EXPLORATION OF THE AIR WITH KITES.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, Issue 7383, 8 February 1902, Page 4 (Supplement)

EXPLORATION OF THE AIR WITH KITES.

Mr A. Lawrence Rotch has for some years past devoted his attention to the use of kites to obtain meteorological observations at the Blue Hill Observatory Mass., U.S.A., and he has successfully carried on the work of exploring the air there to a height of three miles by several hundred kite flights, executed in varied weather conditions, whenever the velocity of the wjnd exceeded 12 miles an hour. Certain types of weather, however, such as anti-cyclones, accompanied b3' light winds, can rarely be studied. Mr Roteh now proposes the employment of kites carrying meteographs on steamships, especially en vessels cruising in tropical oceans. He has himself demonstrated the practicability of this scheme, as on 22nQ August last he raised a kite to an elevation of half a mile from a towboat in Massachusetts Bay, when thu velocity of the wind at sea-level varied between 6 and 10 miles an hour. At the end of the same month, when crossing the North Atlantic from Boston to Liverpool on the steamship Commonwealth, he was able to raisekites carrying a meteorograph to an altitude of 1800 feet on five days out of the eight. The chief feature of these records was the rapid change of temperature with height. — "Engineering."

Sydney Smith speaks of a man so dry that if you were to bore holes in him with a gimlet sawdust would come out.