First kite measurements of weather

The first use of kites to make meteorological observations took place in July 1749, when Alexander Wilson and Thomas Melvill (both UK) attached a thermometer to a chain of box kites and flew them up into the sky from a site near Glasgow, UK.

Alexander Wilson was in his mid-thirties at the time of the experiments. He was an educated man who had trained as an apothecary, but by the 1740s was running a typesetting and printing company associated with the University of Glasgow Press. This role brought him into contact with many academics and through them their more gifted students. One of those students was Thomas Melvill, who combined an advanced knowledge of mathematics and the sciences of the day with the practical curiosity of an experimentalist.

Thomas Melvill moved in with Wilson in 1748, and the two of them worked on various scientific schemes and experiments together. One of the ideas Wilson suggested was the use of multiple large kites to lift thermometers – then large and heavy pieces of scientific equipment – into the sky. They started work on a series of six kites, which were made of paper and the lightest, strongest wood they could find. The largest was seven feet (2.13 m) tall and the smallest four feet (1.21 m). They also commissioned a local rope-maker to wind them several different thicknesses of line, with the intention of attaching the highest kite to the second by the thinnest line possible and then gradually increasing the diameter down the chain.

Thermometers were reportedly attached to these kites at intervals, fastened by cords that were ignited and allowed to smoulder as the kites climbed. At a certain point the thermometers would break free and fall back to earth, where they could be read by Melvill and Wilson before they adjusted to the change in altitude. Sadly, the two men never published the results of their experiments (Wilson was busy with his professional activities and Melvill died in 1754) so we do not know how high the kites went, what temperatures they recorded, nor how they protected the thermometers during their descent (we only have ambiguous reference to the instrument being secured with "bushy tossels of paper tied to them").