(obsolete) A child's hornbook for learning the alphabet. 1802, William Hutton, The History of the Roman Wall, preface You will also pardon the errors of the Work, for you know I was not bred to letters; but, that the battledore, at an age not exceeding six, was the last book I used at school. (obsolete) A bat or beetle used in washing clothes.
The parachute, like the helicopter and the hang glider, dates back to the drawings of mankind's greatest public genius, Leonardo da Vinci.
However, parachutes had been imagined and sketched by Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) centuries earlier and other inventors have designed parachutes, including Croatian Faust Vrancic who constructed a device based on Da Vinci's drawing and jumped from a Venice tower in 1617.