When you ask most people what Alexander Graham Bell was most famous for they will probably be able to tell you that he was the inventor of the telephone, which would later become known and used as an everyday appliance, the home phone. Some people may even know that it was invented in 1876 and that he later invented the gramophone.
Very few people realise that Bell had a great passion for both aeronautics
and kites. He used kites to further his knowledge of man assisted flight.
Bell designed, made and tested many of his own man-carrying kites himself.
The kite on the right is a huge twelve-sided giant radial-winged kite.
A man is holding the tail or landing-line and is controlling the kite
on the ground.
The image below shows Bell holding one of his kites. The kite is made
up of two hexagons (a six sided shape).
The photograph below shows Bell with one of his tetrahedral structures.
A tetrahedron is a four-sided solid, triangular pyramid. The two
large tetrahedral shapes at the ends are attached together with a framework
of smaller, hollow tetrahedrons.
This design was later made into a winged boat in 1902.
Bell found the tetrahedron to have a very good strength to weight
ratio. This simply means that an object is structurally very strong
but at the same time is very lightweight.
It was towed behind a steamship to a height of 168 feet. The pilot Lieutenant
Thomas.E. Selfridge survived the seven-minute flight unfortunately because
the winding crew onboard the ship were too slow to unwind the towrope
the Cygnet hit the water and broke up on contact.
Selfridge died seven months later while flying as a passenger
of Orville Wright. He became the first person to die in the history
of powered flight.