4. Ladies first
Georgia Ann Thompson Broadwick was a small woman (at only 5 feet tall, her stature earned her the nickname "Tiny").
But her parachuting feats were anything but. In 1907, Broadwick saw a hot air balloon flight at a travelling carnival and instantly caught the flying bug.
She convinced the carnival owner to hire her and train her, and she was soon parachuting over state fair grounds nationwide for the benefit of awestruck crowds.
After becoming the first woman to parachute from an airplane, Broadwick caught the eye of the U.S. Army, who asked her to demonstrate how parachutes could save pilots from midair disasters.
In 1914, during one of these demonstration jumps, Broadwick accidentally became the first person to perform a free-fall jump when her static line got tangled in the airplane's tail.
Static lines are ropes attached to the airplane that get pulled taut when the jumper leaps, dragging the parachute from its pack and automatically deploying it. Up until this time, all jumpers used static lines.
But when her static line malfunctioned, Broadwick jumped anyway, free-falling and manually deploying her chute. The leap made her the first parachutist ever to jump free-fall
Broadwick gave up jumping in 1922 and took a job on a tyre factory assembly line to make ends meet.
For recreational parachutists or carnival performers, the jump is the main event. For smokejumpers, however, the landing is just the beginning. Once on the ground, these men and women have to fight remote wildfires with only the equipment dropped to them by parachute.
