The United Kingdom's contributions to the development of aeronautics: Part 2. The development of the practical aeroplane (1900-1920)

Abstract

The first part of this survey dealt mainly with the development of the earliest ideas on air resistance and their application to flight. That part of the survey paused at the achievement of powered flight during the early years of the twentieth century. Even then, the main problem remained as that of aerodynamics, a subject only vaguely understood by those aviation pioneers endeavouring to get off the ground. For them theoretical guidelines, as yet, could offer little help. One of the earliest of those very few analytically based results to achieve general acceptance was the statement that resistance is proportional to the product of fluid density, a characteristic body area and the square of the flow's speed. This result had appeared during the seventeenth century in Newton's work and had received some experimental confirmation. Newton's concurrent ‘rare medium’ concept, viewing fluid flow as a stream of disconnected particles, gained credence at that time since its results agreed with the above resistance proportionality. Yet this concept became mistakenly applied to airflow so as to predict plate resistances proportional to the square of the sine of the plates' incidence angles, a misleading result which caused confusion for at least the next century.