Editing Aeroelasticity (section)

== History ==
The second failure of [[Samuel Langley]]'s prototype plane on the Potomac was attributed to aeroelastic effects (specifically, [[torsional]] divergence).<ref name="Bisplinghoff">{{cite book |last1=Bisplinghoff |first1=R. L. |last2=Ashley |first2=H. |last3=Halfman |first3=H. |title=Aeroelasticity |publisher=Dover Science |year=1996 |isbn=0-486-69189-6 }}</ref> An early scientific work on the subject was [[George H. Bryan|George Bryan]]'s ''Theory of the Stability of a Rigid Aeroplane'' published in 1906.<ref name="soundcloud.com">{{Cite web | url=https://soundcloud.com/aerosociety-podcast | title=AeroSociety Podcast}}</ref> Problems with torsional divergence plagued aircraft in the [[World War I|First World War]] and were solved largely by trial-and-error and ad hoc stiffening of the wing. The first recorded and documented case of flutter in an aircraft was that which occurred to a [[Handley Page Type O|Handley Page O/400]] bomber during a flight in 1916, when it suffered a violent tail oscillation, which caused extreme distortion of the rear fuselage and the elevators to move asymmetrically. Although the aircraft landed safely, in the subsequent investigation [[Frederick W. Lanchester|F. W. Lanchester]] was consulted. One of his recommendations was that left and right elevators should be rigidly connected by a stiff shaft, which was to subsequently become a design requirement. In addition, the [[National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom)|National Physical Laboratory]] (NPL) was asked to investigate the phenomenon theoretically, which was subsequently carried out by [[Leonard Bairstow]] and [[Arthur Fage]].<ref name="soundcloud.com"/>

In 1926, [[Hans Reissner]] published a theory of wing divergence, leading to much further theoretical research on the subject.<ref name="Bisplinghoff" /> The term ''aeroelasticity'' itself was coined by [[Roxbee Cox, Baron Kings Norton|Harold Roxbee Cox]] and [[Alfred Pugsley]] at the [[Royal Aircraft Establishment]] (RAE), [[Farnborough, Hampshire|Farnborough]] in the early 1930s.<ref name="soundcloud.com"/>

In the development of [[aeronautical engineering]] at [[Caltech]], [[Theodore von Kármán]] started a course "Elasticity applied to Aeronautics".<ref>[[Theodore von Kármán]] (1967) ''The Wind and Beyond'', page 155.</ref> After teaching the course for one term, Kármán passed it over to [[Ernest Edwin Sechler]], who developed aeroelasticity in that course and in publication of [[textbook]]s on the subject.<ref>[[Ernest Edwin Sechler]] and L. G. Dunn (1942) [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.205355 Airplane Structural Analysis and Design] from [[Internet Archive]].</ref><ref>{{cite book |first=E. E. |last=Sechler |year=1952 |title=Elasticity in Engineering |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |oclc=2295857 }}</ref>

In 1947, [[Arthur Roderick Collar]] defined aeroelasticity as "the study of the mutual interaction that takes place within the triangle of the inertial, elastic, and aerodynamic forces acting on structural members exposed to an airstream, and the influence of this study on design".<ref>{{cite journal |last=Collar |first=A. R. |title=The first fifty years of aeroelasticity |journal=Aerospace |year=1978 |volume=5 |series=2 |pages=12–20}}</ref>