Dr. Mike Jensen demonstrated the continuing utility of the kite for scientific studies on a two-month trip to the North Pole last summer. Traveling with a group of scientists aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden, Jensen, 32, a research associate with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colorado, put up a Stan Swanson Parafoil preparatory to attaching a package of instruments to the line. The instruments measured temperature, air pressure, humidity, and wind direction and velocity as the kite rose some two kilometers into the atmosphere.

Eleven years after opening its doors to the public, the World Kite Museum in Long Beach, Washington, is alive and flourishing. It’s also ambitious. With more than 90 percent of its collection of 1,400 kites in storage because of severely limited exhibition space, the institution is seeking to expand in a major way.

Samuel F. Cody’s kites and other artifacts of Farnborough England’s 100-year-history as the birthplace of British aviation are expected to find an exhibition home when a huge airship hangar is rebuilt at Farnborough, west of London. Farnborough was the home of the famous old balloon factory of l905 where the British developed their wide-ranging aviation establishment prior to World War 1.

When Christophe Cheret and associate Richard Poisson, both Burgundians from France, went to Hebron in Palestine last summer to teach kitemaking and flying to Arab children, they found that kiting was one of the few play activities there. The reasons have to do with the special circumstances of life in one of the most highly disputed cities in the world. Hebron has 500 Jewish settlers living, for religious reasons, in the midst of 120,000 Moslem Palestinians. Only Israeli army protection permits this to continue.

The giant kites of Guatemala——barriletes gigantes, as they are called in Spanish—are amazing when viewed either in flight or up close. Up to 40 feet across, the circular kites are flown on the Day of the Dead—the lst of November—in just two Mayan Indian villages near the capital, Guatemala City. Why there and nowhere else, no one is able to say, since credible historical documentation is in short supply, although this ritual kite flying is clearly a very old tradition.

After the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of l876, so many countries gave the contents of their national exhibits to the Smithsonian Institution, as the museum arm of the United States Government, that the Smithsonian was obliged to construct a building to house and display these treasures. The museum was called the Arts and Industries Building, and it can be visited today on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., sandwiched between the old Smithsonian Castle and the Hirshhorn art museum. Some of the Centennial objects remain on exhibition to this day.

I have (with a bit of help) just established an absolutely definitive new benchmark in customer abuse. This is how it happened:

The Drachen Foundation was the recipient of an exciting gift in late 2000. Fifteen Korean kites, all over 100 years old, made a circuitous journey into the Drachen collection. The kites were originally bought by or given to Georges Lefevre, French consul to the Orient in the 1890s. They passed within his family to his grandchildren, one of whom gave them to Dr. Francoise Forriere, former president of the French kite club, Le Doit Du Vent (The Wind Club?).

Jim Hannah (Tottenville, Staten Island, New York): The cover of the American Art Review for last June is worth noting. It’s a painting of the banners and carp flown traditionally by Japanese households on a day in May to honor their children. Formerly it honored only sons, now it honors daughters too.

"“Among (Mr. Wilson’s) more advanced students…was Thomas Melville, so well known by his mathematical talents, and by those fine specimens of genius which are to be found in his posthumous papers….With this young person, Mr. Wilson lived with the greatest intimacy. Of several philosophical schemes which occurred to them in their social hours, Mr. Wilson proposed one, which was to explore the temperature of the atmosphere in the higher regions, by raising a number of paper kites, one above another, upon the same line with thermometers appended to those that were to be most elevated.