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I'm looking for experimental data (lift, drag, pull, etc...) of Graham Bell's tetrahedral kite. As he was a scientist and inventor I thought that he might have written some quantitative data down on the kite's performance.

Would anybody know a resource where I could find this? A museum maybe? Some website?

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  • Try mathoverflow perhaps – Felix Goldberg Feb 28 '13 at 20:54
  • I think math.stackexchange.com would be appropriate if I would have questions about the content of these measurements (actually physics.sxc would be better for that). But I have no question (yet) about the contents, but more on where to find this historical measurement data. – Saaru Lindestøkke Feb 28 '13 at 21:02
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The Library of Congress website has archived a great amount of letters, experimental notes, and general notebooks of Graham Bell. There, using the right search terms, I came up with a whole list of articles related to the tetrahedral kite. Other notes of Graham Bell are available as well, but I haven't researched those.

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  • Edit: The best thing I could find is a Master of Science Thesis PDF entitled Aerodynamic performance prediction of a tetrahedral kite. It is basically an analysis for a crazy art installation, but it has useful equations and does a partial wind tunnel analysis of the geometry. – Barrett Leslie Apr 29 '15 at 20:02
  • Well, it looks as if the Library of Congress has changed the results… Either they removed them, or they have used different keywords to describe it. By removing search criteria from the link I have in my answer you can get slightly more results. The results are clickable and show a link to PDF or JPEG version of the document. It seems the thesis was made after I posted the question/answer… Would've been useful back then. – Saaru Lindestøkke Apr 30 '15 at 16:47

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