The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I turn a flat thing into a solid thing, with no cutting and no glue.
NASA studies me to fold telescopes and solar panels small enough to launch.
A legend promises a wish to anyone who makes a thousand of my cranes.
My name is two Japanese words: fold and paper.
The art of paper folding.
Origami
The Miura fold, designed for Japanese satellites, opens an entire sheet with a single pull. Solar arrays and pocket maps both use it.
Paper folding is old, but the art as it is practised now owes most to one man. Akira Yoshizawa, working in poverty for decades, invented wet-folding, which lets paper hold curves instead of creases, and devised the system of dots and arrows that made it possible to write a model down and share it. Once the folds could be written, mathematicians took an interest, and the field turned out to be useful: telescope shades, heart stents and airbags all rely on ways of collapsing a large sheet into a small volume and opening it reliably.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #24 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #23. Next: mystery #25. Or try #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12.