Alexander Graham Bell, father of the telephone, was also a huge fan of tetrahedrals — building everything from boats to planes out of the pyramid-shaped structures. This massive kite — built by the Queen and Crawford design house — brings Bell’s tetrahedral ideals into the 21st Century.
The experimental design was developed specifically by Sash Reading with Ivan Morison from the University of Westminster. It consists of 1700 3D-printed connectors linking carbon fibre rods that support cubenfiber aerospace fabric sheets. And as you can see from the video, the structure — dubbed Three Cubes Colliding — can actually be launched and brought airborne. That’s more than Bell could say of his three tetrahedral planes. [Wired]