Some Philosophical Consequences of Wittgenstein's Aeronautical Research

Before he studied philosophy under Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein was trained as an engineer at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin. He then worked as a graduate research engineer at the University of Manchester, where he designed a variable volume combustion chamber and received a patent for an innovative propeller design in 1911. I argue that the methodology of contemporary aeronautical engineering research, involving the systematic use of experiments and scale models, affected the Bild theory of language in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The principle of similitude, underlying the mathematical resolution of scale effect problems associated with wind tunnel research on models, is reflected in the law of projection in the Tractatus.