Leslie Leroy Irvin (September 10, 1895 – October 9, 1966) was a stunt-man for the fledgling Californian film industry. Flying in balloons, he performed using trapeze acrobatics and parachute descents. For the 1914 film Sky High, Irvin made his first jump out of an airplane while flying at 1,000 feet above the ground. In 1918, he developed his own life-saving static line parachute, jumping with it several times and promoting it to the US Army. Irvin joined the Army Air Service's parachute research team at McCook Field near Dayton, Ohio where he made the first premeditated free-fall jump with the modern parachute on April 28, 1919.
Biography
Leslie Leroy Irvin was born on September 10, 1895, in Los Angeles, California. A protégé of Charles Broadwick, the adventurous and athletic Irvin made his first parachute jump at age 16. In 1914, he first jumped from an airplane at 1,000 feet above the ground in a stunt for the movie Sky High. Irvin, while working for the Curtiss Aeroplane Company in Buffalo, developed a 32-foot diameter free-fall parachute, tested it with dummies dropped from Curtis airplanes and applied for a US patent. While in Buffalo, his designs moved from cotton to light weight silk with the help of silk merchant and business partner George Waite. Irvin joined the Army Air Service's parachute research team at McCook Field near Dayton, Ohio which developed the first modern parachute.
After the WWI Armistice, Major E. L. Hoffman of the Army Air Service led an effort to develop an improved parachute for exiting airplanes by bringing together the best elements of multiple parachute designs. Participants included Irvin and James Floyd Smith. The team tested 17 parachute configurations using test dummies. The results favored Smith's parachute design which his company, the Floyd Smith Aerial Equipment Company of San Diego, California, filed a patent for on July 27, 1918. Smith's design was further improved and eventually created the airplane parachute Type-A. The Type A parachute incorporated three key elements: storing the parachute in a soft pack worn on the back, as demonstrated by Charles Broadwick in 1906; a ripcord for manually deploying the parachute at a safe distance from the airplane, from a design by Albert Leo Stevens; and a pilot chute that draws the main canopy from the pack. On April 28, 1919, using the "Type A" 28 foot backpack parachute, volunteer Leslie Irvin, flying in a Smith piloted de Havilland DH9 biplane at 100 mph and 1500 feet above the ground, jumped (with a backup chute strapped to his chest) and manually pulled the ripcord fully deploying his chute at 1000 feet. Irvin became the first American to jump from an airplane and manually open a parachute in midair. The new chute performed flawlessly, though Irvin broke his ankle on landing. Floyd Smith filed the Type A patent No. 1,462,456 on the same day. The Parachute Board determined the backpack chute was crowding the cockpit, a redesign moved the parachute down the pilots back becoming the "seat style" chute. The McCook Field team tested the Type A parachute with over 1000 jumps. These successful tests resulted in the Army requiring parachute use on all Air Service flights.
Less than two months after Irvin's first freefall jump, the Irving Air Chute Company was formed in Buffalo, New York, the world's first parachute designer and manufacturer. Legend has it that 'Irvin' was inadvertently changed to 'Irving' by a secretary who mistakenly tacked a 'g' on the end of the name, and the company never bothered to correct the mistake until 1970.
Major Hoffman wrote the US Army specifications for the Type A parachute and the Army Air Service placed an order for 300 parachutes from the lowest bidder: Irvin's Irving Air Chute Company. After Irvin lost a patent dispute with zero compensation to Floyd Smith, the US Government compensated Smith with $3500 to transfer his patent to Irvin's company. The original 1919 ripcord parachute is on display at the Air Force Museum at Dayton, Ohio.