A History of Aerodynamics and Its Impact on Flying Machines

It could be argued—although one should do so hesitantly—that the defining technology of the twentieth century is the airplane. It enabled humanity to break the bonds of Earth for the first time and contributed greatly to the shrinking of the globe that has been so much a part of this century’s history. It also made possible the mass destruction of whole cities—and with nuclear weapons perhaps whole civilizations—through strategic bombing. The search for ever more efficient and safe aircraft, flying faster, higher, and farther may have helped to pull along research and development in critical areas ranging from electronics to fuels to materials to structures.

In this important overview, senior aerospace engineer John D. Anderson Jr. explores one of those critical areas, the evolution of aerodynamics. The result is a significant work that goes far toward capturing the essence of this major field. It will find a place in both aeronautical engineering and history of aeronautics classes, but the greatest importance of A History of Aerodynamics will probably be its use as an essential reference by scholars working in the history of flight who lack Anderson’s technical depth.

Beginning with a definition—aerodynamics is the study of the motion of gaseous fluids and of other forces acting on solid bodies moving through them—and an exposition of basic theory and practice, such as lift over drag coefficients and Navier-Stokes equations, Anderson divides his subject into four key areas and attacks them chronologically. The first period, requiring nearly one hundred pages in this publication, begins with antiquity and ends with the work of the Wright brothers at the beginning of the twentieth century. The second era he characterizes as one dominated by the strut-and-wire biplane of the 1900s through the 1920s. A third definable era came with the mature propeller-driven airplane that emerged in the 1930s and predominated until the 1950s. Then a fourth era arose, in which the jet aircraft has dominated. Anderson would be quick to point out that the last two eras have existed side by side since the coming of the jet, but that each of them present different aerodynamics challenges requiring different solutions and hence deserve separate treatment.

Three major themes run through A History of Aerodynamics from Aristotle to the present. First, Anderson emphasizes the development of the discipline of aerodynamics—the change over time in the understanding of the physical nature of aerodynamic flows over solid bodies and the discovery and systemization of basic governing equations—much of which emerged independently from a variety of sources and without immediate practical application. For instance, he concludes that, with Newtonian physics as a foundation, numerous scientists and mathematicians, ranging from Leonhard Euler to Pierre-Simon Laplace, working largely individually, constructed a framework for aerodynamics that included fundamental understanding of Euler’s and Navier-Stokes’s equations for air flow. Those efforts, however, took place independently of a desire to build flying machines, and indeed many of those working on them scoffed at the idea of powered flight.

Second, it took a group of practical inventors to apply these theoretical aerodynamics principles and build the first practical flying machines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These individuals, few of whom held academic posts, began the practice of applied aerodynamics. The classic example is Wilbur and Orville Wright, who had no advanced degrees and no outside funders, either public or private. The research of these people went directly into the design of airplanes. As Anderson concludes, “It is remarkable that the flying machine was developed and advanced well into the beginning of the twentieth century without direct recourse to the state of the art of theoretical aerodynamics that existed in academic circles” (pp. 448–49).

Finally, Anderson traces the linkage between the aerodynamic theory being developed in the academy and its application to the design...