No Kite-Eating Trees Allowed at Smithsonian Flying Festival

Once a year, the sky over the Washington Monument turns into a brilliant display of color as kite lovers of all ages rally to the Smithsonian Institution’s Kite Festival. “It’s just like stained-glass windows painting the sky,” said festival founder and Smithsonian historian emeritus Paul E. Garber in an interview before his death last year at age 93.

Garber had a lifelong fascination with aviation that began when he received his first kite at the age of 5. As a young boy, he organized kite and model airplane clubs among his classmates. He made and flew a biplane hang glider when he was a teen-ager.

He subsequently dedicated the rest of his life to collecting and preserving the nation’s aviation heritage and was the first curator of the Smithsonian’s National Air Museum (now the National Air and Space Museum) when it was established in 1946.

“Garber conceived the idea for the festival because he wanted to share his enthusiasm for kites with others,” said Margo Brown, Garber’s biographer and coordinator of the kite festival, which is co-sponsored by the Smithsonian Associates and the museum. The first Smithsonian Kite Festival took place 27 years ago.

“Garber also wanted the Smithsonian to sponsor an activity that would include all people, and kite flying is cross-generational and has no economic barriers,” Brown said. “The air is free, after all.”

Kites have been flown for more than 2,000 years. One legend holds that the kite was invented in China when a gust of wind blew off a farmer’s hat. The hat was tethered, so the farmer not only got his hat back but he also got a great idea. Little did he know that his idea would grow sky high: Kites, in their many variations, have since been used for military purposes, scientific experiments, aeronautical advances and just plain fun.

The earliest recorded kite flight was around 200 BC, when a Chinese general launched a kite over an enemy’s palace to determine the distance between the palace and the wall in order to calculate how long to make an invasion tunnel.

For the next 1,000 years or so, kite flying remained a military activity, used for aerial observation, signaling and, eventually, dropping propaganda flyers.

Kites were used frequently in battle during the Middle Ages and earlier, said Peter Jakab, a curator in the aeronautics department of the National Air and Space Museum. “Kites were flown to signal friendly troops and also to frighten the enemy,” he said.

As early as AD 105, the Romans used kites known as Dracos--fierce animal-head figures attached to wind tubes--to intimidate their enemies and to provide archers with a weather vane. Dracos with wings were occasionally depicted on medieval illustrations and drawings, usually in the form of animals writhing above horsemen.

According to Chinese folklore, in AD 800 a surrounded general ordered soldiers to make kites with “hummers”--taunt strings or strips of bamboo--in a last-ditch effort to escape. His army flew the kites in the middle of the night; as the wind blew across the strings, it made such a ghostly howl that the terrified enemy soldiers fled.

Kites historically have also been used in scientific investigations. In 1749, Scottish scientist Alexander Wilson attached several kites to the same line and lifted a thermometer into the air to determine the temperature at different altitudes. This experiment was the first reported flight of a train of kites.

Three years later, the most famous kite in American folklore took flight, when Philadelphia inventor Benjamin Franklin stretched his silk handkerchief between two sticks and sailed it during a lightning storm. This experiment eventually led to the practical application of electricity.

In the 1820s, George Pocock, a creative English schoolteacher, tested and patented his design for a new method of transportation that might have put horse breeders and stable hands out of business--the kite-drawn carriage. Pocock’s lightweight char-volant , capable of attaining speeds of up to 20 m.p.h. and carrying as many as five passengers, never caught on, probably because drivers had little control over steering or stopping the carriage.

But Pocock’s kite endeavors did not end there. In 1825, he put his daughter in an armchair, strapped it to a kite line and lifted her 300 feet in the air. Although Marco Polo returned from the Orient with tales of man-lifting kites, Pocock’s experiment was the first instance in the Western world of a person carried aloft by a kite.

“Man-lifting kites were used also in wartime, briefly and sporadically, to see beyond enemy lines,” Jakab said.

The late 19th Century proved to be a time of great innovation in kite design. New York journalist William A. Eddy, who had been flying trains of kites and found the tails cumbersome, redesigned the typical kite so that its frame produced a keel effect, which gave it stability, eliminating the need for a tail. The Smithsonian has an original Eddy kite in its collection.

Australian scientist Lawrence Hargrave invented a kite in 1893 that had greater stability and lifting power than previous kites. The cellular or box kite was eagerly adopted by meteorologists, and was used by the U.S. Weather Bureau until the mid-1920s to test temperatures at different altitudes.

The box kite also played a vital role in the early development of aircraft structures, Jakab said. “The classic biplane form of many early airplanes in part was derived from Hargrave’s box kite.”

The Wright brothers also used a kite as an effective research tool in their development of the first powered airplane, Jakab said. In 1899, the Wrights made a 5-foot kite model of a glider to test their theories of control by wing-warping. “They used the kite to test the control mechanism they planned to use on a full-size glider,” Jakab said.

The glider itself, built a year later, was essentially a full-size biplane kite. The Wrights flew it as a tethered glider, operating it either from the ground or, when there was enough wind to allow manned flights, with a pilot aboard. “The results of the tests further refined their aircraft,” Jakab said.

The inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, was also interested in manned flight and developed triangular and tetrahedral (four-sided) box kites. The most important characteristic of his designs was that the modules could be infinitely combined to produce greater lifting power. The Smithsonian has a Bell tetrahedral kite in its collection.

With the invention of powered flight, the use of kites to carry meteorological instruments into the atmosphere dramatically waned. Airplanes could be used to carry instruments for high-altitude measurements, and kite lines posed a small danger to airplane flight. The last U.S. Weather Bureau kite station closed in 1933 at Ellendale, N.D.

“The outbreak of World War II brought a resurgence of military interest in kites,” the Smithsonian’s Margo Brown said. Ironically, the same trait that forced kites out of the weather business made them useful to the U.S. Navy. Ship convoys flew box kites on lines thousands of feet long, with wires and cables suspended from them to entangle intruding enemy aircraft.

Garber invented a kite that had another military application. He originated ship-to-air gunnery target kites that had enemy aircraft silhouettes stenciled on them. “He also designed a system using kites to carry canisters of top-secret information from the ship to an airplane and then to headquarters on land,” Brown said.

Kites nowadays may not be the great scientific tools they once were, but they are, of course, still used for recreational purposes. From back-yard flying to carnivals and festivals around the world, “kites bring out the kid in everyone,” Brown said. “And besides, they’re a great way to meet people.”

“Most folks love to watch kites in action,” she said, which explains the growing attendance at the Smithsonian Kite Festival, both by participants and spectators--up to 5,000 people from all over the world. This year’s festival is scheduled for March 28.

Brown, past president and life member of the American Kitefliers Assn., finds kite flying relaxing and challenging. “Putting a ‘heavier-than-air’ object in the air and keeping it stable is exhilarating,” she said.

And it’s really quite beautiful, she added. “Life is full of simple pleasures, and I find kite flying poetic. The kites dance high in the sky, the strings sing while they fly. They truly have a life of their own!”