KF Story
“I visualize something first in my mind and then I try to create it.” said Richard “Dick” Kline as he leaned back in his dining room chair. Dick has been a personal friend for more than thirty years, and I have always been amazed at the lightning twists and turns of his mind when confronted with a problem.
I wanted to know how he had created a new principle of flight and developed a paper airplane that had become world famous, without knowing a single thing about aerodynamics.
He told me the story. For many years he had been a successful advertising art director on Madison Avenue. One Sunday he was working on an ad project with a copywriter on an upper floor of a building on 42nd Street in New York City, overlooking Bryant Park.
“We made a bet,” Dick said. “Who could fold a paper airplane that would fly straighter and faster than the other’s. We each made a plane and threw it out the window toward the park trees below.”
Dick won the bet because his plane flew as straight as if shot from a bow. But he was disappointed that the plane crashed too quickly. That contest didn’t end that Sunday afternoon in Dick’s mind.
“I kept thinking – how can I fold that plane so it will stay straight and stay aloft. I kept visualizing in my mind the kinds of folds that might make the plane more stable. I even toyed with the idea of pasting bee-bees in the wings.”
But nothing worked. Then one day he began to fold part of the wings under each other, creating pockets. He flew the plane. It flew straight as that proverbial arrow, staying aloft for several minutes.
Fast forward a few months. He sent his new invention to several major toy companies. No interest at all. Then one day Floyd Fogelman, a man who retouched Dick’s advertising photographs, came into his office and Dick flew the plane down the hall to show him how well it was flying.
As he later described the moment, the plane began to climb as soon as it left his hand. It reached a height when most paper airplanes stall and fall back. But this plane leveled itself and began a slow descent, making a safe landing far down the hall.
Floyd, who was also a part-time pilot, could only say, “A new concept in aerodynamics.” Dick agreed that Floyd could take the paper airplane home to make a balsawood model of the plane to see if the model would have the same flight characteristics. Several days later Floyd returned with the model. It flew as straight and smooth and long as its paper prototype.
Dick and Floyd became partners. Although neophytes in the legal and rights field, both knew they had to apply for a patent to protect the new invention. Whatever it was! After tests in wind tunnels and help from patent attorneys, they submitted their drawings and claim of the Kline-Fogelman wing to the U.S. Patent Office. After several rejections (which they later learned was fairly common), they received Patent No. 3,706,430 for “a steplike discontinuity midway back on an airfoil for aircraft and for helicopter and propeller blades.” Not bad for two newbies in the arcane field of airplane design.
Then serendipity took over, as it sometimes does when people have paid their “dues” in a certain field. An advertising account executive interested Dr. John Nicolaides, a professor and founder of the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Notre Dame University, in flying the paper plane in a wind tunnel. Then Time magazine carried a story about the new invention, “The Paper Plane Caper.” Then Dick appeared on 60 Minutes as his plane flew over Central Park in New York, with Frank Sinatra singing, Come fly with me. This show was repeated two times, followed by Dick’s appearances on The Letterman Show, CBS Morning News, Regis Philbin and many other national TV programs.
Some months later, Dick and his wife Fran had joined me a day before Christmas at my home. I suggested that Dick should write a book about his plane and incredible experiences.
“I’m not a writer,” he said.
I told him the publisher could get a ghost writer. I asked him to see my agent Barbara Kouts and tell her about it. He did. Fortunately she knew a senior editor at Simon & Schuster who had a great interest in paper airplanes. Soon Dick was in contract talks with him.
“I’m not a writer,” Dick told him. “Should I work with a ghost writer?”
“No,” said the editor. “You should write it yourself.”
So Dick apparently fell back into his favorite mental creative exercise. He “visualized” a book.
The Ultimate Paper Airplane book by Richard Kline has now sold more than 124,000 copies worldwide. I can’t imagine how many copies he might have sold if he had been a “writer.”
