Tetrahedral kite
Encyclopedia
Box kite
A box kite is a high-performance kite, noted for developing relatively high lift; it is a type within the family of cellular kites. The typical design has four parallel struts. The box is made rigid with diagonal crossed struts. There are two sails, or ribbons, whose width is about a quarter of the...
composed of tetrahedrally shaped cells. The cells are usually arranged in such a way that the entire kite is also a regular tetrahedron
Tetrahedron
In geometry, a tetrahedron is a polyhedron composed of four triangular faces, three of which meet at each vertex. A regular tetrahedron is one in which the four triangles are regular, or "equilateral", and is one of the Platonic solids...
. The kite can be described as a compound dihedral kite as well.
This kite was invented by Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell was an eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone....
. It came about from his experiments with Hargrave's Box Kites
Lawrence Hargrave
Lawrence Hargrave was an engineer, explorer, astronomer, inventor and aeronautical pioneer.- Early life :Hargrave was born in Greenwich, England, the second son of John Fletcher Hargrave and was educated at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Kirkby Lonsdale, Westmorland...
and his attempts to build a kite that was scalable and big enough to carry both a man and a motor. As such, it was an early experiment on the road to manned flight. He worked on the kites between 1895 and 1910. Bell wrote about his discovery of this concept in the June 1903 issue of National Geographic magazine; the article was titled "Tetrahedral Principle in Kite Structure".
From an initial one cell model, Bell advanced to a 3,393 cell "Cygnet" model
AEA Cygnet
|-Specifications :-See also:...
in 1907. This 40-foot (12.2 m) long, 200 pound (91 kilogram) kite was towed by a steamer offshore near Baddeck, Nova Scotia
Baddeck, Nova Scotia
Baddeck is a Canadian village in Victoria County, Nova Scotia.It is the county's shire town and is situated on the northern shore of Bras d'Or Lake on Cape Breton Island...
on 6 December 1907 and carried a man 168 feet (51.2 metres) above the water.
Bell also experimented with a large circular "tetrahedral truss" design during the same period.
The tetrahedral kite, while not easy to make compared to the simple cross kite, is very stable and easy to fly. It flies well in moderate to heavy winds if it is properly set up.