3rd Year Special Annual Double Issue Vol 4 Issue 1 & 2 Jan - Apr 2 3rd Year Special Annual Double Issue Vol 4 Issue | Page 33

qualified for BASE numbers 3 and 4 soon after.
A separate “award” was soon enacted for Night
BASE jumping when Mayfield completed each
category at night, becoming Night BASE #1, with
Smith qualifying a few weeks later.
Fausto Veranzio is widely believed to have
performed a parachute jumping experiment for
real and, therefore, to be the first man to build and
test a parachute: according to the story passed
on, Veranzio, in 1617, then over sixty-five years
old, implemented his design and tested the
parachute by jumping from St Mark’s Campanile
in Venice. This event was documented some 30
years later in a book Mathematical Magick or, the
Wonders that may be Performed by Mechanical
Geometry (London, 1648) written by John Wilkins,
the secretary of the Royal Society in London.
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
popularized BASE jumping more widely among
parachutists. Carl Boenish continued to
publish films and informational magazines on
BASE jumping until his death in 1984 after a BASE
jump off the Troll Wall. By this time, the concept
had spread among skydivers worldwide, with
hundreds of participants making fixed-object
jumps.
During the early eighties, nearly all BASE
jumps were made using standard skydiving
equipment,
including
two
parachutes
(main
and
reserve),
and
deployment
components. Later on, specialized equipment
and techniques were developed specifically for
the unique needs of BASE jumping.
Upon completing a jump from all of the four
object categories, a jumper may choose to
apply for a “BASE number”, awarded
sequentially. The 1000th application for a
BASE number was filed in March 2005
and BASE #1000 was awarded to Matt
“Harley”
Moilanen
of
Grand
Rapids,
Michigan. As of May 2017, over 2,000 BASE
numbers have been issued.
Guinness World Records first listed a BASE
jumping record with Carl Boenish’s 1984 leap
from Trollveggen (Troll Wall) in Norway. It was
described as the highest BASE jump. (The jump
Vol 4 | Issue 1 |Jan - Feb 2019
was made two days before Boenish’s death at
the same site.) This record category is still in the
Guinness book and is currently held by Valery
Rozov. On 5 October 2016, Russia’s Valery
Rozov leapt from a height of around 7,700 m
(25,262 ft) from Cho Oyu, the sixth-highest
mountain in the Himalayas, located on the
China/Nepal border. He fell for around 90
seconds before opening his parachute,
landing on a glacier approximately two min-
utes later at an altitude of around 6,000 m
(19,685 ft). On July 8, 2006 Captain
Daniel G. Schilling set the Guinness World
Record for the most BASE jumps in a
twenty-four-hour period. Schilling jumped off the
Perrine Bridge in Twin Falls, Idaho, a record 201
times.
BASE competitions have been held since the
early 1980s, with accurate landings or free fall
aerobatics used as the judging criteria. Recent
years have seen a formal competition held at the
452 metres (1,483 ft) high Petronas Towers in
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, judged on landing
accuracy.
In 2018 at Eikesdalen, Norway a world record
was sat with 69 BASE jumpers jumping from
the cliff Katthammaren
Notable Jumps
•In 1912, Franz Reichelt, tailor, jumped from the
first deck of the Eiffel Tower testing his invention,
the coat parachute. He died by hitting the ground.
It was his first-ever attempt with the parachute
and both the authorities and the spectators
believed he intended to test it using a dummy.
•February 2, 1912 Rodman Law parachuted
from the top of the candle/torch of the Statue of
Liberty. The top of the candle is 305 ft 11 in above
the ground.
•In 1913, it is claimed that Štefan Banic
successfully jumped from a 15-story building to
demonstrate his parachute design.
•In 1913, 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 to jump from the Eiffel Tower
too, but the Parisian authorities did not allow it.
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