Kite Personalities - Harry Sauls

      The designer of the naval Barrage Kite, who died of a heart attack on December 2nd, 1988 at the age of 90 in North Miami Beach Florida. He was born and grew up in a large family in North Carolina. His formal education was brief, but his natural mechanical abilities were considerable. After his discharge from the Marines in 1920, he raised poultry in California and hung around the car races in Los Angeles, where balloons carried advertising banners. He noticed that they would go down in heavy winds, just when the crowds arrived and decided the cure was a kite.

“Having built kites all my life since a kid, I decided to give it a try.” He based his design on examples seen at the Smithsonian. After much work and many mistakes, he developed his methods and began advertising for Carroll’s Follies, Silver Foam Soap, 7–Up, and others. He employed 16 people and 7 sewing machines. The Sauls kite underwent extensive testing by the Navy before it was adopted in 1941 to fly from ships on cables to ward off enemy dive–bombers. The Sauls Vangrow Company was formed in Dayton, Ohio to manufacture the kites. The Navy ordered 3,300 of them at a total cost of $543,000. Production ran from February 1943 to January 1945.