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He is the inventor of a new parachute and is testing the device himself 185 years ago today. Because Robert Cocking died in the process, skydiving fell into lasting disrepute.
24. July 1837: In den Vauxhall Gardens a balloon rises on the London bank of the Thames, under which passers-by can make out a strange appendage. Some may have come because they saw a flyer announcing big things for the day.
An “extraordinary innovation and combined action” is promised. To be more precise, there is an “ascent in Mister Green’s Royal Nassau balloon” – and a “fall in a newly invented parachute by Mister Cocking”. The new device is conically shaped, has a circumference of 32 meters and is a “completely new parachute”, it says.
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And who is the hotshot who wants to take that leap? Robert Cocking is touted as “a gentleman of great scientific knowledge” who witnessed André-Jacques Garnerin’s jump in 1802. The Englishman is considered the second person following Frenchman Louis-Sébastien Lenormand to have successfully parachuted.
An artist who dreams of flying
However, Cocking finds Garnerin’s aircraft in need of improvement – and spends the next few years working on reconstructing it. Cocking, who was born in 1776, has a completely different background: he is actually a painter living between Kennington and Stockwell.
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Cocking is described as “short, rounded and delightfully unkempt”. He also works as a teacher and is apparently very popular with his students. He paints landscapes, but also pictures of flowers as subjects in order to be able to provide for his wife and two relatives who live with them.
However, Cocking’s passion is flying. He is obsessed with balloons: drawings of them fill the house. 35 years following seeing Garnerin’s jump, he wants to do the same as his compatriot. He asks the famous balloonist Charles Green if he wants to help him with his projects.
What might possibly go wrong?
On July 24, 1837, Green, Edward Spencer and Cocking took off at 7:37 p.m. “I saw the balloon with the attached parachute rise in the air of the summer evening,” writes Robert Morley, who knows the painter personally. “I saw the poor fellow say goodbye to the world. I wish it hadn’t flew up and down so quickly before it broke free.”
Smithsonian
Cocking himself tested his invention on a 1:12 scale model that “worked flawlessly” and is confident his plan – and the screen – would work. What he doesn’t know is that he forgot to include the weight of the parachute in his calculations, which at 115 kilograms is significantly heavier than today’s models.
Cocking shakes a few more hands before he climbs into the basket that is attached to his parachute under the balloon’s basket. In this way, a good 2400 meters in height should be reached, but the men only climb 1500 meters. Either the trio was too heavy or time was running out to be able to do the jump in daylight.
“I averted my eyes”
When the parachute releases, it looks as if everything is going to work for the first few moments. The balloon jumps upwards, Cocking glides gently down. But then the disaster takes its course: “I averted my eyes from the sight of this thing, which tumbled to earth like a heavy, drunken meteor,” Morley describes the scene.
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Nine miles from Vauxhall Gardens, Cocking’s basket, which has become detached from the rest of the parachute, hits the ground. one Message According to the workers, the 61-year-old was discovered alive in a field before he died. Another tale says that the local population takes glasses, watch and shoes from the dead man before he is found.
Robert Cocking pays for his passion with his life: he is the first person to die from a parachute. Jumping gets through the accident in disrepute: In the coming decades, parachutes will mostly only be seen in circus performances.
Only with the invention of the foldable parachute at the end of the 19th century by the German Käthe Paulus and the backpack parachute by the Russian Gleb Kotelnikow in 1912 did the flying device, which is so popular today, experience a revival.
