224 USE OF KITES IN METEOROLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS. 



America can claim only the later and most remarkable development of 

 this means of exploring the air. About 18H7 there existed in Phila- 

 delphia an organization called the Franklin Kite Club, that flew kites 

 for recreation. Espy, the eminent meteorologist, was a member, and 

 he states '"that on those days when columnar clouds form rapidly and 

 numerously the kite was frequently carried upward nearly perpen- 

 dicularly l)y columns of ascending air," a phenomenon which is often 

 observed to-day. Espy calculated the height at which clouds should 

 form l)y the cooling of the air to its dew point, and then emploj^ed 

 kites to verify his calculations of the heights of the clouds. Both these 

 methods are utilized in the measurements of cloud heights at Blue Hill. 



Kites were employed to get temperatures a hundred feet or more 

 above the Arctic Ocean earlv in the present century, and in 1847 Mr. 

 W. R. Birt, at the Kew Observatory in P^ngland, flew a kite for the 

 purpose of measuring temperature, humidity, wind velocity, etc. 

 His kite, of hexagonal shape, required three strings attached to the 

 ground to keep it steady, and Avhile he proposed to hoist the instru- 

 ments up to the kite by means of a pulley, it does not appear that this 

 was done or that any observations were obtained. In 1882 Mr. Doug- 

 las Archibald in England revived the use of kites for meteorological 

 observations and outlined a comprehensive scheme of exploring the 

 air with kites, which included almost all that has been done since. His 

 actual work, performed during the next three years, was limited to 

 ascertaining the increase of wind velocity with height up to 1,200 feet, 

 and to do this he attached registering anemometers at four difl'erent 

 points on the kite wire, but since the total wind movements only were 

 registered from the time the anemometers left the ground until they 

 returned, it was impossible to obtain simultaneous records near the 

 ground and at the kite, as is done to-day. Mr. Archibald in 1887 took 

 the flrst photograph from a kite, a method which MM. Batut and 

 Wenz developed in France, and Messrs. Eddy and Woglom in the 

 United States. 



The subsequent progress of kite flying for meteorological purposes 

 was in this country, and it may ])e chronologically stated as follows: 

 In 1885 Mr. Alexander McAdie (now of the United States Weather 

 Bureau) repeated Franklin's kite experiment on Blue Hill, with the 

 addition of an electrometer; in 1891 and 1892 he measured sinuiltane- 

 ously the electric potential at the base of Blue Hill, on the hill, and 

 with kites as collectors several hundred feet above the hilltop, about 

 the same time that Dr. Weber, in Breslau, Germany, was making a 

 more extensive use of kites for the same purpose. It was no doubt 

 William A. Eddy, of Bayonne, N. J., who turned the attention of 

 American scientific men to kite flying, and created the widespread 

 interest in kites which exists to-day. About 1890, Mr. Pwddy lifted 

 thermometers with an ordinary kite, })ut soon afterwards devised a 



