- Contrary to what some may think, the city was not named after Paris, the King of Troy's son who fell in love with Helen, and carted her home.
Instead, it was got its name from the Parisii, a tribe of Gauls who settled on the Ile de la Cité between 250 and 200 B.C.
(i honestly never thought it was named after Paris, does that make me smart?)
- No, Paris is not called the City of Lights due to the wattage put out from the Eiffel Tower every evening.
The "Lights" of Paris actually referred to the intellectual residents which made Paris a world-renowned centre, drawing other artists, writers and sculptors. But the lightbulbs help.
(LAWL at the lightbulbs comment)
- The first human beings to take flight did so in Paris, in 1783, when the Marquis d'Arlandes rose majestically into the sky in a hot air balloon and managed to stay there for 20 minutes, on November 21.
In the same year, Louis Sébastien Le Normand took two umbrellas, jumped out of a tall tree and survived. It wasn't quite like the complicated drawings Da Vinci had made of a parachute, hundreds of years before, but it was a work in progress...
(that must have been what inspired Mary Poppins)
- Two years later, in 1785, Jean-Pierre Blanchard attached a small basket to a parachute and dropped it from a hot air balloon — with a dog as the unwilling pilot. The dog survived.
(good thing too or i'd build a time machine and go back in time to smack him)
But it wasn't until October 22, 1797, that André-Jacques Garnerin climbed out of a hot air balloon and into a similar parachute and basket affair, and descended (successfully) on Paris.
Of course, anything he can do, she can do at least as well: His wife became the first female to parachute, in 1799.
(yay for us females!)
Read more here! (:
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