Xtreme Sports: basejump
There are isolated examples of BASE jumps dating from the late 1700s.* In 1783, Louis-Sébastien nd made the first parachute jump from the tower of the Montpellier observatory, preceding the jump from a balloon by Garnerin.* In 1912, Frederick Law jumped from the Statue of Liberty* In 1912, Franz Reichelt, tailor, jumped from the first deck of the Eiffel Tower testing his invention, the coat parachute. He died. It was his first ever attempt with the parachute and he had told the authorities in advance he would test it first with a dummy.* In 1913, Štefan Banič jumped from a building in order to demonstrate his new parachute to the U. S. Patent Office and military * In 1913, a Russian student Vladimir Ossovski (Владимир Оссовский), from the Saint-Petersburg Conservatory, jumped from the 53-meter high bridge over the river Seine in Rouen (France), using the parachute RK-1, invented a year before that by Gleb Kotelnikov (1872-1944). Ossovski planned jumping from the Eiffel Tower too, but the mayor of Paris didn’t allow that. (Information from the Russian edition of GEO magazine, issue 11, November 2006, GEO).* In 1966, Michael Pelkey and Brian Schubert jumped from the cliff “El Capitan” in Yosemite Valley* On 9 November 1975, the first person to parachute off the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada, was Bill Eustace, a member of the tower’s construction crew. He was fired.* In 1975, Owen J. Quinn, a jobless man, parachuted from the south tower of the World Trade Center to publicize the plight of the unemployed.* In 1976 Rick Sylvester skied off Canada’s Mount Asgard for the opening sequence of the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me, giving the wider world its first look at BASE jumping.* In 2008, first base-jumping championship in Spain from the Gran Hotel Bali. More than 30 jumpers from all over the world. Maximum winner Klaus Renz.* In 2008, two men, dressed as engineers, illegally jumped off the Burj Dubai, the tallest man-made structure in the world. However, these and other sporadic incidents were one-time experiments, not the systematic pursuit of a new form of parachuting. After 1978, the filmed jumps from El Capitan were repeated, not as a publicity exercise or as a movie stunt, but as a true recreational activity. It was this that popularised BASE jumping more widely among parachutists. Carl Boenish continued to publish films and informational magazines on BASE jumping until his 1984 death after a BASE-jump off of the Troll Wall. By this time, the concept had spread among skydivers worldwide, with hundreds of participants making fixed-object jumps.
