Pioneering Teenage Parachuter Georgia ‘Tiny’ Broadwick Showed That Courage Isn’t Counted in Pounds
The first woman to parachute from an airplane, she will be recognized in an exhibit when part of the newly renovated National Air and Space Museum reopens this year
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In 1908, a 15-year-old girl named Georgia “Tiny” Broadwick leapt from a hot-air balloon and floated more than 1,000 feet down to earth under a parachute. It was the start of a prolific aerial career: The 4-foot-8, 85-pound Broadwick went on to jump from the sky some 900 times, demonstrate skydiving for the U.S. Army and inspire an invention that changed parachuting.
Born in 1893, the North Carolinian spent her youth working in a cotton mill, got married at 12 years old and was abandoned by her husband shortly thereafter. When she was 15, she watched the parachuter Charles Broadwick jump from a lofted balloon at a carnival. Hooked, Broadwick convinced him to teach her his act, after which she took his name. At a carnival in Raleigh in 1908, Broadwick performed her first public jump. Soon, spectators were lining up to see her fly.
Aviation was still in its infancy, and Americans were thrilled about “leaving the earth and being in an apparatus that allows you to get closer to the heavens,” says Lieutenant Colonel Jessica Brown, a historian at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Parachutists could fall like angels and alight without injury. (Not to say Broadwick always landed smoothly, as she went where the wind took her: Once, that was through the window of a train’s caboose; another time, into a cactus patch.)
Soon, Broadwick became the first woman to parachute from an airplane. In one early jump, on January 9, 1914, she sat in a swing that hung from a plane 2,000 feet above Los Angeles, pulled a lever and dropped. She floated safely into Griffith Park.
Later that year, Broadwick was demonstrating parachuting for soldiers in San Diego when she encountered a pivotal snag: Her parachute’s static line was catching on the aircraft—so she cut it. Free-falling, Broadwick maneuvered her lines to open the parachute. Her snip is often credited as the first use of a “rip cord,” later patented by Floyd Smith.
Growing up in poverty, Broadwick showed working people that the wonders of aviation weren’t only for wealthy men. Her skill and courage, Brown says, proved that “aviation is classless.”
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This article is a selection from the June 2025 issue of Smithsonian magazine
