Bungee Jumping - History

History

The word "bungee" originates from West Country dialect of English language, meaning "Anything thick and squat", as defined by James Jennings in his book "Observations of Some of the Dialects in The West of England" published 1825. Around 1930, the name became used for a rubber eraser. The word bungy, as used by A J Hackett, is "Kiwi slang for an Elastic Strap". Cloth-covered rubber cords with hooks on the ends have been available for decades under the generic name bungy cords.

In the 1950s, David Attenborough and a BBC film crew brought back footage of the "land divers" (Sa: Naghol) of Pentecost Island in Vanuatu, young men who jumped from tall wooden platforms with vines tied to their ankles as a test of their courage and passage into manhood. A similar practice, only with a much slower pace for falling, has been practised as the Danza de los Voladores de Papantla or the 'Papantla flyers' of central Mexico, a tradition dating back to the days of the Aztecs.

A tower 4,000 feet (1,200 m) high with a system to drop a “car” suspended by a cable of “best rubber” was proposed for the Chicago World Fair, 1892-1893. The car, seating two hundred people, would be shoved from a platform on the tower and then bounce to a stop. The designer engineer suggested that for safety the ground below “be covered with eight feet of feather bedding”. The proposal was declined by the Fair’s organizers.

The first modern bungee jumps were made on 1 April 1979 from the 250-foot (76 m) Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, by members of the Oxford University Dangerous Sports Club. The jumpers were arrested shortly after, but continued with jumps in the US from the Golden Gate and Royal Gorge bridges, (this last jump sponsored by and televised on the American programme That's Incredible) spreading the concept worldwide. By 1982, they were jumping from mobile cranes and hot air balloons.

Commercial bungee jumping began with the New Zealander, A J Hackett, who made his first jump from Auckland's Greenhithe Bridge in 1986. During the following years, Hackett performed a number of jumps from bridges and other structures (including the Eiffel Tower), building public interest in the sport, and opening the world's first permanent commercial bungee site; the Kawarau Bridge Bungy at Queenstown in the South Island of New Zealand. Hackett remains one of the largest commercial operators, with concerns in several countries.

Several million successful jumps have taken place since 1980. This is attributable to bungee operators rigorously conforming to standards and guidelines governing jumps, such as double checking calculations and fittings for every jump. As with any sport, injuries can still occur (see below), and there have been fatalities. A relatively common mistake in fatality cases is to use a cord that is too long. The cord should be substantially shorter than the height of the jumping platform to allow it room to stretch. When the cord reaches its natural length the jumper either starts to slow down or keeps accelerating depending upon the speed of descent. One may not even start to slow until the cord has been stretched a significant amount, because the cord's resistance to distortion is zero at the natural length, and increases only gradually after, taking some time to even equal the jumper's weight. See also Potential energy for a discussion of the spring constant and the force required to distort bungee cords and other spring-like objects.

The Bloukrans River Bridge was the first bridge to be ‘bungee jumped off’ in Africa when Face Adrenalin introduced bungee jumping to the African continent in 1990. Bloukrans Bridge Bungy has been operated commercially by Face Adrenalin since 1997, and is the highest commercial bridge bungy in the world.

In April 2008 a 37-year-old Durban man, Carl Mosca Dionisio, made bungy jumping history when he jumped off a 30 m (100 ft) tower attached to a bungy cord made entirely of 18,500 condoms.