Birth of aerodynamics and aerospace engineering

The birth of aerodynamics and aerospace engineering In the early days giant leaps were taken towards aviation, but almost no progress could be achieved. From the records it is found that mankind has been toying with the idea of flying for the past thousands of years, and was experimenting with aerodynamics.

There is innumerable number of instances when magicians have tried to fly towards heaven like birds. It is said that the magician took to the sky as people gathered below in huge numbers, and he rose to the sky with the help of the demons, and a prayer said at St. Peters, drove the demons away.

As years went by, people started to think about the theories behind flying. There were several theories which were forwarded, but the Newton’s law defied any opportunity to fly.

It was late 1800’s that the topic of aviation was seriously taken up. The thought of flying was regarded as an important contradiction with the birds flying in the heaven whiles this feat eluding the humans’ understanding.

There were several technical meetings held in the 1890’s to find out what force makes the birds and some insects fly which cannot be imitated by non-living objects. This meeting conferred upon the observation that a bird could glide through the sky without any noticeable motion of its wings, losing a little or no altitude. This was a mystery for some time to come. It was then concluded that, the birds use some sort of energy which they convert into a small turbulence which they use to fly.

This theory was later abandoned and it was thought that the birds used more of the up draft rather than the turbulence.

Aeronautics was not taken seriously for many years there-after, except for a handful of people, having interest in aviation. One of them was William Henson, who went on to design the Aerial Steam Carriage and had patented the work. This was never build physically and was only a design work for publicity in order to raise venture capital.
This never materialized since both the design and the attempt to raise the funds, were much ahead of time.

The work related to what was done by Henson was continued by two people in England, John Stringfellow and Federick Marriott, who further developed the concepts and built several models, including a plane powered by steam which flew in 1848.
The two also developed models of tri-planes which flew in 1860’s. Marriott went on to and continued the work on flying machines, and eventually made a name as a publisher in San Francisco. He went on to design and built large wing planes spanning 28 feet and tri-planes, which he named after Leland Stanford in the 1870’s. He popularized aviation long before it was seriously thought of and the technology became feasible.

Much later, the concept and method of aerodynamic flows became a technology, with computers analyzing the data in simulated conditions.
The method of computerized wing design of aircrafts evolved, where analysis of the test patterns of such designs with different elements were computed to find out the suitability of the specifications considered.

The matter of the weather conditions in flight, the variations in temperatures, the stress of the aircraft, and others became more and more apparent in aerospace design engineering.