Mathematicians versus Practical Men:. The Founding of the Advisory. Committee for Aeronautics

In the meantime every aeroplane is to be regarded as a collection of unsolved math­ematical problems; and it would have been quite easy for these problems to have been solved years ago, before the first aeroplane flew.

g. h. bryan, “Researches in Aeronautical Mathematics” (1916)1

The successful aeroplane, like many other pieces of mechanism, is a huge mass of compromise.

Howard t. wright, “Aeroplanes from an Engineers Point of View” (1912)2

The Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the ACA) was founded in 1909. This Whitehall committee provided the scientific expertise that guided Brit­ish research in aeronautics in the crucial years up to, and during, the Great War of 1914-18. From the outset the ACA was, and was intended to be, the brains in the body of British aeronautics.3 It offered to the emerging field of aviation the expertise of some of the country’s leading scientists and engi­neers. In 1919 it was renamed the Aeronautical Research Committee, and in this form the committee, and its successors, continued to perform its guid­ing role for many years. After 1909 the institutional structure of aeronauti­cal research in Britain soon came to command respect abroad. When the United States government began to organize its own national research effort in aviation in 1915, it used the Advisory Committee as its model.4 The result­ing American National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the NACA, was later turned into NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The British structure, however, was abolished by the Thatcher administration in 1980, some seventy years after its inception.5

If the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was meant to offer the best, there were some in Britain, especially in the early years, who argued that, in fact, it gave the worst. For these critics the ACA held back the field of Brit­ish aeronautics and encouraged the wrong tendencies. The reason for these strongly divergent opinions was that aviation in general, and aeronautical sci­ence in particular, fell across some of the many cultural fault-lines running through British society. These fault lines were capable of unleashing powerful

and destructive forces. From the moment of its inception the Advisory Com­mittee was subject to the fraught relations, and conflicting interests, that divided those in government from those in industry; the representatives of the state from those seeking profit in the market place; the university-based academic scientist from the entrepreneur-engineer; the “mathematician” and “theorist” from the “practical man.” Throughout its entire life these struc­tural tensions dominated the context in which the ACA had to work.6