Paper airplanes: Lighter than air

In 1903, two bicycle builders named Orville and Wilbur Wright took a homemade contraption to the sandy stretches of Kitty Hawk, N.C., and managed to get it up in the air. The world has been fascinated by airplanes ever since.

Of course, the fascination with airthings has been around much longer than that. The Chinese were flying paper kites some 2,000 years ago. Hot-air balloons appeared in the late 1700s; the earliest ones were made of paper and cloth.

So, the question arises: When did paper airplanes come on the scene?

When the first Egyptian scribe threw a piece of papyrus into the trash heap, was he actually flying an "airplane"?

Or, do paper missiles of any kind not count until there were actual planes to name them after? Were paper models used, as some historians speculate, by people who were trying to design flying machines?

These are questions that intrigue Ken Blackburn, an aeronautical engineer with Boeing, who has been fascinated with paper airplanes for most of his life.

The earliest reference he has been able to come up with for paper airplanes is around 1908-09, supplied by a man named Ian Leonard of Great Britain. Leonard has collected paper models of dirigibles dated from 1902-03, and he has some early French paper planes from 1908. Leonard also cites a book, "Model Gliders," published in 1909, which had three cutout things to fly — a butterfly, a swallow and a model of the Wright Flyer.

A man named Wallis Rigby began making and selling paper airplanes in the 1930s, and in the 1940s designed a series of Wheaties Flyers that were included in General Mills cornflakes boxes.

"Jack Northrop used paper airplanes in the 1930s to help in his ideas for flying wing airplanes," said Blackburn. "In a sense, those paper airplanes helped shaped a corporation and lead to the B-2 stealth bomber. I've had e-mails from people who remembered making paper planes 60, 80 years ago. Apparently they were common then, so paper airplanes could likely have even inspired the Wright Brothers."

Deseret News graphicMake a paper airplaneRequires Adobe Acrobat.

All Blackburn knows for sure is that his own passion for paper planes started when he was young. "I remember making them in first grade and Cub Scouts. I started with the basic pointed-nose plane, and as I learned more, I began to experiment with other shapes," he said during a telephone interview from his home in St. Louis.