Practical Uses of Kite Flying

One of the early uses suggested for kites was that of establishing a line of communication between a vessel and the shore during a storm. Capt. Dansey describes an experiment of this kind in 1825 in vol. xli. of the Transactions of the Society of Arts (England): “ The kite, in a strong breeze, extended 1,100 yards of line § inch in circumference, and would have extended more had it been at hand.

It also extended 360 yards of line 1 3/4 inches, weighing 60 lb.

The Holland [covering] weighed 3 1/2 lb.; the spars, one of which was armed at. the head with iron spikes for the purpose of mooring it, weighed 6 3/4 lb., and the tail was five times its length, composed of 8 lb. of rope and 14 lb. of elm plank, weighing together 22 lb.” The kite was 9 feet tall, and had a surface of 55 sq. feet. The unusual load of 92 lb. lifted by the kite of this size shows the high velocity and pressure of the wind in which it was flown. After a public competition for the prize offered in 1861 by the Shipwrecked Fishermen and Mariners’ Royal Benevolent Society, for “the best, simplest, and least expensive mode of communication between a wreck and a lee shore,” a kite invented by Sir George Nares was awarded the prize. Capt.

Nares’s opinion was that “ by means of a life-buoy the kite can be used to drag one or more men to the shore.

The kite can also be used to take a line to a boat to leeward unable to fetch the ship; to communicate with a lighthouse or between vessels at sea when a boat can not be used; to carry a line across a river, and other similar cases.”

Kites have been used by engineers for carrying lines across chasms.

It is said that in building the first suspension bridge over Niagara the first cable was drawn across the gorge by means of a cord carried over by a kite, or by a second larger cord which was drawn over by the kite-cord.

Prof. James P. Espy relates in his Philosophy of Storms (p. 74) that he sent up a kite into the base of a cumulus cloud at a height of about 1,200 yards. He thus proved that the height of formation of such clouds is in accordance with the laws of expanding and cooling of gases determined by laboratory experiments, and that by ascertaining the temperature of the air and the dew-point at the earth’s surface, the height of such clouds at any time can be computed. This was about 1840, and probably at Philadelphia.

In 1822 or 1823 Mr. George Fisher sent up a minimum thermometer on a kite in Igloolik island, and Admiral Back when in command of the Terror is said to have used a kite to elevate thermometers for the purpose of ascertaining the temperature of the upper air in Hudson’s Strait.

In 1874 Mr. John T. Lacy and Mr. Booth, of Bridgeport, Conn., made a voyage of 22 miles on Long Island Sound, in the space of three and a quarter hours, in a rowboat towed by a kite. The boat was 12 feet long, and the kite 10 feet high by 8 feet wide. About 600 feet of cord was let out.

The first really successful use of the kite in obtaining systematic and trustworthy records from instruments lifted into the air was by Douglas Archibald in England in 1883 and 1884. He elevated anemometers indicating on dials the total movement of the wind during given times, and worked out for his locality the law of increase of wind-velocity up to a height of about 1,000 feet. His results are given in Nature, Nov., 1884.

In 1885 Mr. Alexander McAdie used a kite with a tin-foil surface collector and a fine copper wire wound around the flying-string for the purpose of studying the electricity of the air, at the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory, near Boston, an institution maintained and directed by Mr. A. Lawrence Rotch. He repeated these experiments in 1891 and 1892, and succeeded in getting on a modern electrometer a record of the electricity collected by a kite. He also repeated Franklin’s experiment while a distant thunder-storm was passing, obtaining sparks and voltage sufficient to illumine an incandescent lamp, probably after the manner of a Geisler tube.

Studies of atmospheric electricity by means of kites were carried out very successfully by L. Weber in Breslau, Germany, about 1886. Mr. William A. Eddy, of Bayonne, N. J., has used kites for a similar purpose in New York since 1892, and Mr. G. W. Pickard carried on some interesting experiments at Portland, Me., in 1896 and 1897.

As a result of some experiments of J. Woodbridge Davis, of New York, in 1887, on the life-saving use of kites for towing buoys ashore and of Archibald’s experiments, Mr. Eddy took up kite-flying in 1890 with great enthusiasm. His first experiment was to elevate a maximum and minimum thermometer, from which he obtained a record at a height of about 1,500 feet. In the course of his experiments he developed a very efficient kite of the Malay pattern. In 1894 he went to the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory to try his kite in meteorological work. Assisted by the staff of the observatory, on Aug. 4, 1894, a thermograph, remodeled for the purpose by Mr. S. P. Fergusson, was lifted to a height of 1,430 feet above Blue Hill, or 2,070 feet above sea-level. Thus for the first time an instrument recording graphically and continuously was lifted into the air by kites, and began a new epoch in atmospheric research. In 1895 Mr. Botch decided to employ the kites in systematic meteorological investigation at Blue Hill. Since then Mr. Fergusson and the writer have been engaged in the development of the kite and apparatus. With an appropriation to Mr. Botch from the Smithsonian Institution, Mr. Fergusson has constructed a steam-windlass, along the lines of those used in deep-sea sounding. A Hargrave kite as developed by the writer for meteorological work at Blue Hill is shown in Fig. 2. Kites of this form, but with a different frame-work, were invented by Lawrence Hargrave in Australia about 1892, and are described in the Reports of the Academy of Science, Sydney. At the beginning of the work at Blue Hill no records had ever been obtained from instruments carried by kites at heights greater than 1,500 or 2,000 feet. The rapid progress upward at the observatory is shown by the following figures, derived from the greatest height in each kite-flight, from which meteorological records have been brought back:

The experiments were begun in 1894 with kites of the Eddy pattern (Fig. 3), and with cord as a flying-line.

Steps in development which permitted of progressively higher flights were: (1) The substitution in Jan., 1896, of steel piano-wire for cord, the wire being less than half as heavy and less than one-fourth the diameter of cord of t he same length, besides being smoother and more uniform in tensile strength ; (2) the building of a steam-windlass in the spring of 1897; (3) the general use of the more stable Hargrave kite (Fig. 2) after the spring of 1897; (4) the use on all the kites after Aug., 1897, of an elastic bridle to regulate the pull automatically; (5) the construction of larger kites in 1898 (80 to 90 sq. feet), the use of which was permitted by the regulating bridle; (6) the partial introduction of curved surfaces into the larger kites after June, 1898, only one of the kites having previously had curved surfaces. In 1899 curved surfaces, which greatly increase efficiency, are used in all the kites. The principles of flight when great altitudes are desired are as follows: (1) Place as much kite-surface at the top of the flying-line as it will hold with safety under a maximum pull, which can be determined in advance by a proper adjustment of the regulating bridles : (2) attach smaller kites to lift the flying-line as the weight of line let out permits. For example, when 20 lb. of wire are out add a Kite with a maximum pull of 20 lb. In this way the pull along the line is kept approximately uniform and within the limits of safety. The method of flying kites tandem is illustrated in Fig. 4, except that at Blue Hill kites of the Hargrave form replace the diamond-shaped form shown in the figure.

The interest in kite-flying during the last few years has been very great, especially in America, and a number of applications have been found for the kite.

In 1896 S. C. Keith, Jr., lifted an instrument above Boston for the purpose of catching and studying the numbers and kinds of bacteria at different heights. In Dec., 1896, William A. Eddy, Dr. William R. Mitchell, and Henry L. Allen carried a telephone-wire over houses, trees, and roadways, by means of a kite, and succeeded in transmitting telephonic and telegraphic messages between the two ends. Mr. Eddy later made attempts to hear sounds, as fog-signals, etc., from a telephone sent aloft by the kites. In Aug., 1897, Mr. Eddy sent aloft a camera obscura on a kite by means of which he was enabled to view distant and inaccessible objects.

Kites were used by Archibald in London as early as 1887 for lifting a camera to photograph from a height. M. Arthur Batut used the kite for this purpose with much success in France in 1888 and 1889. Many photographs were taken by M. Emile Wenz in Rheims in the years following 1890. Mr. Eddy took up the subject in this country in 1895, and has since taken many hundreds of photographs. Mr. G. T, Woglom, Capt. Baden-Powell, and others nave also worked in this line, obtaining fine photographs from midair of the scenes below.

Capt. Baden-Powell, of the British army, and Lieut. Hugh D. Wise, of the U. S. army, have experimented in recent years with considerable success in the development of kites for lifting men and signals for war purposes. Maillot in France, Hargrave in Australia, Baden-Powell in England, and Wise and Lamson in the U. S. have all lifted men short distances, thus showing the feasibility of the method.

Excepting, perhaps, Mr. Lawrence Hargrave, Mr. C. H. Lamson, of Portland, Me., is probably the most original and fertile designer of kites. One of the various forms invented by him is illustrated in Fig. 5. Another form which he calls an aerocurve was at the top of the flying-line at Blue Hill in the highest flights in 1898. In 1896 he built a kite of the Hargrave type 32 feet long and having 900 sq. feet of surface. It weighed about 150 lb. and lifted a dummy man weighing 150 lb. several hundred feet into the air. In the air it presented a most magnificent and inspiring sight, resembling a yacht under full sail in midair. This kite probably had the largest surface of any ever built, although in 1886 and 1887 Mr. Maillot, a French rope-maker, is said to have constructed a single-plane kite of about 800 sq. feet (78 sq. meters), weighing 165 lb., and lifted with it in one experiment as much as 594 lb. Marconi tried kites successfully in 1898 for transmitting messages by his new system of wireless telegraphy.

In 1898, after experimenting for about three years in Washington, the U. S. Weather Bureau established sixteen kite stations separated from each other by several hundred miles, and covering the area from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi river, and from Tennessee to the Canadian boundary, the object being to obtain simultaneous records at considerable heights in the air and to construct charts of the weather conditions in the upper air for purposes of forecasting. So far only a partial success of the scheme is reported. In the course of the experiments at Washington

Mr. Potter developed several forms of kite, one of which is illustrated in Fig. 6.

Following the example of the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory, kite stations for investigating the air with self-recording instruments have been established with success near Paris, by Teisserence de Bort, and near St. Petersburg, by Rykatcheff. Experimental stations are in process of establishment by Mossman in Scotland, Koeppen in Germany, Davis in the Argentine Republic, Pickering in Peru, the Bayonne Kite Corps in New Jersey, and perhaps by others.

Authorities.—Arthur Batut, La Photographie Aerienne par Cerf-Volant (Paris, 1890); Henry de Gaffigny, Traite d’Aerostation Theorique et Pratique (Paris, 1891); Octave Chanute, Progress in Flying-machines (New York, 1894); Proceedings of the International Conference on Aerial Navigation, Chicago, in 1893 (New York, 1894); Cleveland Abbe. Monthly Weather Review (Washington, 1895-98); miscellaneous writers, Scientific American and Supplement; G. T. Woglom, Parakites (New York, 1896).

H. Helm Clayton.