London, Oct 7: On Tuesday (October 9), Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner will attempt his wildest stunt yet: becoming the first human to break the speed of sound in freefall in what would also be the highest skydive yet, from 37 km in the air.
If Baumgartner succeeds, he'll break a record set in 1960 and top his previous high jumps of 71,581 feet (21,818 meters) and 96,640 feet (29,460 m).
But Baumgartner isn't the first daredevil to vie for skydiving supremacy.
Here are eight of the most daring, dangerous and sometimes fatal jumps in history.
1. First to leapThe idea of the parachute is an old one — Leonardo da Vinci sketched a design for a pyramid-shaped one in his notebooks — but it wasn't until 1797 that a brave skyjumper made the first high-altitude leap from air to ground.
That year, balloonist Andre-Jacques Garnerin rose 2,000 feet (610 m) above Parc Monceau in Paris in a hot-air balloon, cut the balloon free and descended back to the ground attached to an umbrellalike silk parachute.
It was not a pleasant ride, according to Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
These rigid early parachutes oscillated wildly on their descent. One account of a later jump in England describes the parachutist as "extremely pale" and taken with "a short sickness" after his leap.
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