The History Of Kites
The History of Kites
People always ask me how I got into kites. And the honest answer is: I was born into it. My dad flew kites. My grandfather flew kites. My Aunt Cookie flew kites. When you grow up with a kite string in your hand, you start to understand something most people don't: this is one of the oldest things a human being can do. When you launch a kite into a prairie wind, you are doing something people have been doing for at least 3,000 years. That never gets old to me.
Here's the story.
It Started in Asia
The earliest kites we know of flew in China around 200 BC. General Han Hsin of the Han Dynasty reportedly flew one over enemy territory to measure how far his troops needed to dig a tunnel. Silk and bamboo. Simple materials, brilliant application.
But China wasn't the only place. In Malaysia, Indonesia, and across the South Pacific, people were building kites independently from large leaves and reeds and using them to fish. The kite would carry the bait out over the water without casting a shadow to spook what was below. In New Zealand, the Maori crafted kites called manu tukutuku for divination and communication with the spiritual world. Different cultures, same sky, same instinct.
Kites Reach the West
Marco Polo wrote about seeing Chinese merchants use man-lifting kites to predict whether a sea voyage would go well. By the 1500s and 1600s, sailors coming home from Japan and Malaysia were bringing kites to Europe. For a long time, Europeans mostly saw them as curiosities. Children's toys. They had no idea what they were looking at.
When Science Got Involved
That changed fast. In 1749, Scottish researchers Alexander Wilson and Thomas Melville sent thermometers aloft on kites to measure temperature at altitude. The first weather balloons, basically. Then in 1752, Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm with a key on the line and proved that lightning is electricity. You've heard that story. Most people have. But think about what it took to stand in a field in a storm and do that. That's curiosity without a safety net.
Through the 1800s, kites were lifting cameras for aerial photography and even pulling carriages. In 1822, a British schoolmaster named George Pocock built a carriage pulled by two massive arch-top kites that could hit 20 miles per hour. Because it had no horses, it was exempt from road tolls. I appreciate that kind of creative problem-solving.
Canada's Part in All of This
This is where it gets personal for me.
The Kite That Built a Bridge (1848)
In 1848, an engineer named Charles Ellet Jr. needed to get a wire across the Niagara Gorge. Eight hundred feet wide, two hundred feet deep. No bridge, no crossing. His solution was a kite-flying contest. A 16-year-old boy named Homan Walsh crossed to the Canadian side of the gorge to catch the better winds. Ice stranded him there for eight days after his first attempt failed. He came back, flew his kite, "The Union," across the gorge, and that single string was used to pull a cord, then a rope, then the wire cable that became the world's first international suspension bridge. A bridge that later carried people north on the Underground Railroad. Started with a kite and a kid who didn't quit.
Alexander Graham Bell in Baddeck (1890s to 1909)
I have to tell you this one differently because in 2007, I was there.
Baddeck, Nova Scotia. That summer was the 100th anniversary of the Cygnet, Alexander Graham Bell's 3,393-cell tetrahedral kite that lifted a man 168 feet into the air over Baddeck Bay. Bell had spent his summers at his estate there conducting over 1,200 documented kite experiments. He was obsessed with the tetrahedral cell, a three-dimensional triangle that was light and incredibly strong, and he built massive kites from thousands of them covered in maroon silk.
I stood where Alexander Graham Bell stood. I don't have words for what that felt like.
His kite research led directly to the Silver Dart, which made the first controlled powered flight in Canada on February 23, 1909. Aviation in this country started with a kite.
The Canadian Father of the Parafoil (1964)
If you've ever flown a foil kite, gone kiteboarding, or watched a paraglider, you owe that to a man from Quebec. Domina Cleophas Jalbert was born in 1904 and invented the ram-air parafoil in 1964. His design used flexible fabric cells that inflated with the wind to create an aerodynamic wing with no solid spars at all. No frame. Just air and fabric working together. Every modern traction kite, every paraglider in the sky today, traces back to that one idea from a Canadian.
The Modern Era
After World War II, where kites had been used for anti-aircraft gunnery training and sea rescue signaling, they came back to us. In 1972, Peter Powell introduced the dual-line stunt kite, and suddenly the whole game changed. You weren't just holding a string anymore. You were flying something. Loops, dives, precision ballet in the sky.
The 1980s and 90s brought ripstop nylon, carbon fibre, and fibreglass. Quad-line kites that could hover and reverse. Peter Lynn of New Zealand gave the world the kite buggy and launched an entire family of traction sports. Today, kitesurfing is an Olympic event. Sharon and I have competed in kite fighting in North America, where you use friction to cut the other person's line and the last kite in the sky gets the bragging rights.
It's a long road from bamboo and silk over ancient China to where we are now. But the thread runs straight through.
The next time you feel the wind take your kite, you're holding 3,000 years of human curiosity in your hands. Treat it well.
Fly a kite. Just for the health of it.
Bud Taylor | The Kite Guys
References and Further Reading
- History of Kites — American Kitefliers Association
- Kites and manu tukutuku — Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand
- Homan Walsh and His Kite — Niagara Falls National Heritage Area
- How A.G. Bell Spent His Summers Flying Kites in Nova Scotia — ARTpublika Magazine
- A.E.A. Silver Dart — Canada Aviation and Space Museum
- The Life and Times of Domina Cleophas Jalbert — Ingenium Canada