Introduction

One might argue that ship resistance is not relevant to the activities of a mechanical engineer. This text is about the construction of an empirical science and the work of Froude (1810 – 1879) is woven into that science because it showed that the testing of models is a way of gathering data about the way that flowing fluids interact with solids to produce forces on them. His work opened the way for wind tunnels and prepared the way for the computer modelling that is now used in tandem with model testing to reduce the amount of physical testing that is needed to achieve some result. It was a seminal piece of work. Froude’s papers have been published and figure 11-1 is the flyleaf of the book. I enjoyed reading them.