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The Dawn of Aerodynamics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

J. Laurence Pritchard
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Extract

As individuals, those who have been born and bred and nurtured in the long, unique and formative tradition of the British people may justly claim a pride in their scientific and technical achievements over the years which cannot be claimed in such measure by any other nation. It is a claim they can make as proudly this very day as they could have done over the past three hundred years.

In the main, this paper is concerned with but a small, although not unimportant, part of the scientific achievement of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. It was a period, in Great Britain, of such giants as Isaac Newton, James Watt, John Dalton, Robert Boyle, Henry Cavendish, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Clerk Maxwell, W. J. M. Rankine, Lord Kelvin, Lord Rayleigh, Sir Charles Parsons, Prescott Joule, C. G. Stokes, Osborne Reynolds, Sir J. J. Thomson, C. Babbage, F. W. Lanchester, and so many others whose ideas and achievements have changed the face of the world in this Twentieth century of application.

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Type
Research Article
Information
The Aeronautical Journal , Volume 61 , Issue 555 , March 1957, pp. 149 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Aeronautical Society 1957

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Footnotes

*

The substance of papers read before the Belfast, Bristol, Isle of Wight and Cheshire Branches of the Society, and on behalf of the History and Philosophy of Science Committee at the University of Cambridge, 1956-1957.

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