On This Day in History: December 28

Tiny Broadwick jumps from an airplane

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I was 18 the first time I jumped from a perfectly good aircraft. I didn’t tell my mom because she would have shit. Georgia “Tiny” Broadwick was only 15 the first time she parachuted, although it was out of a balloon. Later she would become the first woman to parachute from an airplane.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: December 28, 1908--

It wasn’t until 2021 that North Carolina legislators raised the legal age for getting married from 14 to 16. People used to get married even younger than that. Born in that state in 1893, Tiny was only 12 when she married, and gave birth to a daughter when she was 13. Tiny was nicknamed so because she stood under 5 feet and weighed a mere 85 pounds. I expect that the combination of her size, her young age, and the state of medicine in 1906 that the delivery was less than fun.

Her husband abandoned her, and Tiny worked 14 hours a day in a cotton mill to support herself and her daughter. But then at the age of 15 she saw Charles Broadwick’s aeronaut show, which included jumping from balloons, and Tiny said fuck yeah that seems like a fantastic career choice. She sent her daughter to live with her parents and joined the show, sending part of her salary home to support her daughter. Tiny made her first jump from a balloon on December 28, 1908. She described it as “the most wonderful sensation in the world.” She was hooked. Continues below …

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Broadwick adopted Tiny in order to make traveling easier—an adult man couldn’t be traveling with an underage girl—and billed her as the “Doll Girl” and dressed her up like one. Tiny hated the name and the doll costumes, but Charles knew show business, because she soon became the star. Tiny had several mishaps and near misses, once landing on the caboose of a train, another time in a swamp, and another time getting caught up in a windmill. She also broke bones and dislocated her shoulder from a series of rough landings, and once even jumped from a balloon that had caught fire, but she never lost her enthusiasm for the sport.

In 1912 she became the first woman to jump from an airplane, and in 1914 she demonstrated parachutes to the U.S. Army, which had just begun to add airplanes to its force. On one of the jumps the static line—a cord attached to the aircraft that opens the parachute—became tangled in the tail of the aircraft. For the next jump she said fuck it and cut the static line, pulling the cord herself. She’d just invented the first ripcord.

Tiny made about 1,100 jumps in her life, retiring at the age of 29 because her ankles couldn’t take the hard landings any longer. An aviation pioneer, she is known as the first lady of parachuting, and is one of the few female members of the Early Birds of Aviation. Tiny was made an honorary member of the 82nd Airborne, and one of her parachutes is in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. She lived to be 85.

Thanks, Erin, for the suggestion of today’s topic.

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