The Chief Scientific Uses of Kites

Abstract

If we neglect the ancient legends regarding the employment of kites in China to communicate with the garrison of a besieged town and the carrying off of a golden ornament from a tower in Japan, the earliest use of kites seems to have been in 1749, when Dr. Alex. Wilson of the University of Glasgow in this way lifted thermometers into the summer clouds. Curiously enough, this first application of kites to meteorological purposes has proved to be the most important use to which they have been put since. Two years later Dr. Benjamin Franklin, in Philadelphia, by means of a kite, proved the identity of electricity and lightning, these experiments being afterwards repeated by De Romas in France, by Beccaria in Italy, and by Cavallo in England. Early in the last century, interest in the kite for scientific purposes was revived, and Admiral Back obtained with it temperatures above Hudson's Straits, while in 1847 Mr. W. R. Birt proposed to obtain in the free air above Kew Observatory, observations of the various meteorological elements.