Abstract
This chapter starts dealing with the transition from speculation to experience that took place in the two centuries going from the birth of Leonardo da Vinci to the death of Galileo Galilei, showing how the wind culture received stimuli from the evolution pervading the various knowledge sectors, starting with the ones connected to the appearance and diffusion of weather instruments and measurements. Similarly, the revitalised wind culture drew essential concepts and principles from the basic disciplines that arose and developed from the sixteenth century onward, first mathematics and the related tools capable of automatically performing complex and repetitive computations, probability theory, destined to become an essential tool for wind engineering, mechanics, in its broadest meaning, fluid dynamics, that mostly provided direct and innovative contributions to the wind culture, thermodynamics, essential to interpret the Earth atmosphere as a giant thermal machine and as a key issue for the development of the steam machine, which bounded its progress to the measure and knowledge of wind, the gas kinetic theory and an essential reference for the first theories about turbulence. The chapter ends with a synthesis of the main aspects characterising the origins and the first developments of structural mechanics and dynamics, two matters that became increasingly vital to protect human works from wind actions.
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Notes
- 1.
Tycho Brahe made dials that, rotated in any vertical plane, measured the position of celestial bodies; they are considered the ancestors of theodolites.
- 2.
According to some bibliographic sources, the first thermometer was invented by the Persian scientist Avicenna (980–1037) in the early eleventh century.
- 3.
Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) described a mercury thermoscope in Magnes, sive de arte magnetica (1641).
- 4.
It is said the idea of the condensation hygrometer goes back to a hot and humid day in which the Great Duke Ferdinando II was impressed by the external surface of a glass cup containing a cold beverage; it first misted up, then became covered with water drops, with no liquid coming out from the container.
- 5.
Robinson itself, afterwards, built three-cup devices (Sect. 6.1).
- 6.
The oldest device to perform repetitive calculations, the abacus or counting-frame, was known since the twentieth century in China.
- 7.
In 1967, a group of American researchers uncovered, in the National Spanish Library in Madrid, some finds of Leonardo including the drawing in Fig. 3.14a, now known as the Madrid Code. Roberto Guatelli remembered that a similar drawing was present in the Atlantic Code. He put the two diagrams side by side and, in 1968, built a replica of what is nowadays called Leonardo da Vinci’s calculator. Many point out that this replica is based on interpretations and intuitions that are absent from Leonardo’s works.
- 8.
Using the description provided by Ada Lovelace Byron (1815–1852), the daughter of the English poet and a disciple of Babbage, the analytical engine was made up of four parts: a memory store, where the temporary data used for the calculation were stored; an arithmetic unit, called mill and driven by a steam engine, in which the operations on the numbers taken from the memory were carried out; a transfer device between the memory and the arithmetic unit, working both ways; a device for the input of data and the output of results. This machine, amazingly modern for its time, performed logic control operation and made use of punched cards on which the calculation program and the numeric data were recorded.
- 9.
In 1687, a book attributed to Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was found; the second part contained the solutions of various problems concerning probability theory (Reeckening van kanssen), including the first problem of Huygens . The French mathematician Pierre Rémond de Montmort (1678–1719) was the first to provide the complete solution of the five problems in Essai d’analyse sur les jeux de hazard (1708).
- 10.
Some affirm that Bayes’ theorem had been discovered, some years before, by the English scientist and mathematician Nicholas Saunderson (1682–1739).
- 11.
The first expression of the normal distribution dates back to 1753, when Abraham de Moivre (1667–1754), a French scholar of gambling, obtained a particular form of the same as a limit case of the binomial distribution with the increase of the experiments.
- 12.
2 h2σ2 = 1, being σ the standard deviation of the error.
- 13.
The distinction between mass and weight enunciated by Newton implicitly appeared in the works of Galilei and is explicitly mentioned in a writing of Giovan Battista Baliani (1582–1666), Captain of the Genoese Archers, who distinguished “moles” from “pundus” [2].
- 14.
Together with Denis Diderot (1713–1784), a French man of letters and philosopher, D’Alembert conceived and directed the redaction of the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des mestiers (1751–1772), a splendid picture of the knowledge of man in the eighteenth century. L’ Encyclopédie consists of 18 volumes: the first 17 made up its body, and the eighteenth contains tables, supplements and illustrations. D’Alembert dissociated himself from Diderot in 1757, because of their different views about science and scientific method, when the first 7 volumes had already been written.
- 15.
Around 1770, when he was very young, Laplace developed the homonymous transform; thanks to it, he put the solution of a system of differential equations with suitable initial conditions back to the solution of a system of algebraic equations.
- 16.
In 1776, Laplace wrote Philosophique sur les probabilités, in which he maintained that the laws of time and nature implied a strict determinism; from this, it can be inferred the foreseeability of future states, if an initial state is known. With this concept, Laplace anticipated by a century and a half the foundations of the meteorological forecasts, enunciated by Bjerknes and Richardson at the beginning of the twentieth century (Sect. 6.3).
- 17.
Between 1799 and 1825, Laplace published Mécanique céleste. It contained a study of the vertical balance of the air starting from the observations of Pascal and Perier (Sect. 3.2); since atmospheric pressure decreased with height, air was subject to an upward gradient force; Laplace expressed the balance of this force with the gravity one and obtained the hydrostatic law.
- 18.
Starting from the Eulerian form of the equations of motion, Helmholtz studied the balance of the separation surface between two masses of air with different temperatures and motions; in this way, he explained the origin of fronts (Sect. 6.3) by applying the concept of fluid dynamics instability.
- 19.
In 1829, Stephenson won the contract for the Liverpool–Manchester railway, taking part, with his Rocket, to a competition between four participants. Victory was far too easy: an opponent was banned because there was a horse hidden inside his vehicle; the other two locomotives broke down along the route and did not arrive at the finishing line. Rocket carried 13 tons and 36 people, travelling at 36 kph.
- 20.
Traité élémentaire de chimie included some ambiguous elements. There is a sentence in which heat is described as “a real and material substance, a very thin fluid that seeps through the molecules of all the bodies and moves them away”. The terms “calorique” and “lumière” were placed at the top of the list of simple or elementary substances. For these reasons, not everyone recognises Lavoisier as the main denigrator of the theory of phlogiston [43].
- 21.
The Swiss physician Jean Paul Marat is the author of Recherches physiques de la feu (1780), in which he criticized and refused Lavoisier’s theory of combustion. Lavoisier made the mistake of ridiculing him in public. Subsequently, when he became a Jacobin leader of the French Revolution, Marat launched the fatal attack to Lavoisier from his newspaper, L’ami du peuple.
- 22.
Using the relation provided by the German physicist Max Planck (1858–1947), the first principle of thermodynamics is simply the principle of energy conservation applied to the phenomena involving the production or absorption of heat.
- 23.
The system formed by the law of continuity, the Navier–Stokes’ equations and the first principle of thermodynamics provides a complete description of the state of fluids and of the air in particular.
- 24.
The foehn wind (Sect. 6.4) occurs when a moving mass of air meets a mountain and is forced to climb along its ridges. If the mountain is high enough, the ascending air condensates, causing rains in the valleys and snow on the peaks; after becoming dry and cold, then, it passes over the crest and descends the opposite ridge, adiabatically heating itself. This type of wind is frequent along the Alpine arc, especially on the Swiss and Austrian sides, and in many other countries, where it assumes local denominations. The most well-known ones are the chinook, which blows on the east side of the Rocky Mountains, the samul, on the Iranian mountains of Kurdistan, and the bohorok, which in Sumatra is linked to the monsoon.
- 25.
Around 1500, Leonardo da Vinci provided pioneering contributions to material science and structural mechanics. In 1620, Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637) observed that the fibres at the convex and concave edge of a bent beam are respectively tensioned and compressed. Galilei and his successors demonstrated how such an observation was not necessarily foregone in that age.
- 26.
Hooke illustrated his discoveries through three anagrams. The first one, “Ut pendet continuum flexile sic stabit continuum rigidum inversum”, suggests that a stable arch must have the (inverted) shape of a catenary. The second, “Ut tensio sic vis”, establishes that the power of a spring is proportional to its tension. The third, “Ut pondus sic tensio”, indicates the proportionality between tension and extension.
- 27.
Before Galilei vibrations were interpreted, at popular level, as the effect of a kind of sympathy of strings as regards to the vibrating one. They attracted the interest of Leonardo da Vinci who wrote: “The blow struck in the bell will make a similar bell reply and move a lot; the played string of a lute will make another similar string of similar voice in another lute reply and move, and this you will see by placing a straw over a string similar to the played string”.
- 28.
The same model had previously been studied by Huygens only for the case N = 1.
- 29.
The father of Giordano Riccati , Jacopo Riccati (1676–1754), attempted to establish the first dynamic theory of elasticity for a long time.
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Solari, G. (2019). The Wind and the New Science. In: Wind Science and Engineering. Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18815-3_3
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