An Eighteen-winged Monster

It all started when George Webster made a chance remark to me in conversation to the effect that although he knew that there was an interesting early eighteen-winged kite, he had never seen one. A kite that George had never seen sounded intriguing and we decided to investigate further.
The only written record of such a kite that we could find at the time was a statement in Ron Moulton’s book Kites (the first edition, 1978, not the later book of the same title he wrote with Pat Lloyd) that “... at a kite flying competition held on 25 June 1903 ... S.H.R. Salmon was another competitor who favoured multiple cells. He flew a rhomboidal kite at this contest, and at a 1907 contest used an eighteen-winged, 10-ft (3-m) span monster (Fig.19) [reproduced below] which flew in the lightest of breezes and took a meteorograph to 1,600 ft (480 m).”

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