Re: [Phys-l] Bernoulli's Principle

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 12/21/2007 09:05 PM, Joseph Bellina wrote:
> I don't know if this a related issue, but in the early 20th century,  
> at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington England there was a  
> Scaling committee, with included the premier mathematicians and  
> physicists of the day, and chair, as I recall by Lord Rayleigh.   
> Scaling issue at hand was how to take wind tunnel data from models  
> and scale it up so the results applied to real aeroplanes which at  
> the time were fond of falling down and killing the pilot.  It was not  
> an easy task.

Haven't we had this conversation before?  Back in November of 2000 I 
wrote:

I wonder if this is the same committee as is mentioned in
  http://www.eng.man.ac.uk/historic/reynolds/oreync.htm

namely a committee including Reynolds, Kelvin, and Froude as well as
Rayleigh.  This committee (especially Reynolds) produced quite a number of
important papers on dimensional analysis and scaling laws (aka similarity
laws).

All this considerably predates the founding of the NPL (1902) and the
invention of airplanes (1903) -- the committee was concerned with the
safety of _ships_.