Man who made first modern bungee jump dies at age 78

David Kirke, a flamboyant British thrill-seeker who performed — and more important, survived — the first modern bungee jump, died Oct. 21 at his home in Oxford. He was 78.

His death was confirmed by brother Hugh Potter, who said no cause had been determined.

Kirke, an irrepressible daredevil and prankster, helped found the Dangerous Sports

Club at the University of Oxford in the late 1970s. He inadvertently led this tiny band of eccentrics, plucked from the upper rungs of British society, into a historic plunge off the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, England, on April Fools’ Day in 1979.

Inspiration came in part from a rite- of-passage ritual on the South Pacific island country Vanuatu known as land diving, in which young men leap from high towers, using vines to break their fall. Kirke opted for an elastic rope used by the military to help fighter jets land on aircraft carriers.

“We hadn’t tested it or anything like that,” Kirke said in a 2019 interview with the news site Bristollive. “We were called the Dangerous Sports Club, and testing it first wouldn’t have been particularly dangerous.”

Clad in a top hat and tails, with a bottle of Champagne in hand, Kirke, who was nursing a hangover from an all-night party, was the first to take the plunge on that fateful day. The other jumpers — Alan Weston, Tim Hunt and Simon Keeling — “waited to see what would happen to me,” Kirke said in a 2019 interview with ITV News. “When I started bouncing up again, they all jumped.”

Police promptly arrested the jumpers, charged them with breach of peace and briefly tossed them behind bars before letting them off with a small fine. Jail was hardly a traumatic experience, Kirke told ITV: “They were the only police force I’ve ever known to bring halfempty bottles of red wine, from the party, in a brown paper bag and give it to us in prison.”

Little did they know that their playful prank would inspire a popular pastime around the world. A video of a plunge from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco by members of the club in the 1980s inspired a New Zealander named A. J. Hackett to develop controlled methods for bungee jumping and build a thriving business that popularized the sport.

Fortune, however, was not the point for Kirke, a writer by trade whose jobs included ghostwriting a newspaper column for a politician. Instead, he would find fame with a lifetime of extravagant stunts — each seemingly more outlandish than the last.

Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available.