renaissance artist

Get Out Now!

The da Vinci chute, circa 1493: Testing Leonardo's design

In "Get Out Now!" [Oct. '03], Stephan Wilkinson tells the history of fighter-plane ejection seats starting from the early 1940s, but high-altitude escape technology actually reaches back at least five centuries. Professional skydivers Katarina Ollikainen and Adrian Nicholas recently teamed up with an art historian to construct in painstaking detail a parachute designed by Renaissance artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci.

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