Man-lifting kite

[1] The Book of Sui, dating from 636 A.D, records that the tyrant Gao Yang, Emperor Wenxuan of Northern Qi (r. 550–559), executed prisoners by ordering them to 'fly' using bamboo mats.

[4] In one such story the Japanese thief Ishikawa Goemon (1558–1594) is said to have used a man-lifting kite to allow him to steal the golden scales from a pair of ornamental fish images which were mounted on the top of Nagoya Castle.

To foretell whether a ship should sail, a man would be strapped to a kite having a rectangular grid framework and the subsequent flight pattern used to divine the outlook.

On 12 November 1894 he attached the rig to the ground on a long wire and lifted himself from the beach in Stanwell Park, New South Wales, reaching a height of 16 feet (4.9 m).

Alexander Graham Bell developed a tetrahedral kite, constructed of sticks arranged in a honeycomb of triangular sections, called cells.

His first large experiment with self-similar tetrahedral patterns was "The Frost King" with 1300 cells, weighing 288 lbs (131 kg) including the aviator.

After a stunt in which he crossed the English Channel in a boat drawn by a kite, he attracted enough interest from the Admiralty and the War Office for them to allow him to conduct trials between 1904 and 1908.

[13] Roald Amundsen, the polar explorer, commissioned tests on a man-lifting kite to see whether it would be suitable for observation in the Arctic, but the trials were unsatisfactory and the idea was never developed.

The skier was able to marginally control these unstable flat kites by using swing seats that allowed their entire body weight to effect pitch and roll.

[15] John Worth adopted the cable-stayed triangle control frame at several scales in stiffened Rogallo wing kite glider and powered versions.

Over the next two decades, parafoils were increasingly seen alongside parachutes, and single line lift systems were replaced with steerable multi-line configurations.