Excerpt from Original Solutions of Several Problems in Aerodynamics

The employment of the laws and principles of dynamics in discussing the movements of the parts of an aerial medium caused by the action of a local force impressed upon them, or by their own inherent elastic force causing them to flow towards a total or partial vacuum, has heretofore been thought by mathematicians to be attended with great difficulties, so great indeed that few attempts were made to surmount them, and none that were attended with full and complete success. Hence many problems in aerodynamics, that were of great interest to science and the arts, remained unsolved. Some years since I became deeply interested in an attempt to solve one of these problems, and after much thought succeeded in devising a method whereby a satisfactory solution was accomplished. Perceiving that the saute method, with suitable modifications, was applicable to the solution of other problems, I gave my thoughts to others from time to time as I found leisure amid the active pursuits of life, and the results of these investigations, as they were respectively reached, were published in the then current numbers of the American Journal of Science.

Believing that the methods employed in those investigations might be employed with success in solving other important problems, and desiring to bring this field of research to the attention of physicists, I recently prepared another paper pertaining to this branch of physics and offered it for publication in the Journal of Science, but the editors, finding in it positions and conclusions which conflicted with their pre-conceived opinions, and not being disposed to publish that which they were not ready to endorse, declined the article.

Under these circumstances it was decided to print the paper, prefixing to it the articles that had been published in the Journal of Science pertaining to aerodynamics, arranged in the order of their respective dates, and in this collective, but somewhat disjointed form, to present them as a contribution toward a more full development of this interesting and important branch of Physics.

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