Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Journals
  3. The Aeronautical Journal
  4. Volume 5
Journal Home
Refine listing

Refine listing

Access:
Publication date:

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Volume 5 - January 1901

Contents

Page 1 of 5

Other

Meeting Report

Other

Meeting Report

Research Article

  • The Chief Scientific Uses of Kites

  • A. Lawrence Rotch
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    14 September 2016, pp. 56-59

  • If we neglect the ancient legends regarding the employment of kites in China to communicate with the garrison of a besieged town and the carrying off of a golden ornament from a tower in Japan, the earliest use of kites seems to have been in 1749, when Dr. Alex. Wilson of the University of Glasgow in this way lifted thermometers into the summer clouds. Curiously enough, this first application of kites to meteorological purposes has proved to be the most important use to which they have been put since. Two years later Dr. Benjamin Franklin, in Philadelphia, by means of a kite, proved the identity of electricity and lightning, these experiments being afterwards repeated by De Romas in France, by Beccaria in Italy, and by Cavallo in England. Early in the last century, interest in the kite for scientific purposes was revived, and Admiral Back obtained with it temperatures above Hudson's Straits, while in 1847 Mr. W. R. Birt proposed to obtain in the free air above Kew Observatory, observations of the various meteorological elements.

Meeting Report

Obituary

  • In Memoriam

  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    14 September 2016, p. 23
    • Article
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • Export citation

Other

Page 1 of 5