A Short History Of Paper Airplanes

The history of paper airplanes has never truly been established, but it is believed that the first piece of flying paper was likely a crumpled up piece of the first paper tossed aside to the garbage.

Paper is believed to have originated with the Chinese almost 2000 years ago, so most flight historians believe that this is where the first paper airplanes may have originated.

Paper was used for many things in the old days, and in the orient, they used paper for such things as origami œ which is the Japanese art of paper folding.

It only seemed like a matter of time before they realized that because of the light weight of paper, that it could sail through the air.

In China, they have used paper in the design of their kites as well.

This has also been traced back to about 2000 years ago.

And today, if you rigged everything up correctly and you used a paper that was heavier than your normal writing paper, you would be able to fly your paper airplane just like you would a kite.

In fact, if you look at the basic design of a kite, it bears a striking resemblance to what your paper airplane might look like today.

Just like any other flight device, there has been an evolution of paper airplanes to the point where they have become real serious flying machines.

The latest world record for paper airplane flight that I could find was

27.

6 seconds in the air œ can you imagine if one of your airplanes could fly that far? What would one of those airplanes look like? We‘ll show you the world record holding airplane design later in the book.

Starting 2000 years ago, the Chinese first figured out that paper could fly.

Through generations of fathers and sons, and any airplane enthusiast alike, the designs have been refined using science, better paper, and whole lot of imagination.

In the next articles, we will give you a little bit of the science behind why a paper airplane flies, and what makes a good paper airplane œ and how to keep it from crashing in a spiraling mess.



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