When I was a kid, when the month of March rolled around, the stores had kites for sale. If I remember, they cost about a dime, with some of the larger “box” kites costing up to a quarter. I don’t remember buying very many kites — we usually just made our own.
I almost never see kids flying kites anymore. Most kids’ outdoor activities today are organized, like soccer, baseball, etc. I really don’t see a lot of kids outside just “playing” anymore. I think I’ve mentioned before that neither Kelly or David ever showed much interest in kites and I’m pretty sure that none of our grandkids have even been exposed to kite flying.
I suppose there could be (and maybe is) an entire blog about nothing but kites. But they are interesting — they have a long history and over the years they’ve been used for all sorts of unusual things and contributed to advances and discoveries in a number of fields. And a lot of famous people used kites in their discoveries.
Most people are familiar with the kite experiment performed by Ben Franklin that proved that lightning is electricity. He performed his experiment in 1752 in some amount of secrecy — the only witness to the experiment was his 21 year old son. Franklin waited until there was a storm and then flew his kite made of silk (silk tolerated the rain better than other materials available a the time.) The experiment took a long time — so long that they considered just calling it off. But before they did, Ben noticed some threads of silk tied to the key were standing straight out. He then touched the back of his knuckle to key and felt a shock, thus proving his theory. It’s amazing that Franklin wasn’t killed, as others trying to reproduce the experiment were.
No one really knows who came up with the first kite, but most people agree that the kite originated in China thousands of years ago. Since then, kites have been used to prove all sorts of theories, gather data about the weather, used in military battles and observations, and of course provided just plain fun for generations of kids — and adults.
In 1804 George Cayley developed the concept of heavier-than-air flight — his glider was a modified arch top kite. Kites have been used to pull “horseless carriages.” A kite flown by Homan Walsh ,when he was 10 years old, aided in the construction of a suspension bridge across the Niagara River. The Wright Brothers used kites to test their theories for the first airplane and Marconi used a kite to lift an antenna hight enough to make his radio link between America and Europe work. After the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, kites carried cameras aloft to take pictures to assess the damage.
So kites have been around for thousands of years and and became a part of, and influenced, our lives. Authors and poets used to write about them… its kind of sad that the kite has lost its prominence today. We can learn a lot from kites. In today’s environment, we seem to questioning rules and freedom more than ever. Someone once wrote that kites can’t really fly free — in order to soar high in the sky the string of a kite needs to be anchored. If the string breaks the kite drops back to the ground. The kite’s freedom depends on it not being as free as it thinks it is. Just some food for thought on a windy March day — and, it’s more poetic than “go fly a kite.”
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