Welcome to DrachenKite.com. Learn how we took to the skies HERE.
I did an Internet search for Clawson Machine Co. – don’t ask why, you’ll see that I had my reasons – and found a number of interesting patents from the late 1800s: a coin-controlled, musical weighing machine (US381338, 1888), a coin-controlled air-pump-operating mechanism (US619279, 1899), and the one that has appeared to keep the company in business, the “machine for shaving ice” (US387861, 1888). Established in 1883, Clawson Machine Co.
I don’t know how this understated paperback found its way to my bookshelf. I’ve walked into some great bookstores in every part of the country, including Powell’s in Portland, Tattered Cover in Denver, and Ken Sander’s Rare Books in Salt Lake City, to name a few. My memory is fuzzy, but More Sky might have been a Ken Sanders purchase, and I’m surprised and impressed every time I take it off the shelf and leaf through its pages.
Introduction by Scott Skinner
In man’s search for usable energy, the journey started with the first spark that led to harnessing fire, and continues toward the hope of nuclear fusion power in the future. Here I’d like to draw from that history and consider how kites may be on the verge of becoming a small part of that story.
Can you tell us how long you’ve been involved in kite flying and about your life in England before kites?
My attraction to wind and flight began early in childhood. Like many of us, I recall making and flying brown paper diamond kites with my father, but the pastime did not grab me and I put it aside, as in my early teens I was more interested in crystal sets and short wave radios. I left school at 14 without any qualifications. I was diagnosed later in life as having dyslexia.
On September 23rd, 2014, four Australian kite enthusiasts flew a kite to a claimed 16,038 feet above the launch point at an airfield on a 50,000-acre sheep farm called Cable Downs, in Western NSW, Australia. This was the venue for all our record attempts over the last ten years. It is a site remote from our homes in Sydney, 750 kilometers (466 miles) to the east of this dry and dusty place.
In its final manifestation last year, the annual Junction, Texas, kite weekend produced yet another surprise-a kite wizard from one of the world's more obscure countries, Afghanistan.
Basir Beria, born in 1961 in the capital, Kabul, and now resident as a refugee in Tarzana, California, after doing a prison term as a teenager for demonstrating anti-Russian sentiment in his home country, showed off the kite tradition of Afghanistan to a fascinated audience.
