Some think that a form of a primitive parachute was mentioned by Chinese texts 21 centuries ago. In 9th century Abbas Ibn Firnas and Ali Ben Isa (of Arabic origin) also created one of the earliest versions of a parachute which John H. Lienhard described as "a huge winglike cloak to break his fall". A conical parachute appears for the first time in the 1470s in an Italian manuscript, slightly preceding Leonardo da Vinci's conical p...