Chinese kite
Withholding judgment on whether Chinese kites are an unambiguously unique technological category, they are sometimes treated independently in our literature.
It must not be imagined that the Chinese kite is anything like the flimsy, cross-shaped structure of wood covered with paper of a diamond-shaped surface that we used to fly in our boyhood days. This toy is a poor degenerate orphan put to blush in comparison with the ingenious creations of the Chinese, which are wonders of both technique and art. The ordinary Chinese kites are made of a light, elastic framework of bamboo over which is spread a sheet of strong paper painted in brilliant hues with human or animal figures.[1]
China is frequently cited as the original home of kites and of human flight in general. While it might be difficult in the case of early kites to distinguish between fact and legend, we can say that Chinese inventors were building and flying kites in the pre-aviation period, and that their designs were more or less known to Western inventors.
Octave Chanute wrote in Progress in Flying Machines (1894):[2]
The various forms of the Chinese kites are even more numerous than those of the Japanese, and most of the tailless kind are said to depend upon the same principle of flexibility for their equilibrium. It would not at all be surprising to find, should a stable aeroplane be hereafter produced, that it has its prototype in a Chinese kite; but the writer has discovered very little information in print upon the subject; the following article, translated from La Nature by the Scientific American and published in its issue of March 24th 1888, being perhaps the best available:
He then quotes from the Scientific American translation (March 24, 1888, p. 185) of Gaston Tissandier's article in La Nature.[3]
Chanute comments on the dragon kite:
This last device resembles in arrangement the multiple disk kites for life saving of the Rev. Mr. Cordner, already described, and suggests that the superposition of kites affords a good field for experiment, There is a limit in size beyond which the increasing leverage will so add to the required strength and weight of the frame as to make a kite unduly heavy as well as unwieldy, and superposition naturally suggests itself for experiments intended to test the efficacy and equilibrium of kite aeroplanes.[4]
and on the bird kite:
The attention of experimenters is specially called to the form of kite shown in fig. 70. It resembles in shape and attitude those of the soaring birds, which, as already remarked, perform their manoeuvres with peculiarly curved and warped surfaces, and it will be seen hereafter that the nearest success in compassing gliding flight hitherto obtained--that of M. Lilienthal--has been achieved with just such surfaces.
Berthold Laufer on the dragon kite:
The most complicated and ingenious of these flying-machines is the centipede kite. One which I obtained at Peking in 1901 for the American Museum of Natural history in New York (together with a collection of some seventy kites, all of different types) measures forty feet in length, and is made to fold up accordion-like. [...] The body consists of a series of some twenty-five disks, about a foot in diameter, formed of a bamboo frame and covered with paper. [...] The disks are connected with one another by two cords which keep them equidistant, and are fastened to a transverse bamboo rod from which sticks run crosswise to the centre of the disks. [...]
O. Chanute justly calls attention to the fact that this device resembles in arrangement the multiple disk kites suggested and designed for life-saving in shipwrecks by E. J. Cordner, an Irish Catholic priest, in 1859.[5]
References
- ↑ Laufer, 1928, Prehistory of Aviation, p. 31.
- ↑ Cited in Laufer, 1928, Prehistory of Aviation, p. 35, and Lawrence Lesh, "A Few Sidelights on Aviation", Flying Magazine, September 1934, pp. 165–166, 186.
- ↑ Tissandier, 1888, Cerfs-volants chinois
- ↑ Chanute, 1894, Progress in Flying Machines, Aeroplanes 12.
- ↑ Laufer, 1928, Prehistory of Aviation, p. 32.
| Enclosing categories | Kite |
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| Subcategories | |
| Keywords | Glider, bamboo |
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This wiki has 0 patents in category "Chinese kite".
Publications referring to Chinese kite
- Tissandier, 1888, Cerfs-volants chinois (Simple title: Chinese kites, Journal: La Nature)
