More than 270 smokejumpers work in the United States today (Russia also has a large smokejumping program). The job was unheard of, however, until the late 1930s, when the U.S. Forest Service first began training young men to leap into fires that couldn't be reached any other way.
On July 12, 1940, two men put this training to use as the first smokejumpers to parachute into a blaze in Idaho's Nez Perce National Forest. Rufus Robinson was the first out the door, followed soon after by Early Cooley, according to a 2009 obituary of Cooley in the Washington Post.
Cooley made a death-defying landing, his parachute's lines tangling midair before unwinding; he hit a spruce tree on the way down, but emerged uninjured.
The first two smokejumpers extinguished the fire by the next morning.
