Patents are a "damned if you do and damned if you don’t" for kite designers. They take huge amounts of time (which I’d rather spend kitemaking), they are horrendously expensive, like more than US$ 50,000 for just a few core countries (plus at least the same again in a defense fund to establish credibility), and, even after considerable investment, won’t necessarily be granted or be defensible because of legal vagaries.

It may not look like much, but the shop complex displaying kites in the Jodphur bazaar (above) constitutes one of the largest hand-made kite manufacturing operations in the world. Jodphur is in India’s desert state of Rajasthan. Working in a warren of dark, cramped spaces, the Baylim family and some 20 employees produce upwards of four million Indian fighter kites yearly. Using colored paper, bamboo and glue, the workers turn out the kites assembly line-style, with each doing just a designated portion of the cutting, bending, and pasting.

Now that they’ve proved the worth of kites in atmospheric research, Drs. Ben Balsley and Mike Jensen of the University of Colorado have set themselves a new challenge: they want to fly higher than ever before. Much higher, in fact, in order to open new vistas for their work. It’s a logical next step for them and they feel they have the technology to do it.

Nearly 250 years after Benjamin Franklin flew a kite to sample the electric fields in a Pennsylvania thunderstorm, meteorological kites are again flying high as platforms for scientific research.

After dismissing grand plans of travel, warm weather, and raucous New Year’s Eve celebrations, I chose to celebrate the first day of 2000 the same way many other kite enthusiasts probably did: by flying kites. We’d had a very mild winter in Colorado, so I decided to drive up to Boulder and fly kites on the top of nearby Bald Mountain. For years, George Peters has invited friends to this scenic spot west of Boulder, to picnic, fly kites, and enjoy nature. He has had all the Colorado winter weather extremes in the last few years: from whiteout snowstorms to …

One of the prizes of my kite collection is an original Steiff Roloplan that came to me because of the great people at the Into the Wind kite store in Boulder, Colorado. They were called a few years ago by a man in Nebraska, who asked if they’d be interested in buying two old box kites, rescued from his attic. Whatever they thought of the offer, they politely referred the man to me.

As the premier aeronautics and astronautics repository in the world, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., predictably has a wonderful kite collection. Tom Crouch, chairman of the Department of Aeronautics, surveyed and reported on the holding after assuming his new job a few years ago.

Marian Frelicher: "Would you tell us something of your early years?"

Sumatra’s jungle foliage stayed with us right up to the village of Mutun’s narrow, white sand beach.

Joseph Louis LeCornu was born in Caen, Normandy, on March 13, 1864, the seventh of eight children. His father was a lacemaker by trade. Following the father’s death in 1878 when LeCornu was 14, he and his seven siblings were raised by their mother. An early achiever, LeCornu received a prize in philosophy from his lycee in Caen at age 9 and four years later was included in a delegation from his school sent to Paris to attend the burial of writer Victor Hugo. The following year he was admitted to L’Ecole Centrales des Arts and Manufactures.