Just weeks before we were married, my wife, Michelle, confessed that she had never flown a kite. I was stunned. Flying kites was such a wonderful part of my own childhood that I couldn't imagine growing up without it. So I figured it was my responsibility to show her how. And this seemed an opportune time, because I wanted to demonstrate that getting married didn't mean we had to settle down into a stodgy adulthood; instead we could play together for the rest of our lives.

I thus concocted a plan. As soon as we escaped our wedding reception, I drove my new bride to the beach and unfurled my best kite, a large triangular beauty with a thousand feet of string. I picked a favorite local spot for flying kites, just in front of the cliffs at Torrey Pines State Reserve, near La Jolla, Calif., where I knew I could count on the steady onshore breeze to form an updraft. It all worked. Still in her wedding gown, Michelle stood ankle-deep in wet sand, acting giddy as a schoolgirl as she let the wind carry the kite skyward. Six years later we still talk about the magic of that moment.

ILLUSTRATION BY DANIELS & DANIELS PICAVET SUSPENSIONlevels the camera holder using 50 feet of cord, eight small pulleys, two crossed braces and three metal rings. A lark¿s head knot (inset) attaches the upper metal rings to the kite string, and two large rubber O-rings prevent vibrations on this line from shaking the camera and thus blurring the pictures.

And so began a family tradition. Just last month we took our two-year-old daughter to that same beach for her first taste of handheld aeronautics. When she begged me to send her teddy bear aloft, she reminded me of how kites have for centuries provided amateur scientists with inexpensive access to high altitudes¿recall Ben Franklin's famous investigation of lightning. That experiment has come to symbolize an ordinary person's ability to carry out scientific research. Indeed, this column sported a logo featuring Franklin's kite for many years. So it's embarrassing to admit just how little about kites has been published here, a deficiency that this month's offering should help to rectify.

Kites are wonderfully inexpensive platforms for aerial photography, something countless scientists, from archaeologists to geologists, use in their research. The view obtained from easy kite height¿say, 1,000 feet (300 meters) up¿is perfect for monitoring all kinds of environmental changes. But picture taking is not all that's possible: new lightweight data loggers and sensors of all kinds should make for an explosion of kite-based research of other types. Aspiring meteorologists could, for example, determine temperature as a function of altitude using a thermocouple and a simple pressure sensor. And lifting a hot-ball anemometer (see the November 1995 column) would reveal the speed of the wind aloft. Although I describe here only kite-borne aerial photography¿a technique called KAP by its practitioners¿I'm certainly looking for clever research projects of other kinds using kites. If you've done such work, please let me know so that I can share your inventiveness with this column's many interested readers.

What's the best kind of kite for carrying scientific equipment? That's a hard one to answer. Franklin was limited to the basic diamond-shaped flyer, but kites are now available in a wide variety of designs. For gentle zephyrs not exceeding about 10 miles (16 kilometers) per hour, the "Rokkaku" type is a good lifter. A large one covering 30 square feet sells for around $130 at your local kite store, or you can contact Into the Wind (800-541-0314). For moderate to stiff breezes (about 10 to 20 miles per hour) KAPers often prefer the "flow-form" or "parafoil" designs. There are no rigid supports in these lightweight wind catchers, which resemble puffy parachutes and fold up for easy transport. Such kites will fly well in a moderate autumn breeze and will pull like tractors in strong wind. A flow-form kite with an area of roughly 30 square feet sells for about $120.

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