Authors: Ben Ruhe
Date Submitted: August 31, 2002
Article Type: Journal

In an experiment, C.W. Post, the breakfast food millionaire, once tried to produce rainfall on his Texas ranch by using 20 kites to hoist 150 sticks of dynamite into the air, where they were simultaneously detonated. The arid blue sky remained blue. No rain fell.

In a volume called Art That Flies, kite historian Tal Streeter points out that Samuel F. Cody, the American cowboy who invented and flew the first manned and powered airplane in England, worked up to that high point by designing man-lifting observation kites at the turn of the 19th century. As he was working toward manned flight, he managed to get himself appointed chief kite instructor at an important British military establishment at Farnborough, making him, as the author comments, “the first (person) to command a country’s military air force.”

India weighs in with its own kite oddity. It is reported that the famously beautiful Taj Mahal, in Agra, has a number of old gashes to its edges where lethal ground-glass fighter kite lines swiped the stone façade.

PDF Link: Journal Issue