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A man-lifting kite is a kite designed to lift a person from the ground. Historically, man-lifting kites have been used chiefly for reconnaissance and entertainment. Interest in their development declined with the advent of powered-flight at the beginning of the 20th century. more...

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Early history

The first records of man-lifting kites come from China. Their use is mentioned in Sun Tzu's The Art of War as a means of viewing the movements of enemy troops. In a story about the Japanese thief Ishikawa Goemon (1558-1594), he used a man-lifting kite to allow him to steal the golden scales from a pair of ornamental fish images which were mounted on the top of Nagoya Castle. His men manoeuvered him into the air on a trapeze attached to the tail of a giant kite. He flew to the rooftop where he stole the scales, and was then lowered and escaped. In the 17th century, Japanese architect Kawamura Zuiken used kites to lift his workmen during construction. George Pocock, who invented a kite-drawn buggy in 1822, had previously used kites as a method of lifting men to inaccessible cliff tops, but it was not until around the 1880s that there was serious interest in developing man-lifting kites.

Modern development

The first well-documented record of a man lifted by kite was at Pirbight Camp in 1894. In the early 1890s, Captain B.F.S Baden-Powell, brother of the founder of the scouting movement, had designed the "Levitor" kite, a hexagonal-shaped kite intended to be used by the army in order to lift a man for aerial observation or for lifting large loads such as a wireless antenna. On June 27, 1894 he used one of the kites to lift a man 50 feet (15.25 m) off the ground. By the end of that year he was regularly using the kite to lift men above 100 ft (30.5 m). Baden-Powell's kites were sent to South Africa for use in the Boer War, but by the time they arrived the fighting was over, so they were never put into use.

Lawrence Hargrave invented his box kite in 1885, and on 12 November 1894, lifted himself from the beach in Stanwell Park, New South Wales using a four box kite rig, attached to the ground by piano wire. Using this rig he lifted himself 16 feet (4.9 m) above the ground, despite the combined weight of his body and the rig weighing 208 lb (94.5 kg).

Samuel Cody invented a kite known as the Bat, that he proposed be used for observation of the enemy during war. After a stunt in which he crossed the English Channel in a boat drawn by a kite, he attracted enough interest from the War Office for them to allow him to conduct trials between 1904 and 1905. He lifted a passenger to a new record height of 2,600 ft (792 m) on the end of a 4,000 ft (1,219 m) cable. The War Office officially adopted Cody's design in 1906, and the war kites were used for observation until they were replaced by aircraft. Cody also made flights in an untethered kite powered by a 12-horsepower engine.

Read more at Wikipedia.org