A paper plane (also known as a paper airplane in American English or paper aeroplane in British English) is a toy aircraft, usually a glider made out of single folded sheet of paper or paperboard. A simple nose-heavy paper plane, thrown like a dart, is also known as a paper dart. History 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. 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. It is impossible to ascertain where and in what form the first paper aircraft were constructed, or even the first paper plane's form. For 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. The pioneers of powered flight have all studied paper model aircraft in order to design larger machines. Leonardo da Vinci 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. Thereafter, Sir George Cayley explored the performance of paper gliders in the late 19th century. Other pioneers, such as Clément Ader, Prof. 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. With time, many other designers have improved and developed the paper model, while using it as a fundamentally useful tool in aircraft design. One of the earliest known applied (as in compound structures and many other aerodynamic refinements) modern paper plane was in 1909. 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: Prandtl was also somewhat impulsive. 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. He started to explain; in