David Bloor: The enigma of the aerofoil: rival theories in aerodynamics, 1909–1930

Excerpt

The year 1909 marked the first air crossing of the English channel. Besides providing a new hero for the popular press (the aviator Louis Blériot), this event focused British attention on the immediate military implications of human flight. At that time there was no satisfactory answer to the most basic scientific question: what generates the lift in these new flying devices? Just a few years earlier the idea of human flight had been considered a practical impossibility by most serious scientists. Now the issue was no longer a curiosity, it was an urgent matter, causing the British secretary of state for war to form the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the ACA) with the Nobel laureate Baron Rayleigh as head. With this as backdrop, David Bloor, professor emeritus of Science Studies at the University of Edinburgh, compares the theoretical progress of the British scientific community to that of its great continental rival Germany. While each group was well acquainted with the same fluid mechanics—the work of the recently passed Helmholtz, Stokes, and Kelvin being thoroughly known by all concerned—the British and German response to “the enigma of the aerofoil” could hardly have been more different. …