By Dan Beard
Fig.
38a
In a New York newspaper in October, 1894, there appeared an article describing Professor Clayton's experiment, and showing how he sent up a series of kites, all attached by short lines to one kite string. The kites were tailless, bowed, diamond-shaped; kites which the writer called "Malay kites." The only Malay kites that the author of this book ever saw were at the World's Fair at Chicago, and in the collection of Mr. Chase, the artist.
These kites differed from the Holland kites and the Eddy kites in the fact that they possessed two cross sticks, one straight one and one a bow over the, straight stick. The Malay kite is said to fly without a tail, like most of its Oriental brothers.
In the last edition of the "American Boy's Handy Book" the diamond-bowed tailless kite is described, and there called a Holland kite by the gentleman who sent in the description to the author in 1883, long before it burst into popularity under the name of the Malay kite.
Part of the Celebration.
During the Columbian parade in New York City these kites were used to help celebrate. As on all occasions of the kind where large bodies parade, there "came a long wait, the tedium being only occasionally relieved by the frantic efforts of the policemen to drive the crowd back by leaning against the foremost and pushing desperately, but generally unavailingly.
"Then there came another break in the monotony. Gilbert T. Woglom, the well-known experimenter with airplanes actually tailless kites-sent up six gaudily colored fliers from the Judson Memorial Tower, south of the arch. When they were so high that they were almost invisible a large American flag was attached to the kite line and raised far into the air, until it was over a thousand feet above the earth. There it fluttered grandly, outlined sharply against the unclouded beauty of the Venetian sky that glorified the city's holiday, until the celebration was ended."
This was an interesting sight, but not new, as Captain Jack Walker, of the Nereus Club, used to do the same thing during the Fourth of July Regattas of the club on Flushing Bay. The captain's kite line was attached to the top of the flag-pole on the club-house. An illustrated account of this experiment appeared in the St. Nicholas Magazine several years ago.
How to Make the Tailless Kite.
Mr. Eddy had one convex kite in his collection at Blue Hill last summer, which he called the Beard Kite. Mr. Beard has given to kite-fliers (in The American Boy's Handy Book) the earliest working drawings of a tailless kite which the Editor has yet found. -Aeronautical Annual, 1896.
The vital difference between this and the old-fashioned diamond kite consists in using instead of the cross stick, a bow, as may be seen in the accompanying diagram. The sketch also shows bow the belly-band is attached and its proportion, the latter being taken from a kite made in Rochester, which flew very satisfactorily. The center stick or spine is four feet long, the cross stick, of ash, or hickory, is three feet long.
Mr. Woglom began his experiments with this sort of a kit, in 1894, and he now keeps a regular "stable" of kites of all sizes. But he does not call them kites, he calls them airplanes, and he has sent his airplanes 5,590 feet into the sky--that is, the top kite was three hundred and ten feet more than a mile above the earth.
