Photo: Record breaker! Whether you’re on land, air, or water, you can’t break speed records unless you understand aerodynamics. This is the Railton Mobil Special, which became the first car to go faster than 640 km/h (400 mph) in the 1940s. Here the streamlined bodywork has been lifted up high off the chassis so you can inspect the engine inside. See it for yourself at Think Tank, the science museum in Birmingham, England.
Here’s a quick tour through some of the major moments and key figures in the history of aerodynamics:
● c250 BCE: Aristotle describes how objects float and move in fluids.
● 1490: Leonardo da Vinci considers the aerodynamics of flight and sketches the detailed anatomy of bird wings in his notebooks. He notes the importance of air resistance (drag) as a force that slows down moving objects and figures out the equation of continuity by watching rivers flow.
● 1600s: Isaac Newton studies air resistance, noting that it’s much the same whether air moves around an object or an object moves through the air.
● 1673: French scientist Edme Mariotte shows that drag increases with the square of speed. Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton reach the same conclusion at about the same time.
● 1738: French scientist Daniel Bernoulli works out the connection between the speed of a fluid and its pressure.
● 1840s: Englishman Sir George Cayley makes pioneering aerodynamic studies with model gliders and identifies the four forces of flight (thrust, drag, weight, and lift).
● 1852: German physicist Heinrich Magnus explains the Magnus effect, which explains why spinning soccer and tennis balls curve through the air.
● 1880s: Osborne Reynolds notes the difference between laminar and turbulent flow. A concept called the Reynolds number is used to describe and explain different kinds of fluid flow.
● 1890s: Frederick Lanchester starts to study aerodynamics and figures out the circulation of air around airfoil wings.
● 1903: After making their own detailed scientific studies of aerodynamics, the Wright brothers make the first powered flight.
● 1900s: German physicist Ludwig Prandtl derives the mathematical equations of airflow, figures out how drag occurs in the boundary layer, and effectively invents the modern science of aerodynamics.
● 1930s–1960s: Hungarian Theodore von Kármán makes complex mathematical models of airflow and makes pioneering contributions to the science of supersonic and hypersonic flight, including the development of swept-back wings.
● 1934: Henri Coandă discovers what becomes known as the Coandă effect—that moving fluids bend toward nearby surfaces.
● 1947: Chuck Yeager makes the first supersonic flight.
