Georgia Ann “Tiny”[1] Thompson Broadwick (1893-1978) fell in love with aviation in 1907 at the age of 14 when she attended an aerial show at the North Carolina State Fair. The show featured pioneering balloonist Charles Broadwick (c. 1875-1943), who went up in a hot air balloon, climbed over the side and parachuted down. Tiny later told a reporter “When I saw that balloon go up, I knew that’s all I ever wanted to do.”

The sight of that balloon rising into the air may have looked like freedom to Tiny. She had married one William A Jacobs two years earlier[2] and had a daughter within a year. Jacobs abandoned them soon after the girl was born. With her husband gone, she worked in a cotton mill to support herself and her daughter.

When the show was over, she went straight to Broadwick and asked to join the act. He thought adding a young, pretty girl to the act would be a draw. After sorting out the complicated issues of her life, she joined Broadwick’s World Famous Aeronauts and the Johnny J. Jones Carnival, leaving her daughter with her mother with the promise that she would send part of her earnings home for her daughter’s support.[3] Soon thereafter, Charles Broadwick adopted Tiny.

A year later, back at the North Carolina State Fair,[4] Tiny made her first jump in a performance. Charles emphasized her size and youth, dressing her in girlish clothes, curling her hair into ringlets, and billing her the “Doll Girl.” When interviewed later in life, she said she hated being dressed up like a doll—she had been a tomboy her whole life—but she loved jumping. It was “the most wonderful sensation in the world! From up in the air I can appreciate the beauty of the earth from a new perspective and felt that I was in the presence of God.”

Tiny was soon the star attraction of the show. She sat on a trapeze that hung from the bottom of the balloon and jumped when she reached the correct altitude. (This sounds terrifying.) Newspapers described her as the most daring female aeronaut[5] ever seen, though she was definitely not the first.

In 1912, Tiny went from jumping out of balloons to jumping out of planes at the suggestion of Glenn L. Martin, an early barnstormer and aviation pioneer. (He was the Martin in Lockheed-Martin.) No woman had jumped out of a plane before and he thought the addition of a woman to his aerial act would spice things up.  The two men developed a new type of parachute for her to use jumping from the plane. She sat on a seat behind the wing and outside the cockpit that worked like a trap door. (Even more terrifying.)[6] When the plane reached an altitude of two thousand feet, she released a lever next to the seat and dropped. A rope was fastened to the fuselage and woven through the canvas cover of her parachute; when she dropped, the rope pulled off the cover so the parachute filled with air.

Two years later, the Army Air Corps, which was looking for ways to improve pilot safety. asked Tiny to demonstrate jumping from a military plane to its pilots. She made four jumps in one day.. Everything went smoothly on the first three jumps. On the fourth, Tiny’s parachute line became tangled in the plane’s tail. She wasn’t able to get back into the plane because the wind was flipping her back and forth. She cut the line, leaving a short length attached—essentially improvising what would become known as a ripcord. As she plummeted to the earth, she opened the parachute by hand with the remaining line.  She was the first person to self-deploy a parachute. It was a game-changer. Her quick thinking demonstrated that it would be possible for a pilot to bail out of a damaged airplane and survive.

Tiny Broadwick made more than 1100 jumps from balloons and airplanes over the course of her career, making her last jump in 1922[7]. She served as an advisor to the Army Air Corps throughout World War I. During World War II she worked at Rohr Aircraft Company on the assembly line making aircraft parts.  She was also asked to speak to young paratroopers about her experiences as the “First Lady of Parachuting”

In later years, she received important recognition from the aviation world. She received the U.S. Government Pioneer Aviation Award in 1963 and the John Glenn Medal in 1964. In 1970, NASA invited her to watch the Apollo 13 launch. In 1976, she was made an honorary member of the 82nd Airborne. She was posthumously inducted into the Skydiving Hall of Fame.

When she died in 1978, members of the Golden Knights, the US Army’s elite parachute team, served as her pallbearers.

[1] She was was nicknamed Tiny for a reason. As an adult she stood a little over four feet tall and weighed 80 pounds

[2] Yes. At the age of 12.

[3] And at this point the daughter disappears from the story as reported in the sources I read. Which makes me sad and angry on her behalf.

[4] I’d like to think she visited her mother and daughter.

[5] Both aeronaut and balloonist came into use to describe someone who flies in a balloon in 1784, a year after the Mongolfier brothers launched the first successful manned hot air balloon flight.

[6] For some reason, I find the idea of hanging outside an airplane more frightening than the idea of jumping. (Which I have no intention of doing.)

[7] Or possibly 1923. Sources disagree.