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Interesting. This is the first I have heard of him relative to gas turbine development.
"Ægidius Elling - Wikipedia" gives some of the basics.
Thank you for digging him out.
There is almost always an exception to any use of first, fastest, highest, or any superlative.
I avoid them whenever possible ... they're usually only useful in boozy bar bets and political campaign claims.
Isaac Newton? One of hist thought experiments involved a cannon with arbitrarily high muzzle velocity.I'd seen a PBS documentary on space flight years ago. It demonstrated, thru animation, an artillerist calculated velocity and angle that would be needed to achieve orbit. The cannon ball, though falling, wouldn't hit the ground. Would that have been this officer?
This is also the secret of flight. Throw yourself at the ground and miss.
Soviets also claimed to have invented the telephone around 20 years before Alexander G. Bell, and the automobile and just about everything else newer than animal skin clothing.
A number of other countries have exaggerated their own inventiveness but I don't think anybody claimed to have invented practically everything like the Soviets did in the 1920s thru 50s. They toned things down considerably in later years.
Remember that winglets, spoilers, turbulators, laminar flow, variable geometry among other techniques were developed for or extensively tested and proven on sailplanes before being commonly adopted for all aircraft.
Yes, Alexander Popov was named the "father of radio" in the Soviet literature. Very few knew Marconi: radio enthusiasts and engineers with access to foreign literature and some in civil aviation and merchant marine.My father worked in the telecom industry in the 1990'ies, and was doing some projects in Russia. Talking with them about the history of radio communications, they hadn't heard about Marconi. Turned out in school they had been taught it was some Russian guy.
A stepping stone to the industrial gas turbine was the fascinating Velox boilerThe industrial gas turbine pre dates WW I.
The theory was there, the execution was not.
They could not recover enough power from the turbine to turn the compressor fast enough to keep the engine running.
They could spin the test rigs fast enough to start with external power but they could not keep running on their own. Being industrial machines they also weighed huge amounts for designed power. The idea was power fans/compressors for steel making or other industries and replace steam engines and boilers.
This is also why some gov officials didn't want to fund research, the only examples they had seen/read about weighed well over 10lbs per hp. Getting a working engine to weight 1/10th of that was sticking point.
IIRC the RN evaluated the Velox boiler (mid 1930'ies?), promising an order of magnitude better power density than the Admiralty pattern three drum boiler. Wasn't adopted though.A stepping stone to the industrial gas turbine was the fascinating Velox boiler
Brown Boveri was the pioneer of practical gas turbines as well as marine turbochargers (a market it still dominates)
John Roncz. One of the greatest, but alas one who will never get the recognition he deserves. He worked on Voyager, Pond Racer, the RV-9 has his aerofoil and plenty more.
After he passed a few month back, I contacted EAA to ask what was being done to celebrate his life. To my surprise they did nothing.
There is a forum at AirVenture about him by one of his collegues.
I'll be there.
You mean they invented modesty after bragging about Soviet accomplishemnts?Soviets also claimed to have invented the telephone around 20 years before Alexander G. Bell, and the automobile and just about everything else newer than animal skin clothing.
A number of other countries have exaggerated their own inventiveness but I don't think anybody claimed to have invented practically everything like the Soviets did in the 1920s thru 50s. They toned things down considerably in later years.
They also invented falling out of windows as a medical condition.You mean they invented modesty after bragging about Soviet accomplishemnts?
As to WWII era aerodynamicists, I would list:
...
Andrei Tupolev (Tupolev)
Alexander Yakovlev (Yakovlev)
Artem Mikoyan (MiG)
Mikhail Gurevich (MiG)
...
Sergey Ilyushin (Ilyushin)
...
Semyon Lavochkin (Lavochkin)
The list completely erroneously includes the names of Soviet general designers. They were usually not specialists in aerodynamics. In Soviet design bureaus there were departments of general design, where aerodynamic schemes were proposed, and departments of aerodynamics, where calculations and optimization of these schemes were carried out. Sometimes the aerodynamics department could influence the choice of scheme or even offer its own variant. In the 1930s in the USSR, in general, ALL aircraft design was performed at the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI), where the same aerodynamicists worked for different design groups. In 1939 the design work was reorganized, leaving TsAGI only general and research issues, and transferring all design to separate experimental design bureaus....
Mikhail Simonov
This is a good explanation.The list completely erroneously includes the names of Soviet general designers. They were usually not specialists in aerodynamics. In Soviet design bureaus there were departments of general design, where aerodynamic schemes were proposed, and departments of aerodynamics, where calculations and optimization of these schemes were carried out. Sometimes the aerodynamics department could influence the choice of scheme or even offer its own variant. In the 1930s in the USSR, in general, ALL aircraft design was performed at the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI), where the same aerodynamicists worked for different design groups. In 1939 the design work was reorganized, leaving TsAGI only general and research issues, and transferring all design to separate experimental design bureaus.
Of all the Soviet designers listed, perhaps only Mikhail Gurevich had any experience as an aerodynamicist, but I'm not entirely sure about that.
Mikhail Simonov was a specialist in control systems.
Artem Mikoyan was more of an official than a designer.
Semyon Lavochkin was more of a specialist in structural strength.
Each experimental design bureau had its own chief aerodynamicist, for example, at Myasishchev in the 1950s and at Sukhoi in the 1960s it was Isaac Baslavsky, at Tupolev - Alexander Sterlin, then - Georgy Cheremukhin, and in later times almost every family of machines had its own chief aerodynamicist (for example, Moisey Tuger in Tu-95/-142), in Ilyushin Design Bureau since the late 1970s (General Designer Novozhilov) - Igor Vasin (I do not know who was before him), Lavochkin - Naum Heifets, and Yakovlev - Georgy Pulkhrov (1950-1960s).
Such outstanding aerodynamicists as Ivan Ostoslavsky, Vladmir Struminsky, Sergey Khristianovich, Yakov Serebriysky, Peter Krasilshchikov and many others who were directly involved both in the choice of the scheme of new airplanes and in the process of improving aerodynamics (in addition to fundamental research) worked in TsAGI.
To consider all airplane designers as aerodynamicists (even purely applied ones) is a big mistake.
Roberto Oros di Bartini definitely has merits in the field of aerodynamics - AFAIK, he studied supersonic wing profiles in order to minimize the displacement of the pressure focus. IIRC, he called them "R" type profiles. But Bartini's name is not known as widely as other Soviet designers - he headed the experimental design bureau for a very short time, and some of his airplanes were named after other designers (for example, the Stal-7, better known as the DB-240/Er-2).This is a good explanation.
Probably, only Antonov can be considered as the "aerodynamicist" among the chief designers in the USSR.
Robert Bartini, maybe?