Charles Kaufmann, age 9, of Wilmington, Del., for his question:
WHO INVENTED THE KITE?
We don't know exactly who invented the kite. The Chinese say that one of their generals, Han Sin, invented the kite in 206 B.C. for use in war. Many historians, however, think it was invented between 400 and 300 B.C. by Archytas of the Greek city of Tarentum.
So people have been flying kites for thousands of years.
Kites were first used for scientific purposes three years before Banjamin Franklin made his famous kite flying experiment in 1752. In 1749 in Scotland, two scientists named Alexander Wilson and Thomas Melvill, fastened thermometers to kites to record the temperature of clouds.
Wilson and Melville used kites in series, or train. They sent up the first kite, carrying the thermometer, until it could lift no more string. Then they attached the bottom end of that string to another kite which rose to its limit and allowed the upper kite to rise still higher. More kites were added until the string could hold no more.
As a slow burning fuse burned through, the thermometer dropped to the ground, trailing a white ribbon which made it visible.
In 1883, a scientist named Douglas Archibald in England attached a wind meter, called an anemometer, to the line of a kite and measured wind velocity 1,200 feet up in the air.
Tailless kites, developed by the people of Siam and other Far Eastern countries many years ago, can fly higher and at steeper angles than other kites. The box kite, called the Hargrave kite because it was invented in 1892 by Lawrence Hargrave of Australia, played an important part in early weather forecasting.
During the early 1900s, the Hargrave kite was used by the United States Weather Bureau, now the National Weather Service. Kites were made of spruce wood and covered with cloth. Three or more were flown in a train strung along a line of piano wire. The highest kite recorded barometric pressure, temperature, wind velocity and humidity.
Do you know that a kite was used for starting the building of the suspension bridge at Niagara Falls? Once a light line was carried across the gorge by a kite, a heavier line was attached to it and drawn across.
Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, made a large and improved Hargrave kite which carried a U.S. Army lieutenant named Thomas Selfridge to a height of 175 feet. Bell and a group of engineers went on to design a number of aircraft, several of which made successful powered flights between 1907 and 1909.
American inventor William Eddy used kites to take aerial photos during the Spanish American War.
When Guglielmo Marconi first successfully sent a radio signal across the Atlantic Ocean in 1901, he used a kite to elevate the antenna at the receiving station in Newfoundland.
In China, the ninth day of the ninth month September 9 is set aside as Kites' Day. On that day, thousands of kites shaped like dragons, fishes, birds and butterflies, float over cities and towns throughout the country. Each kite flown is supposed to float away evils which might attack its owner.