HOW THE TERM "SHOCK WAVES" CAME INTO BEING

The present paper considers the history of works on shock waves beginning from S. D. Poisson′s publication in 1808. It expounds on the establishment of the Polytechnic School in Paris and its fellows and teachers — Gaspard Monge, Lazare Carnot, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, Simeon Denis Poisson, Henri Navier, Augustin Louis Cauchy, Joseph Liouville, Ademar de Saint-Venant, Henri Regnault, Pierre Dulong, Emile Jouguet, Pierre Duhem, and others. It also describes the participation in the development of the shock wave theory of young scientists from the universities of Cambridge, among which were George Airy, James Challis, Samuel Earnshaw, George Stokes, Lord Rayleigh, Lord Kelvin, and James Maxwell, as well as of scientists from the Göttingen University, Germany — Bernhard Riemann and Ernst Heinrich Weber. The pioneer works on shock waves of the Scottish engineer William Renkin, the French artillerist Pierre-Henri Hugoniot, German scientists August Toepler and Ernst Mach, and a Hungarian scientist Gyözö Zemplén are also considered.
The present paper considers the history of works on shock waves beginning from S. D. Poisson′s publication in 1808. It expounds on the establishment of the Polytechnic School in Paris and its fellows and teachers — Gaspard Monge, Lazare Carnot, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, Simeon Denis Poisson, Henri Navier, Augustin Louis Cauchy, Joseph Liouville, Ademar de Saint-Venant, Henri Regnault, Pierre Dulong, Emile Jouguet, Pierre Duhem, and others. It also describes the participation in the development of the shock wave theory of young scientists from the universities of Cambridge, among which were George Airy, James Challis, Samuel Earnshaw, George Stokes, Lord Rayleigh, Lord Kelvin, and James Maxwell, as well as of scientists from the Göttingen University, Germany — Bernhard Riemann and Ernst Heinrich Weber. The pioneer works on shock waves of the Scottish engineer William Renkin, the French artillerist Pierre-Henri Hugoniot, German scientists August Toepler and Ernst Mach, and a Hungarian scientist Gyözö Zemplén are also considered.
Author:  N. A. Fomin
Keywords:  shock wave, explosion, combustion, shock adiabat, sound waves, supersonic flows
Page:  1047