This timeline describes the major developments, both experimental and theoretical understanding of fluid mechanics and continuum mechanics. This timeline includes developments in:
Theoretical models of hydrostatics, hydrodynamics and aerodynamics. Hydraulics Elasticity Mechanical waves and acoustics Valves and fluidics Gas laws Turbulence modeling Plasticity and rheology Quantum fluids like Bose–Einstein condensates and superfluidity Microfluidics
Prehistory and antiquity
Before 3000 BC – Civilization starts by settling around rivers, coast and lakes. 3000 BC – Irrigation techniques develop in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. Indus Valley Civilisation develops city-wide drainage systems and toilet systems. Egyptians develop reed boats. 2300 BC – Construction of the Nahrawan Canal. 2000–1500 BC – First dams constructed in India to control water. 1700 BC – Windmill are used in Babylonia to pump water. 14th century BC – Water clock are developed in Egypt under the reign of Amenhotep III. Clepsydra water clock design is developed in ancient Greece. 6th century BC – Theodorus of Samos invents the water level. Ancient Rome's drainage system is designed during the reign of Tarquinius Priscus. Rome's Cloaca Maxima is constructed by lining a river bed with stone. Tunnel of Eupalinos is constructed in Samos. 4th century BC – Mencius describes how to measure an elephant using displacement of water. Development of rain gauges in India. Aqua Appia first Roman aqueduct is built in Rome. 3rd century BC – Archimedes published On Floating Bodies describing the general principle for buoyancy and hydrostatics. Archimedes develops Archimedes' screw for water extraction. 2nd century BC – The aqueduct Aqua Tepula and Aqua Marcia aqueducts are completed in Rome. Zhang Heng of Han dynasty designs the first known seismoscope. 1st century BC – Frontinus publishes his treatise De aquaeductu on Roman water engineering. Hero of Alexandria makes a series of experiments and devices with fluids, including the aeolipile steam device and wind harnessing devices.
Middle ages
8th–13th century – Arab Agricultural Revolution 725 – Northumbrian monk Bede publishes The Reckoning of Time, which includes a quantitative description of the influence of the moon and the sun over the tides. c. 850– Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi (Albumasar) publishes his Kitab al-madkhal al-kabir recording the Moon position and tides, he recognizes that there are two tides in day. 850 – The Book of Ingenious Devices is published by the Banū Mūsā brothers, describing a number of early automatic controls using fluid mechanics. 1206 – Ismail al-Jazari invented water-powered programmable automata/robots and water music devices.Professor Noel Sharkey, A 13th Century Programmable Robot (Archive), University of Sheffield.
Renaissance
1432 – Portuguese develop caravels for long-distance ocean travel. 1450 –Nicholas of Cusa publishes his experiments with fluids in Idiota de staticis experimentis, including the first proposal to measure air moisture using wool. 1480-1510 – Leonardo da Vinci develops the first sophisticated parachute, the first descriptions of capillary action, and the first turbine water wheels designs. 1586 – Simon Stevin publishes De Beghinselen des Waterwichts ("Principles on the weight of water") on hydrostatics. He first details the hydrostatic paradox. 1596 – Galileo Galilei produces the first (Galileo) thermometer.
17th century
1619 – Benedetto Castelli published Della Misura dell'Acque Correnti ("On the Measurement of Running Waters"), one of the foundations of modern hydrodynamics. 1619 – William Harvey provides first model of the human circulatory system. 1624 – Jan Baptist van Helmont coins the term "gas". 1631 – René Descartes first describes the principle of the mercury barometer. 1643 – Evangelista Torricelli provides a relation between the speed of fluid flowing from an orifice to the height of fluid above the opening, given by Torricelli's law. He also builds a mercury barometer and does a series of experiments on vacuum. 1650 – Otto von Guericke invents the first vacuum pump. 1653–1663 Blaise Pascal establishes Pascal's law of hydrostatics. 1662-1678 – Robert Boyle and Edme Mariotte independently discover a gas law that describes the relationship between pressure and volume given by Boyle's law (or Boyle-Mariotte's law). 1678 – Robert Hooke publishes Hooke's law describing linear deformation of a spring. 1687 – Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), introducing the Newton's laws of motion of classical mechanics. He also introduces the concept of Newtonian fluid.
18th century
1713 – Antoine Parent introduces the concept of shear stress. 1714 – Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit develops the mercury-in-glass thermometer along the Fahrenheit temperature scale. 1718–1719 – James Jurin writes the law of capillary action, known as Jurin's law. 1727 – Leonhard Euler introduces linear elasticity and the Young's modulus. 1732 – Henri Pitot discovers how to measure the pressure from the speed of a fluid using a Pitot tube. 1738 – Daniel Bernoulli publishes Hydrodynamica discussing the mathematical relation between pressure and velocity of fluids according to Bernoulli's principle. 1742 – Anders Celsius designs a thermometer with the Celsius scale. 1744 – Euler introduces the concept of deformation and strain. 1747 – Jean le Rond d'Alembert's formula for the solutions of the wave equation in a string gets published.D'Alembert (1747) "Recherches sur la courbe que forme une corde tenduë mise en vibration" (Researches on the curve that a tense cord [string] forms [when] set into vibration), Histoire de l'académie royale des sciences et belles lettres de Berlin, vol. 3, pages 214-219. See also: D'Alembert (1747) "Suite des recherches sur la courbe que forme une corde tenduë mise en vibration" (Further researches on the curve that a tense cord forms [when] set into vibration), Histoire de l'académie royale des sciences et belles lettres de Berlin, vol. 3, pages 220-249. See also: D'Alembert (1750) "Addition au mémoire sur la courbe que forme une corde tenduë mise en vibration," Histoire de l'académie royale des sciences et belles lettres de Berlin, vol. 6, pages 355-360. 1752 – D'Alembert show an inconsistency of treating fluids as inviscid incompressible fluids, known as d'Alembert's paradox. 1757 – Euler introduces the Euler equations of fluid dynamics for incompressible and non-viscous flow. He also introduces the mathematical model for buckling. 1764 – James Watt develops his steam water condenser leading to efficient steam engines. 1765 – Jean-Charles de Borda experiments with whirling arm experiments. He corrects the available theories of air friction. 1766 – de Borda publishes "Mémoire sur l'Écoulement des Fluides par les Orifices des Vases" on hydraulics and resistance of fluid through orifices. He comes up with Borda–Carnot equation. 1768 – Antoine de Chézy provides a semi-empirical formula for resistance of open channel flow, described by Chézy formula. 1775 – Pierre-Simon Girard invents the water turbine. 1776 – Charles Bossut, supervised by the Marquis de Condorcet and d'Alembert, publishes Nouvelles expériences sur la resistance de fluides, a report on a series experiments to test currents theories of hydraulics. 1775-76 – Pierre-Simon Laplace introduces the mathematical theory for tidal forces on oceans. 1779 – Pierre-Louis-Georges du Buat publishes Principes de l'hydraulique ("Principles of hydraulics"), with semiempirical equations for the flow of water through pipes and open channels. 1780 – Jacques Charles discover a gas law that describes the relationship between temperature and volume, given by Charles's law. 1782 – The Montgolfier brothers invent the hot air balloon. 1785 – First theories of friction are introduced by Charles-Augustin de Coulomb. 1787 – Ernst Chladni, publishes his experiments on vibrational modes of thin solid surfaces, describing the Chladni patterns created using a violin bow, based on previous experiments by Hooke. 1797 – Giovanni Battista Venturi discovers the Venturi effect. 1799 – George Cayley introduces modern fixed wing-machines and identifies three important factors for flying machines: thrust, lift, drag, and weight.
19th century
1801 – Robert Fulton develops the first submarine. 1805-1806 – The development of Young–Laplace equation by Thomas Young and improved by Laplace. 1808-1809 – Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac describes the law of combining gases. 1811–1812 – Amedeo Avogadro and André-Marie Ampère independently discover a gas law relating volume and quantity of gas, given by Avogadro's law (or Avogadro-Ampère's law). 1821 – Claude-Louis Navier introduces viscosity in to Euler equations of fluids. 1821 – Sophie Germain wins a contest of the French Academy of Sciences for providing a partial theory for the vibration of an elastic surfaces. 1827 – Augustin-Louis Cauchy introduces the Cauchy stress tensor and the concept of stress in elasticity. 1827 – Robert Brown (botanist, born 1773), identifies the Brownian motion of pollen grains suspended in water. 1831– Michael Faraday first describes vibrational modes in liquids, known as Faraday waves.Faraday, M. (1831) "On a peculiar class of acoustical figures; and on certain forms assumed by a group of particles upon vibrating elastic surfaces", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (London), vol. 121, pp. 299–318. "Faraday waves" are discussed in an appendix to the article, "On the forms and states assumed by fluids in contact with vibrating elastic surfaces". This entire article is also available on-line (albeit without illustrations) at "Electronic Library" .Others who investigated "Faraday waves" include: (1) Ludwig Matthiessen (1868) "Akustische Versuche, die kleinsten Transversalwellen der Flüssigkeiten betreffend" (Acoustic experiments concerning the smallest transverse waves of liquids), Annalen der Physik, vol. 134, pp. 107–17; (2) Ludwig Matthiessen (1870) "Über die Transversalschwingungen tönender tropfbarer und elastischer Flüssigkeiten" (On the transverse vibrations of ringing low-viscosity and elastic liquids), Annalen der Physik, vol. 141, pp. 375–93; (3) John William Strutt (Lord Rayleigh) (1883), "On the crispations of fluid resting upon a vibrating support," Philosophical Magazine, vol. 16, pp. 50–58; (4) Thomas Brooke Benjamin and Fritz Joseph Ursell (1954), "The stability of the plane free surface of a liquid in vertical periodic motion" Proceedings of the Royal Society A, vol. 225, issue 1163. 1831-1833– Thomas Graham first studies the diffusion in gases.Diffusion Processes, Thomas Graham Symposium, ed. J.N. Sherwood, A.V. Chadwick, W.M.Muir, F.L. Swinton, Gordon and Breach, London, 1971. 1834 – Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron unifies many of the empirical gas laws into the ideal gas law. 1834 – John Scott Russell first describes the observation of solitary waves. 1837 – George Green find the minimal number of elastic moduli. 1838-40 – Gotthilf Hagen and Jean Léonard Marie Poiseuille study laminar flow, independently establishing Hagen–Poiseuille equation. 1841 – George Biddell Airy publishes the first correct formulation of Airy wave theory of water waves.Craik (2004). 1842 – Christian Doppler introduces the Doppler effect. 1842 – James Prescott Joule discovers magnetostriction, the first magnetomechanical effect. 1842-1850 – Stokes completes the equations of motions of fluids, now referred as Navier–Stokes equations. He also extends Airy wave theory to non-linear Stokes wave theory.Stokes (1847).