Articles

  • KITE FLY ON GERMAN LAKE CELEBRATES WEATHER STATION’S 100TH ANNIVERSARY
    A busy Lake Constance ferry port in the south of Germany, Friedrichshafen is inextricably linked to the stately Zeppelins built and flown there for the last century. The link to inventor Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin remains strong. Throughout the city, streets, schools, cafes, even a dress shop are named for him. A children’s slide near the sprawling waterfront Zeppelin Museum is shaped like an airship.
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  • Kites Across the Oceans
    THE BEGINNINGS OF A NEW SAILING ERA A millennium ago, daring Polynesian sailors made use of kites to tow their canoes between nearby islands. This was the prehistory of kite navigation, an unusual means of transportation that has not been able to show its full potential until very recent years. As the energy crisis and global warming urge us to find alternatives to oil, high-tech synthetic materials, computer assisted steering, and satellite observation of the earth now allow for brand new developments in kitesailing.
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  • A Kite Innovation in the Year 1910: Bicycle Touring
    Mr. P. Poirier spoke of towing bicycles with the help of kites. Having had several experiences with this concept ourselves, we believe that making our results known will be useful to our readers. The idea to use kites for the traction of vehicles is not new. It is only necessary to refer to Mr. Lecornu's book to find the story, sufficiently documented, of the first experiences of this type which took place in England (Pocock's car in 1828), and then during Colonel (then Captain) Cody's 1903 crossing of the English Channel in a canoe pulled by a cell kite.
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  • Traction Kiting
    Samoans and other island sailors of Polynesia used kites to propel their canoes throughout the vast Pacific. (Although I have it on good authority that using kites in this manner by Polynesian sailors is a fact, I haven't seen the documentation. Grist for one's own mill and, perhaps, another article.) Because he wrote about it (we'll take him at his word), we do know that in the early 1700's, a young Benjamin Franklin, while floating on his back, employed a kite to pull himself across a pond.
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  • A Challenge to Creativity
    Reading Istvan Bodoczky's small, elegant volume titled Hidden Symmetry proves to me the value of individual expression in kite-making. Istvan explains in the preface that his recent works "have irregular asymmetric outlines" and that "I make line drawings first, and only later decide which lines will be 'real'(painted) and which ones will be 'only' part of the physical structure."
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  • Knotty Kite Patent Problems: Protecting Inventions in Predatory Marketplace
    Patents are a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" for kite designers. They take huge amounts of time (which I'd rather spend kitemaking), they are horrendously expensive, like more than US$ 50,000 for just a few core countries (plus at least the same again in a defense fund to establish credibility), and, even after considerable investment, won't necessarily be granted or be defensible because of legal vagaries.
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  • A 'Skyhook' for Studying the Atmosphere: Exploring High Altitudes With a Low-tech Tool-the Kite
    Nearly 250 years after Benjamin Franklin flew a kite to sample the electric fields in a Pennsylvania thunderstorm, meteorological kites are again flying high as platforms for scientific research.
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  • The Power of Reverse Engineering: Building a 5-Foot Steiff Roloplan Kite
    One of the prizes of my kite collection is an original Steiff Roloplan that came to me because of the great people at the Into the Wind kite store in Boulder, Colorado. They were called a few years ago by a man in Nebraska, who asked if they'd be interested in buying two old box kites, rescued from his attic. Whatever they thought of the offer, they politely referred the man to me.
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  • A Little-Heralded French Kite Pioneer: Joseph LeCornu Wrote Important Flight Manuel in 1902
    Joseph Louis LeCornu was born in Caen, Normandy, on March 13, 1864, the seventh of eight children. His father was a lacemaker by trade. Following the father's death in 1878 when LeCornu was 14, he and his seven siblings were raised by their mother. An early achiever, LeCornu received a prize in philosophy from his lycee in Caen at age 9 and four years later was included in a delegation from his school sent to Paris to attend the burial of writer Victor Hugo. The following year he was admitted to L'Ecole Centrales des Arts and Manufactures.
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  • German Kite Patents a Treasure Trove
    Between the years 1882 and 1994, a total of 100 patents were issued by the German Patent Office for kites and kite accessories. This averages about one patent per year, approximately the same number of patents issued by the British Patent Office for English patents over a period of years. In contrast, the U.S. Patent Office issued an average of six to seven patents per year from 1886 to 1998, indicating a much greater interest in kiting in America than in those two European countries.
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