Up to this time a reel turned by two men sufficed to draw down the kites, but the increasing pull and length of wire made recourse to steam-power necessary. In January 1897 a grant of money was allotted from the Hodgkins Fund of the Smithsonian Institution for the purpose of obtaining meteorological records at heights exceeding ten thousand feet, and no doubt the first application of steam to kite-flying was the winch built by Mr. Fergusson with ingenious devices for distributing, oiling, and measuring the length of wire. The cumulative pressure of the successive coils of wire finally crushed the drum, and the next apparatus applied the principle of Sir William Thomson's deep-sea sounding apparatus, in which there is no accumulation of pressure. In October 1897 records were brought down from eleven thousand feet, or a thousand feet above the prescribed height. The kites and apparatus at present employed at Blue Hill will now be described. The kites are all of the multiplane type, and mostly of Hargrave's construction with two rectangular cells. These cells are covered with cloth or silk, except at their tops and bottoms, and one is secured above the other by four or more sticks. The wooden frames are as light as possible, but are made rigid by guys of steel wire that bind them in all directions. The average weight is about two ounces a square foot of lifting surface, which is about the same weight a square foot as the Eddy kites when all the surface is included in the estimate. The largest of the Hargrave kites stands nine feet high, weighs eleven pounds, and contains ninety square feet of lifting surface, which in the recent kites is arched, resembling the curvature of a bird's wings, a construction that was proposed many years ago by Phillips (Fig. 10). These curved surfaces increase the lift, or upward pull, more than the drift, or motion to leeward, and so the angular elevation is augmented without materially adding to the total pull on the wire, which should not exceed one-half its breaking strength. [Illustration: FIG. 10.--Modified Hargrave Kite at Blue Hill.]