THE HIGHEST FLIGHT EVER MADE BY A KITE.

The modern system of flying kites tandem was devised by Mr. Eddy in 1890, although it was hit upon two years later independently by Dr. Alexander B. Johnson, the distinguished surgeon of the Roosevelt Hospital in New York.  The tandem system makes it possible to send kites to far greater altitudes than had ever been previously attained.  And here the best record is undoubtedly held by one of Mr. Eddy’s tandems, sent aloft at Bayonne, on November 7, 1893.  Mr. Eddy began to send up the kites at 7:30 A.M.; but, being hampered by light breezes from the east, found he was kept busy until half-past three in the afternoon in getting nine kites aloft.  He had paid out nearly two miles of cord, when the top kite, a little two-footer, stood straight over the spar buoy in Newark Bay.  The lowest kite, a six-footer, was hovering some distance inland from the shore, on a line from the shore to Mr. Eddy’s house (where the end of the line was anchored) measuring fifty-five hundred feet by the surveyor’s map.  Taking two observations from the two ends of this base line, Mr. Eddy’s kite-quadrant showed angles of thirty-five and sixty-six degrees; and these data, by simple methods of triangulation, were sufficient to determine the altitude of the kite, which was found to be five thousand five hundred and ninety-five feet—­or something over one mile.  The kites were seen by hundreds of persons during the fifteen hours that they remained up, the experiment coming to an abrupt end at ten o’clock that night by the blowing away of the two upper kites in the increasing wind.  The escaped kites disappeared in Newark Bay, along with three thousand feet of the line.

[Illustration:  KITE-DRAWN BUOY.

Invented by Prof.  J. Woodbridge Davis.  This buoy lacks the steering appliances of the one shown below, and travels simply in a line with the kite that draws it.]

Much interest attaches from a scientific point of view to experiments designed to test how great an altitude may be reached by kites; and for a year past Mr. Eddy has been working in this direction for the Smithsonian Institution, the hope being that he will ultimately succeed in sending kites two miles above the earth’s surface.  Professor Langley has been following these experiments with great interest, and has furnished Mr. Eddy with a special quality of silk cord which, it is believed, will give better results in meteorological observation than the ordinary hempen twine or rope.  The great difficulty that Mr. Eddy finds in the way of making his kites reach great altitudes, is the pull on the cord, which increases greatly as the kites rise higher.  It is probable that a tandem of fifteen or twenty big kites, reaching to a mile above the earth’s surface, would exert a pull of one hundred pounds; while at a height of two miles they might, Mr. Eddy thinks, exert a pull of three hundred and fifty pounds; and at a height