Known aerodynamicists?

I've put some names out there but didn't want to hog the thread.

Still haven't seen anyone suggest Jack Northrop, so there it is.

ThomasP said:

Interesting. This is the first I have heard of him relative to gas turbine development.

"Ægidius Elling - Wikipedia" gives some of the basics.

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ThomasP said:

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.

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bye, the sit editing function seems to have gone wonky

weird <eerie music>

As to WWII era aerodynamicists, I would list:
Ed Horkey (NAA)
Irv Ashkenas (NAA)
Ed Schmued (NAA)
Bill Sears (Northrop)
Alexander Kartveli (Republic)
Sydney Camm (Hawker)
Kelly Johnson (Lockheed)
Irv Culver (Lockheed)
Ed Wells (Boeing)
George Schairer (Consolidated and Boeing)
Bev Shenstone (Supermarine)
Joe Smith (Supermarine)
Kurt Tank (Focke Wulf)
Hans Multhopp (Focke Wulf)
Sighard Hoerner (Fieseler, Junkers and Messerschmitt)
Siegfried Günter (Junkers)
Robert Lusser (Messerschmitt and Heinkel)
Art Raymond (Douglas Santa Monica)
Ed Heinemann (Douglas El Segundo)
A.M.O. Smith (Douglas El Segundo)
Ludwig Bölkow (Messerschmitt)
Alexander Lippisch (Messerschmitt)
Gustav Lachmann (Handley Page)
Adolf Busemann (AVA)
Dietrich Küchemann (AVA)
Johanna Weber (AVA)
Albert Betz (AVA)
Andrei Tupolev (Tupolev)
Alexander Yakovlev (Yakovlev)
Artem Mikoyan (MiG)
Mikhail Gurevich (MiG)
Jiro Horikoshi (Mitsubishi)
Marcel Bloch (Bloch)
Bob Hall (Grumman)
Hideo Itokawa (Nakajima)
Rex Beisel (Vought)
Arthur Gouge (Shorts)
Peyton Magruder (Martin)
Sergey Ilyushin (Ilyushin)
Isaac Laddon (Consolidated)
Roy Chadwick (Avro)
Roberto Longhi (Reggiane)
G.R. Volkert (Handley Page)
Robert Woods (Bell)
Semyon Lavochkin (Lavochkin)
Celestino Rosatelli (Fiat)
George Carter (Gloster)
Rex Pierson (Vickers)
Takeo Doi (Kawasaki)
Don Berlin (Curtiss and GM)
Bob Withington (Boeing)
Vic Ganzer (NACA and Boeing)
Dick Hutton (Grumman)
Gordon Israel (Grumman)
Marcel Riffard (Caudron and Rateau)
Teddy Petter (Westland)
Geoffery de Havilland (de Havilland)
James McDonnell (Martin and McDonnell)
Nicolas Payen (Payen)
Zygmunt Puławski (PZL)
Wsiewołod Jakimiuk (PZL, SNCASE and de Havilland)
Wieslaw Stepniewski (de Havilland)
Jerzy Dąbrowski (PZL)
H.B. Squire (RAE)
A.D. Young (RAE)
W.A. Mair (RAE)
John Zalovcik (NACA)
Lawrence Clousing (NACA)
Welko Gasich (NACA)
Abe Silverstein (NACA)
James Nissen (NACA)
Herbert Hoover (NACA)
Howard Matthews (NACA)
Itiro Tani (Tokyo Imperial Univ)
Theodore von Kármán (Caltech)
Qian Xuesen (Caltech)
Tatsuo Hasegawa (Tachikawa)
Yasuzu Naito (Nakajima)
Hideki Itokawa (Nakajima)
Tsutomu Fujino (Mitsubishi)

SaparotRob said:

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.

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Isaac Newton? One of hist thought experiments involved a cannon with arbitrarily high muzzle velocity.

Shortround6 said:

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.

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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.

fannum said:

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.

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Hey Fan, how did they power variable-geometry wings on sailplanes? Was this aux power, or regulated by slipstream, or what?

I've never heard this before, now I've got a bug in my ear and you're to blame so dig it out!

Henri-Marie Coanda
Mikhail Simonov

z42 said:

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.

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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.
On the merchant vessels, "marconi" was a popular nickname for the radio operator. I never heard anyone calling marine radio operators "popov", by the way.
Ah, and there was a Soviet movie about Popov where Marconi was portrayed as a foreign evil scientist who stole Popov's invention...

Anyone know soemthing about Gotthold Matthias, aerodynamicist at Focke Wulf?

I just learned that he was an aerodynamicist at Focke Wulf.

Shortround6 said:

The 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.

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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)

Reluctant Poster said:

A stepping stone to the industrial gas turbine was the fascinating Velox boiler

Velox boiler - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Brown Boveri was the pioneer of practical gas turbines as well as marine turbochargers (a market it still dominates)

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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.