Kon-Tiki itself was made of nine balsa would tree trunks lashed together with hemp rope.

CNN: The Kon-Tiki: Crossing an ocean on balsa

When David Lowy was 5 years old, his mother bought him a toy glider made from balsa wood.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Kon-Tiki was the name of the balsa wood raft which was used to cross the Pacific Ocean in 1947 in a journey of 8, 000km (4, 900 miles).

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Each one is handbuilt out of sheets of lightweight balsa wood sandwiched between layers of carbon fiber or Kevlar and baked in an oven at 100C for stiffness.

FORBES: Mine's Lighter

The Plastiki's name is wordplay off the "Kon-Tiki, " a balsa raft made famous by Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl, who in 1947 sailed the vessel from Peru to the Polynesian islands.

CNN: Boat of plastic to set sail with environmental message

Using balsa wood and other materials that would have been available in antiquity, Mr Heyerdahl built the Kon-Tiki, named after a mythical South American king said to have been fleeing for his life, and launched her from Peru.

ECONOMIST: Thor Heyerdahl

After seven years of tinkering, they arrived at a machine with a deceptively simple design: Solar Impulse with its sleek, clean lines, white-gloss finish and rakishly angled 208-foot wings (bent to increase the plane's stability) resembles what you might get had Steve Jobs reimagined a child's balsa-wood glider in giant form.

WSJ: A Solar-Powered Plane Travels Light | WSJ. Magazine May 2013

In 1948, six Boeing engineers worked for weekend in a hotel room to produce a 33 page proposal, which included moving from turbo-prop to jet engines, and accompanied this proposal with a balsa-model prototype, in order to salvage a team project that was at the risk of failure.

FORBES: Don't Relax Constraints, Embrace Them

My brother and I therefore popped the corpse into a "relaxing jar" now there's a euphemism right up there with Orwell's Ministry of Peace that dampened it into pliancy, whereupon it could be pinned to the spreading board, a balsa rectangle with a groove down the center that allowed the wings to be flattened without squashing the thorax and abdomen.

NPR: Excerpt: 'At Large and At Small'