Tuesday, February 09, 2016

Peter Powell

There was a time, quite a long time ago, when we used to fly kites every weekend. We formed a kite club and made some good mates... Reading this obituary in the Telegraph brought back the memories.

"Peter Powell, who has died aged 83, developed the first two-line steerable kite, selling millions worldwide and sparking a stunt-kite flying craze.
His interest began in the 1960s when he was trying to help a young cousin fly his new kite – a traditional diamond-shaped kite with a string tail. “The wind was wrong either too low or too high and he was so disappointed,” Powell recalled. “From that moment forward I became obsessed with creating a kite that would fly in any wind”.
Two years after he began experimenting with different designs he patented his first kite – a six-footer – with which he went for a world record of highest-flying kite: “The lines snapped and I lost the kites.”
After that he decided to go bigger and made 30ft kites and sat a 70-year old woman on a swing seat suspended from seven of the kites as they rose from the ground. The stunt was filmed by the BBC and his doughty guinea pig earned a Charlie Chester award for providing public amusement.
One day Powell was flying one of his 6ft kites and noticed a list to one side which he tried to correct by attaching a separate line to the other side. It caused the kite to loop, so for fun he attached a third line and found he could loop the kite to right or left. Then, one night, he thought about removing the centre line and just tethering the kite with two lines on either side: “To my greatest relief the kite controls behaved intuitively... The lines did not lock together and the kite [carved] arcs in the sky.”
After two more years of hard work, in 1972 he launched the 4ft steerable stunt kite on to the market. The kites came with a long, hollow polyethylene tail that was inflated by the wind, making them stable and adding to the visual effect as they performed stunts."

read more here

No comments: