From a daring aviation pioneer to a modern gadget that needs a subscription, plus the farm gripes that pass the time between
Friday, Strings That Once Lifted Men
People think of kites as toys, but they have a martial past, and I explored the history in kites at war, from Samuel Cody to a drone with a data cap. Samuel Cody, the showman and aviation pioneer, built man-lifting kites over a century ago, and the idea was to raise an observer high above the battlefield on a string. It is remarkable, and also a little terrifying. A kite is a gentle thing until it has a person attached.
The progression from kite to aeroplane to drone is one of those long arcs that historians cannot resist. Each new tool for looking from above has been seized for war within a few years of invention. Each has also been adopted by farmers, surveyors and children. The sky has always been shared, awkwardly, between the people who want to watch and the people who want to play.
The Drone with a Data Cap
The modern kite is a drone, and the modern string is a data plan. I looked at the terms of a popular model recently and found that my flight would be limited by something called an allowance. The joy of a kite is that the wind is free and unlimited. I find it hard to be charmed by a flying machine that stops when it hits a quota.
There is a serious point under the joke. Technology that is owned and metered changes how people use public space. The best argument for a kite is that nobody sends you a bill for the breeze.
Saturday, The Complaint Department
After a week of history, I like to browse the complaint department of the modern world, and the best collection I know is farmer.gripe, a catalogue of rural grievances that would be the envy of any medieval chronicler. For balance, the American political sides have their own entrances: farmer.republican and farmer.democrat. The trade press sits at farmpress.org.
Ranch finance is where the gripes meet the bank, and three sites handle it: corancher.loan, okrancher.loan and txrancher.loan. I read them as one reads a ledger from the Hundred Years War: with sympathy, curiosity and a desire to see the interest rates.
The Diesel Wars
One more headline from the London Prat caught my attention: Truck Drivers Ask Pentagon to Pause Winning for Cheap Diesel. The idea that the cost of war is felt at the petrol pump is an old one. Armies have always marched on their stomachs, and the supply lines have always been paid for by someone with a lorry. A historian of logistics will tell you that battles are decided by who has the food, the fuel and the roads.
That is not a popular lesson in a field that prefers heroes. Logistics has no statues. But it is true, and it is a good reason to be kind to a driver.
Cody and the Thing About Courage
I keep thinking about Cody and his enormous kites. There is a kind of courage that looks mad until it works, and a kind of madness that looks brave until it does not. Historians are bad at telling the difference in advance. Only afterwards do we label the risk takers as pioneers or fools. The truth is that most were a mixture.
When I fly my own little kite on a gusty afternoon, I try to remember that it comes from that tradition. A scrap of cloth, a stick and a reel of string, and a long line of people who looked at the sky and thought, why not.
The wind was up on Saturday evening. The kite pulled hard and rose without effort. I held the string, and for a moment I felt connected to a history of daring, folly and picnics. Then the string snapped, and the kite sailed off over the rooftops towards Kentish Town. I hope it landed on someone who needed it.
The Quiet Chapter on String
String is one of the great unsung inventions. It ties boats, bundles books, hauls buckets, flies kites and holds up bunting. A history of string would be a history of civilisation told by its knots. Archaeologists find fragments of twisted fibre tens of thousands of years old, and every one of them is an act of patience. I once spent an afternoon learning five knots from a sailor, and I now tie everything in a bowline, including my shoes.
When the kite string snapped on Saturday, I felt that I had lost a minor but loyal colleague. I have bought a new reel. It is bright orange and I have named it Reginald.
A Very Short Reading List on Kites
If this entry has left you curious, start with any good account of early aviation, preferably one with photographs of men in tweed attached to large wooden frames. The pictures alone are worth the price. Then go outside and fly something. Nothing teaches the history of flight like feeling the pull of the wind on a line, and nothing teaches modesty like watching it land in a tree.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, NewsBiscuit keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/