Charru, 2023

Noteworthy comments about the Institut aérotechnique:

• "Maurain and his wife made the IAT an active intellectual community where influential academic and political personalities liked to gather (e.g., Jean Perrin, Paul Langevin, Marie Curie, Paul Valéry, Léon Blum), as Camille Marbo, novelist and wife of the mathematician Émile Borel, recounted in her memoirs"
• "After the war, Maurain and Toussaint, at the IAT in Saint-Cyr, obtained as spoils of war confidential reports (the Technische Berichte) from Prandtl's laboratory at Göttingen. These reports provided numerous tests of formulas for lift and resistance coefficients of wings of finite length, intended to validate the Prandtl theory of the lifting line (Eckert 2006, section 2.6). Toussaint redid these tests for various wings and multiplanes. His results, published in a widely read French scientific journal (Toussaint 1921), confirmed the validity of Prandtl's formulas and their great practical utility."

In contrast, Charru writes, the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics resisted the "circulation theory of lift until after the 1926 publication of The Elements of Aerofoil and Airscrew Theory by Hermann Glauert, which "imposed Prandtl's views".

Original title	Fluid Mechanics in France in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
Simple title	Fluid Mechanics in France in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
Authors	François Charru
Date	2023
Countries	US
Languages	en
Keywords	France, Institut aérotechnique, Basil Zaharoff, Sorbonne, Charles Maurain, Albert Toussaint, Gustave Eiffel, Lord Rayleigh, Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, lift, aerodynamics
Journal	Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics
Related to aircraft?	1
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