The Turbulent History of Fluid Mechanics

The Turbulent History of Fluid Mechanics
by
Naomi Tsafnat
May 17, 1999.

It all started with Archimedes, way back in BC,
Who was faced with an interesting problem, you see…

The king came to me, and this story he told:
I am not sure if my crown is pure gold.
You are a wise man, or so it is said,
Tell me: is it real, or is it just lead?

I paced and I thought, and I scratched my head,
But the answer eluded me, to my dread.
I sat in my bath, and pondered and tried,
And then…”Eureka! Eureka! I found it!” I cried.

As I sat in my tub and the water was splashing,
I knew suddenly that a force had been acting.
On me in the tub, it’s proportional, see,
To the water that was where now there is me.

Of course, Archimedes caused quite a sensation
But not because of his great revelation;
As he was running through the streets of Syracuse
He didn’t notice he was wearing only his shoes.

The great Leonardo – oh what a fellow…
No, not diCaprio, DaVinci I tell you!
He did more than just paint the lovely Mona,
He also studied fluid transport phenomena.

Then came Pascal, who clarified with agility,
Basic concepts of pressure transmissibility.
Everyone knows how a barometer looks,
But he figured out just how it works.

How can we talk about great scientists,
Without mentioning one of the best:
Sir Isaac Newton, the genius of mathematics,
Also contributed to fluid mechanics.

One thing he found, and it’s easy as pie,
Is that shear stress, τ, equals µ dv/dy.
His other work, though, was not as successful;

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His studies on drag were not all that useful.
He thought he knew how fast sound is sent,
But he was way off, by about twenty percent.

And then there was Pitot, with his wonderful tubes,
Which measure how fast an airplane moves.
Poiseuille, d’Alembert, Lagrange and Venturi –
Through his throats – fluid pass in a hurry.

Here is another hero of fluid mechanics,
In fact, he invented the word “hydrodynamics”.
It would take a book to tell you about him fully,
But here is the short tale of Daniel Bernoulli:

Everyone thinks is just one Bernoulli…
It is not so! There are many of us, truly.
My family is big, many scientists in this house,
With father Johan, nephew Jacob and brother Nicolaus.

But the famous principle is mine, you know,
It tells of the relationship of fluid flow,
To pressure, velocity, and density too.
I also invented the manometer – out of the blue!

Yes, Bernoulli did much for fluids, you bet!
He even proposed the use of a jet.
There were others too, all wonderful folks,
Like Lagrange, Laplace, Navier and Stokes.

Here is another well-known name,
A mathematician and scientist of great fame:
He is Leonard Euler, I’m sure you all know,
His equations are basis for inviscid flow.

He did more than introduce the symbols π, I, e,
He also derived the equation of continuity.
And with much thought and keen derivation,
He published the famous momentum equation.

Those wonderful equations and diagrams you see?
They are all thanks to Moody, Weisbach and Darcy.
Then there was Mach, and the road that he paves,
After studying the shocking field of shock waves.

Rayleigh studied wave motion, and jet instability,
How bubbles collapse, and dynamic similarity.

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He was also the first to correctly explain.
Why the sky is blue – except when it rains.

Osborne Reynolds, whose number we know,
Found out all about turbulent flow.
He also examined with much persistence,
Cavitation, viscous flow, and pipe resistance.

In the discovery of the boundary layer
Prandtl was the major player.
It’s no wonder that all the scientists say,
He’s the father of Modern Fluid Mechanics, hooray!

It is because of Prandtl that today we all can
Describe the lift and drag of wings of finite span.
If it weren’t for him, then the brothers Wright
Would probably never have taken flight.

And so we come to the end of this story,
But it’s not the end of the tales of glory!
The list goes on, and it will grow too
Maybe the next pioneer will be you?

Archimedes
287-212 B.C.
Sextus Julius Frontinus
40-103 B.C.
Leonardo daVinci
1452-1519
Galileo Galilei
1564-1642
Evangelista Torricelli
1608-1647
Edme Mariotte
1620-1684
Blaise Pascal
1623-1662
Sir Isaac Newton
1642-1727
Henri de Pitot
1695-1771
Daniel Bernoulli
1700-1782
Leonard Euler
1707-1783
Jean de Rond d’Alembert
1717-1783
Antoine Chezy
1718-1798
Jean Charles Borda
1733-1799
Joseph-Louis Lagrange
1736-1813
Giovanni Battista Venturi
1746-1822
Pierre-Simon Laplace
1749-1827
Claude Louis Marie Navier
1785-1836
Augustin Louis de Cauchy
1789-1857
Gotthilf H. Ludwig Hagen
1797-1884
Jean Louis Poiseuille
1799-1869
Henri Philibert Darcy
1803-1858
Julius Weisbach
1806-1871

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William Froude
1810-1879
Robert Manning
1816-1897
George Gabriel Stokes
1819-1903
Ernst Mach
1838-1916
Osborne Reynolds
1842-1912
Lord Rayleigh [John William Strutt] 1842-1919
Vincez Strouhal
1850-1922
Edgar Buckingham
1867-1940
Moritz Weber
1871-1951
Ludwig Prandtl
1875-1953
Lewis Ferry Moody
1880-1953
Theodor von Karman
1881-1963
Paul Richard Heinrich Blasius
1883-1970

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