral triangles of fabric. The accompanying note read (in translation): “If a man has a structure made of gummed linen cloth 12 arms wide and 12 tall, he will be able to throw himself from any great height without hurting himself.”

Five hundred years later, the parachute was built and tested.

On June 26, 2000, a British balloonist Adrian Nicholas built a parachute according to Leonardo’s specifications. He was hoisted to 10,000 feet in a hot air balloon and then dropped. It worked beautifully, but at 2,000 feet he cut away da Vinci’s model and landed with a conventional parachute, afraid of being crushed by the almost-200-pound wooden frame.

In 2008, Olivier Vietti-Teppa, a Swiss parachutist, jumped from a hovering helicopter 2100 feet up and made it safely to the ground in Payerne, Switzerland, using a parachute built according to the da Vinci model. You can see a picture of it here.