The Flight of The Millibar Messenger -- cont.

You Are Here:

Home >> The Flight of The Millibar Messenger -- cont.

Today's Question
How do you make primitive snowshoes? answer

What should you do if you get lost driving in a snow storm? answer

Today's Question
What is the greenest ski and snowboard on the market? answer

Can I really damage a coral reef with sunscreen while snorkeling? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine June 2001

Page:

The Flight of The Millibar Messenger -- cont.

WHAT SYNERGY REMEMBERS most about his childhood in Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, are his mother's rages, a daily fury he now believes derived from an undiagnosed case of schizophrenia. "Her mood swung from congenial to hostile without warning," he says. "We walked on eggshells every day in that house. When I think of my upbringing, I feel lucky I'm not in jail for mass murder."

While his father withdrew into running the family's hardware store, Richard hid in his bedroom and tinkered. Using tools borrowed from his father's basement workshop, he built fleets of model airplanes and chemical rockets, and made at least one try at nitroglycerin. "It was a solo operation," he says. "The things I managed to learn I learned extremely well because I'd made all the mistakes. I screwed things up every conceivable way." In 1948, when Richard was nine, his father built a 20-by-48-inch box kite. He built it not for his son, or even with his son, but for himself. Richard merely tagged along as his father assembled stringers of quarter-inch straight-grained maple dowels and cross-struts of whittled white pine. The fragile frame was held together with cabinetmaker's glue and tiny finishing nails. "The damn fool," his mother muttered as she begrudgingly sewed the kite skin from pink silk.

One gusty midsummer Saturday, father and son carried the box kite to a nearby cemetery. "We put that little box kite up so high my father could no longer see it, though to my young eyes it was a distant postage stamp," he recalls. "It was an unexpected and awesome experience."

When the wind died abruptly in the late afternoon, Richard and his father followed the string more than a mile over hedges and phone lines before recovering the kite from a rooftop in Dormont, the next town over. Forty-two years later, on a cold January day in 1990, Synergy was browsing in a Toronto bookstore. On a whim, he looked up kite records in the Guinness Book of World Records. It was like Proust's madeleines. As surely as he saw his past, he also saw his future: He would break the altitude record printed on the page in front of him.

Today Synergy lives alone in a low-rent apartment block in Toronto's Chinatown. Aside from the unmade bed, his one-room studio offers no concession to human comfort. It's given over entirely to the flotsam of the 75 kites he's built: $2,000 worth of kite cloth bundled in six-foot rolls; spools of line piled in milk crates; Zip drives containing 3,000 digital kite photographs; and an aerial photograph of Christmas Island, 1,300 miles south of Hawaii, which Synergy considers the world's best launch site for high-altitude kites because it has an abandoned air base for takeoff and almost no air traffic. "All that smooth Pacific wind without a ripple," he says, "and the air is yours to use." On the wall above his pillow, he has taped a faded photograph of Alexander Graham Bell torn from a 1997 edition of the Toronto Sun, accompanied by this quote: "One discovery leads to another."

"If they had printed portraits of Tesla, Ford, Curtiss, Einstein, and Edison, I would have taped those to the wall of my room as well," Synergy says. "These men were not only quick thinkers, they took action. They were the peer pressure of their day."

Synergy reveres Bell in particular not for inventing the telephone, but for plowing its profits into some 70 other scientific inquiries, from sheep genetics and air pollution to Montessori teaching methods and hydrofoil speedboats. "Lord, but do I wish I was in his financial shoes," says Synergy. "The good I could do for mankind would flow forth like the Colorado River at spring flood time. I could easily keep a dozen people working on worthwhile projects that could very well change the course of history."

On another wall of his impossibly cluttered studio, Synergy has taped a dozen sheets of paper darkened with penciled graphs and inscrutable formulas that he hopes will help him get closer to that ultimate goal. He spent more than 150 computer hours dissecting and equating the 30 or so variables of high-altitude kite flight, and his collage of mathematical scribblings tells him that between sea level and 20,000 feet, air density decreases by half, so a kite would need ample wing area to get enough lift in the thinning air to continue rising. Which is why Synergy gave the Millibar Messenger(so named because a millibar is a unit of atmospheric pressure used to designate altitude) a 30-foot wingspan‹as wide as a Piper Cub. His calculations also tell him that he'll need at least 80 pounds of pull on the line to reach his goal. As the wind speed doubles, the drag on the line quadruples. So it's crucial to have skinny line, but not so skinny that it breaks. The trick is to find a propitious balance. Synergy settled on a 270-pound-test line made from specially woven Kevlar, the material used in bulletproof vests.

Finally, once the Millibar Messenger is aloft, the only factor Synergy can control is the angle at which the kite faces the wind—its "angle of attack." Synergy designed and built a special angle-of-attack device to operate as a connector between the line and the kite itself. If it works the way it should, adverse gusts will stretch two spring-loaded scales attached to the device, which will then slide up a four-foot metal track toward the nose and thereby lower the angle at which the kite meets the wind. The objective is to keep the pull on the line below 100 pounds. In theory, it should operate flawlessly. There's only one problem: Synergy hasn't had time to test his creation. "It's crude, but man, I'm really hoping this sucker works," he says. "If I can stay between 60 and 100 pounds I'm in very good stead to fly ridiculously high."

Page: