Leslie Leroy Irvin was born on September 10, 1895, in Los Angeles, California. A protégé of
Charles Broadwick, the adventurous and athletic Irvin made his first parachute jump at age 16. In 1914, he first jumped from an airplane at 1,000 feet above the ground in a stunt for the movie
Sky High. Irvin, while working for the
Curtiss Aeroplane Company in Buffalo, developed a 32-foot diameter free-fall parachute, tested it with dummies dropped from Curtis airplanes and applied for a US patent. Irvin joined the
Army Air Service's parachute research team at
McCook Field near
Dayton, Ohio which developed the first modern
parachute. After the
WWI Armistice, Major
E. L. Hoffman of the Army Air Service led an effort to develop an improved parachute for exiting airplanes by bringing together the best elements of multiple parachute designs. Participants included Irvin and
James Floyd Smith. The team tested 17 parachute configurations using test dummies. The results favored Smith's parachute design which his company, the Floyd Smith Aerial Equipment Company of San Diego, California, filed a patent for on July 27, 1918. Smith's design was further improved and eventually created the airplane parachute Type-A. Irvin became the first American to jump from an airplane and manually open a parachute in midair. The new chute performed flawlessly, though Irvin broke his ankle on landing. Floyd Smith filed the Type A patent No. 1,462,456 on the same day. The Parachute Board determined the backpack chute was crowding the cockpit, a redesign moved the parachute down the pilots back becoming the "seat style" chute. The McCook Field team tested the Type A parachute with over 1000 jumps. These successful tests resulted in the Army requiring parachute use on all Air Service flights. Less than two months after Irvin's first freefall jump, the
Irving Air Chute Company was formed in
Buffalo, New York, the world's first parachute designer and manufacturer. and the company never bothered to correct the mistake until 1970. of the Irving Air Chute Company credits William O'Connor August 24, 1920, at McCook Field as the first person to be saved by an Irving parachute, yet this was unrecognized. On October 20, 1922, Lieutenant
Harold R. Harris, chief of the
McCook Field Flying Station, jumped from a disabled
Loening PW-2A high wing monoplane fighter. Harris' lifesaving chute was mounted on the wall of McCook's parachute lab where the ''
Dayton Herald's'' aviation editor Maurice Hutton and photographer Verne Timmerman, predicting more jumps in future, suggested that a club should be formed. Two years later, Irvin's company instituted the
Caterpillar Club, awarding a gold pin to pilots who successfully bailed out of disabled aircraft using an Irving parachute. The successor to the original Irvin company still provides pins to people who have made a jump. In addition to the Irvin Air Chute Company, other parachute manufacturers have also issued caterpillar pins for successful jumps. GC Parachutes formed their Gold Club in 1940. The Switlik Parachute Company of Trenton, New Jersey issued both gold and silver caterpillar pins. Later the company also made car seat belts, slings for cargo handling, and even canning machinery. In 1970, the company finally removed the misnomic 'g' from its name, becoming Irvin Air Chute, and in 1996, changed its name again to Irvin Aerospace Inc. Leslie Irvin died in Los Angeles on October 9, 1966. ==See also==