He started to explain in the course of it he picked up a paper menu and fashioned a small model airplane, without thinking where he was. I recall that on one occasion at a rather dignified dinner meeting following a conference in Delft, Holland, my sister, who sat next to him at the table, asked him a question on the mechanics of flight. The construction of a paper airplane, by Ludwig Prandtl at the 1924 banquet of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, was dismissed as an artless exercise by Theodore von Kármán: One of the earliest known applied (as in compound structures and many other aerodynamic refinements) modern paper plane was in 1909. With time, many other designers have improved and developed the paper model, while using it as a fundamentally useful tool in aircraft design. Charles Langley, and Alberto Santos-Dumont often tested ideas with paper as well as balsa models to confirm (in scale) their theories before putting them into practice. Other pioneers, such as Clément Ader, Prof. Thereafter, Sir George Cayley explored the performance of paper gliders in the late 19th century. Leonardo wrote of the building of a model plane out of parchment, and of testing some of his early ornithopter, an aircraft that flies by flapping wings, and parachute designs using paper models.
The pioneers of powered flight have all studied paper model aircraft in order to design larger machines. It is impossible to ascertain where and in what form the first paper aircraft were constructed, or even the first paper plane's form.įor over a thousand years after this, paper aircraft were the dominant man-made heavier-than-air craft whose principles could be readily appreciated, though thanks to their high drag coefficients, not of an exceptional performance when gliding over long distances.
Certainly, manufacture of paper on a widespread scale took place in China 500 BCE, and origami and paper folding became popular within a century of this period, approximately 460–390 BCE. The origin of folded paper gliders is generally considered to be of Ancient China, although there is equal evidence that the refinement and development of folded gliders took place in equal measure in Japan.
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