Articles

One of the most charming of the kite-related World Wide Web sites is Uli Wahl’s Kite Musical Instruments pages, out of Weinheim, Germany. Wahl has been interested in aeolian----wind-generated----sounds for some 30 years now and his site is expansive to say the least. It’s in both German and English. Aeolus was the Greek mythological god of wind.

Having flown kites in his boyhood, writer Walter Diem, of Hamburg, Germany, became involved with them again after studying David Pelham’s Kites and Clive Hart’s Kites: An Historical Survey when they became available in Germany. This was some 30 years ago.

A man prepared to take up difficult challenges, Falk Hilsenbek reacted in normal fashion after obtaining a book on kites 15 years ago. A stunt kite flier up until then, the German volume by Diem and Schmidt focused on historical kites and Hilsenbek was an instant convert. After examining the plans, he settled on the most complicated kite in the volume and successfully built it--- -a Lamson Aerocurve. Lamson was a New Englander who invented beautiful and intricate kites at the turn of the last century. Few of them survive, but plans for them, plus photographs, keep his renown alive.

Since he once viewed a dramatic lightning strike on a kite train at a kite festival, inventor Peter Lynn was particularly interested to study the winch house at Lindenberg. Kites there were flown typically with a 1 millimeter (.039 inch) steel line----a magnet for trouble. What the New Zealander learned was that kites were flown 4,000 days between 1905, the opening of the weather observatory, and 1938, the apparent close of everyday kite operations there, to altitudes regularly exceeding 3,000 meters, sometimes as high as 7,000 meters.