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News and Reviews

Kite Origins and other Things

After 13 days of buggying in the desert, I'm all buggied out- well not
quite, one day to go- our last at Ivanpah dry lake in Nevada.
Last year, the final 3 days of the event rained out, but this year
conditions have been excellent; some strong wind days, a few with no
wind so we can sit around telling lies -and perfect mid range winds
today.

So many old friends are here that it doesn't seem possible that
buggying is just 15 years old.
Some of the kites and buggies we used back in the first years have
re-appeared- like relapsed churchgoers at Easter- it's that time of
the year after all- but the equipment we have now is far more user
friendly- and faster.

Legacy of a motorcross crash in '71, for the last 5 years or so I have
been unable to take side load through my upper body without suffering
for the next few weeks; I had fairly much stopped buggying. Now with
easy care kites and a seat harness, courtesy of kitesurfing
developments, I can go all day every day with never a twinge.

The buggy (latest, now called the 'NABX') and kites (Venoms) I have
now are by far the best I've ever used- and the fastest.

We've also been kitesailing with two KiteCats at Lake Mojave- on the
Colorado River. The scenery there is sparse but compelling,
reminiscent of Lake Clearwater. The winds there are also compelling-
strong and gusty, but it was an excellent show all the same,
especially the 7km run we did to the other side and back, 8m Venom
against 9m Phantom, guess which was faster.

The reason traction kites have taken so long to develop to the state
of useability we now expect is because there are so many performance
factors that all have to work at the same time. Yes, we need good
upwind performance- but we also have to have luff resistance, crash
resistance, launchability, packability, buildability, etc, and now,
power control- the list is endless. So much complexity, so many
possible ways to do things- at least we can be sure that traction
kites will continue to improve for the foreseeable future.

But traction kite design and development is comparatively easy because
the aerodynamic principles underlying steerable kites are relatively
well understood- even while being difficult to apply in practice.
Counter-intuitively, single line kite design is much more difficult- I
would say, to a first level approximation, that it is still not
possible to design a new style of single line kite from scratch with
any real hope of success- even though the first single line kite
probably flew as long as 10,000 years ago! What we can do is make a
guess, play around endlessly with minor changes- and sometimes
succeed- but not very often.

After 35 years working full time in this field, I still have no useful
understanding of why kites fly, or rather, why they don't fly- their
overwhelming preference. Sure there's one underlying principle that's
certain - that kites are pendulums- but what it is that makes any
particular design stable is a mystery to me- and everyone else too as
far as I can see.

Sure we have favourite things to try and endless half-baked theories
that work fine until they really need to, but there's no coherent
understanding.

It's no mystery as to why it's all a mystery though- the stability of
single line kites is an interplay between the discontinuous
aerodynamic effects of turbulent flow and the weight force - creating
a complex feedback dynamic which is stable for only a few of it's
zillions of possible manifestations.

The real mystery is how kites ever came to be invented at all.
The best aid to invention is to know that something is possible- and
for kites there is no equivalent natural example. Birds inform the
aeroplane, but nothing that I can think of heralds the kite.
Invention is also assisted by the existence of an incremental path-
rather like the way that evolutionary mechanisms eventually created
the eye.

For things like boomerangs, a development path exists. Over many
thousands of years it could be noticed that a bent stick throws more
easily than a straight one, even better if it's flat in the plane of
the kink. Then, if it's warped a bit- as some bent flat sticks are
sure to be, then sometimes it tends to fly in a curve- and so on to
the returning boomerang-examples of which have now been found from
more than 7000 years ago.

Similar paths can be postulated for other complex human artifacts;
spears, knapped flints, throwing sticks, bows, needles, fishhooks etc.
I can think of just one likely path to a kite. In South West Asia
(Indonesia in particular), a small percentage of one particular type
of leaf, when dry and correctly bridled, will fly as a kite. Is it
possible that there was a reason for tying fishing line to these
leaves- like that the wind acting on such a leaf thrown onto the water
would pull the line out? Maybe then, of all the possible points that
this line could be attached at, at least once, the line attachment was
within the few millimeter range that allowed the leaf to function as a
kite- and that this happened with one of the few leaves out of many
that was symmetrical enough and correctly formed to fly as a kite- and
that it did fly- and that it was recognized as a kite- and replicated!
Yes, it stretches credibility, but what other explanation can there
be?

Which gets me to the point of all this:
What if kites were only invented once, ever, and that all the kites we
now know, are derivatives from this by incremental development, spread
by migrations and technology transfer to all the corners of the world
that have a history of kite flying.

The only more likely hypothesis is that they were never invented at
all- and we know this is not true.

This 'single origin' theory rests on two premises:
One; that from a probability perspective, kites are unlikely, to say
the least, and are even more unlikely to have been discovered when it
wasn't known they're possible.

Two; that no-one familiar with the field that I've talked with so far
can come up with an obvious challenge based on known kite history.
Both of these premises can be tested further.
If 'single origin' survives this testing, then 'reverse engineering'
may well provide information about migratory and trade contacts, and
their timing that is not currently known.

Peter Lynn,
Ivanpah Dry Lake, Nevada, USA, 2 April '05

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