On another occasion, two of Mr. Eddy’s kites flying in tandem broke away, and started out to sea, the dangling line passing over a moored coal barge on which a man was working.  Feeling something tickle his neck, the man put up his hand quickly and touched the kite-cord.  Greatly surprised, he seized the cord and made it fast; and he was not at all disposed to give up the kites when Mr. Eddy claimed them.  There is no property, indeed, so hard to prove and recover as a runaway kite.  For one thing, there is absolutely no telling how far a runaway kite will sail before landing.  Mr. Eddy estimates that when the main line breaks, a kite well up in a twenty-five mile breeze will travel, before alighting, a distance equal to twelve times its height from the ground.  This means that a kite straight over the Battery, in New York City, and a mile in the air, driven by a stiff south wind, might land in Yonkers if the cord broke.  There is, by the way, an old-time ordinance on the statute book, prohibiting the flying of kites in any part of New York City below Fourteenth Street.  This, however, did not prevent Mr. Eddy from taking recently a series of unique photographs (some of them are reproduced in this article), by means of a tandem of kites sent up from a high building near the City Hall Park.  The only complication that resulted was a fierce contention among a crowd of idlers and gamins over the possession of one of the kites, which came down accidentally and lodged in one of the Park trees.

[Illustration:  NEW YORK, EAST RIVER, BROOKLYN, AND NEW YORK BAY, FROM A KITE.

From a photograph taken from a kite by Mr. W.A.  Eddy.]

THE LIFTING POWER OF KITES.

A tandem of six or eight six-foot kites exerts a pull of thirty pounds or more on the main line; but it must not be assumed that such a tandem would lift and carry through the air a weight of thirty pounds.  The weight of thirty pounds would be carried a short distance; but as the weight moved off, there would be a sudden lessening of the resistance on the line, and so of the wind pressure against the kites, which would soon cause them to sink.  A tandem of strong kites in a good breeze might be made to operate a sort of jumping apparatus which, after being carried a short distance, would anchor itself to the ground until the renewed strength of the kites lifted it up again for another jump.  But all kite experts are agreed that a kite’s power for lifting loads clear of the ground must be enormously increased according as the distance to which the load is to be lifted is increased.  It would be possible, for example, to build a tandem of kites strong enough to lift a man clear of the ground, supposing him to be swung in a basket from the main line.  This, indeed, has been actually accomplished.  September 18, 1895, in England, Captain Baden-Powell was lifted to a height of one hundred feet on a kite-string supported by five large hexagon kites.  But Mr. Eddy calculates that to lift a man of the same weight (one hundred and fifty pounds) to a height of fifteen hundred feet, with a wind blowing at the same rate (twenty miles an hour), would require seven kites with upright and cross-sticks not less than sixty-four feet each in length.