HOW DID IT WORK?

In the top right corner of the image you can see a lead kite in the distance (I mistook it for photographic damage before Skinner pointed it out to me.) Once the kite team lifted the lead into the air and tested wind conditions, the stringer kites were flown one by one until there was enough lift to raise the "pilot" from the ground.

The pilot's safety mechanism was his team on the ground. The crew operated a winch, reeling him closer or letting him fly further away depending on conditions. If the pilot was too heavy or carrying equipment, more kites could be added to the string to increase power. "But the bigger issue is always stability," Skinner says. "It's easy to make them fly; it's not always easy to keep them stable in all wind conditions. There was a real element of danger." If the kite line became too vertical, it could careen out of control.

These dangerous shortcomings were realized by Perkins himself, when, during a 1912 test flight at 200 feet, he lost control of the kite. An article in a edition of Electrician and Mechanic from that year recounts how he survived, explaining "the many kites by which he was suspended... parachuted and prevented him from dashing to death on the earth."

But there were other -- perhaps more stable -- man-lifting kite designs abroad.

Samuel Franklin Cody was an American expatriate in Britain who, after a successful career in the theater business, became interested in aviation. He was the first man in Great Britian to pilot a motorized plane, and he also invented this winged box-kite system (resembles a prototype batplane, no?), known as Cody kite system, seen in the images below.

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This system could be flown up to 3,000 feet in the air. Compared to the Perkins system, it was more stable because it only relied on one rigging, rather than a string of kites.

But the practical uses on the battlefield were always limited. The kite operator was still something of a target, although the light waving of the kites would provide a bit of a challenge for gunmen. After the war, the airplane rendered man-lifting kites obsolete, at least for military purposes. Done with lifting people, they were used for aerial photography. Traces of the man-carrying kite concept can be seen in modern paragliders pulled by boats, and, of course, in experiments by weekend hobbyists.

The early days of aviation inspired all sorts of gonzo experiments in aviation. Looking back, steam engine-powered helicopters, bat-wing glider suits and, even a few decades later, merry-go-round plane launchers, seem like dead-ends of engineering. But perhaps such experimentation should be expected -- people are, after all, inclined to dream of ways to lift us very earth-bound humans into the sky.





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