The Aerodrome: A milestone in aviation history: Aviators parachute from from moving aircraft in France. . . .and Texas. And Natural gas makes a coal replacing appearance.

From our companion blog, The Aerodrome:

A milestone in aviation history: Aviators parachute from from moving aircraft in France. . . .and Texas.

It was reported that on this day, in 1918, a French aviator, and an American one, both experimented with parachuting from moving aircraft.

Like all things aviation,  parachutes were advancing fairly rapidly under the pressure of World War One. They'd already been introduced for balloon crewmen, who could parachute out of balloons in combat scenarios.  Indeed, they typically did so when it became apparent a balloon was about to be attacked, as they had to put the parachute harness on in order to get out. They did not simply routinely wear it.  But up until this point in the war, it had not been the case that aviators wore parachutes or even could.

Indeed, it would not become standard until after the war.  While these experiments proved it could be done, it remained the case that wearing an early parachute in an early airplane was not easy to do, and indeed, was largely impractical for the most part.

A larger view of the same newspaper can be seen on our Today In Wyoming's History site for this date.

Meanwhile, in the other local newspaper, the news was all about oil. . . and natural gas.

Indeed, this paper has a number of interesting things reported in it in the energy news that would predict the future.  Gasoline was coming on. . . but natural gas was arriving and replacing coal.