If Oscar Wilde had been concerned with this paper I think he might well have said: “To be asked to attempt an essay on the development of an engineering specialisation over the next hundred years may be regarded as a misfortune. To attempt to predict the form that control of a complex creative process will take looks like carelessness”. Having undertaken the task, perhaps somewhat carelessly, my first attempts to assemble some thoughts led to the conclusion that I was not only careless but also foolish and as such unqualified to present any views I might have. This paper is the result of a determination to break out of this unproductive frame of mind and to set down my personal views for what they are worth. I can only hope the paper has not turned out to be “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People”.

Sir Robert Wynne-Edwards (Past Chairman, CEI): To understand the Council of Engineering Institutions one needs to consider first the historical development. When, 150 years ago, the Institution of Civil Engineers was formed it was set up to provide a forum where engineers could meet and discuss matters relative to any branch of engineering and where young men could attend to become educated in the profession. Unlike its counterpart in other countries it had no government sponsorship and at that time there was no academic teaching in engineering in Britain.

It is a great privilege to be here before you today at this lecture which honours the memory of Wilbur and Orville Wright and all that they brought to that very favourite subject of all of us—Aeronautics. I have chosen as my topic for tonight “The Role of Competition in Aeronautics”. My thesis is that competition has been extremely important in the advancement of aeronautics through the years. Much progress has come in the heat of competition. The monetary costs of competition are small and completely overshadowed by the economic benefits accruing from competition. Competition has been the life blood of aeronautics. We must keep competition alive. My objective in this paper is to stimulate in each member of this audience a strong personal belief that competition has been a major contributor to making aeronautics what it is today and a most necessary ingredient in the future of aeronautics.

Frank Barnwell was a man who combined vision with practical achievement and as such earned tremendous respect. I am sure he would have enjoyed the challenge, as well as the vision, of further shrinking Everyman's World by making Supersonic Transport a commercial reality.

I am indeed honoured in being asked to give this 1968 lecture in his memory.

Right at the start I would like to pay tribute to all of my colleagues who have done a great deal of work preparing the material for this paper, and to say that without their help it would not have been an interesting paper at all.

The application of the matrix displacement method to large displacements and strains, as formulated in refs. 1, 2, 3, is based on the idea of natural modes. This method was significantly generalised to triangular and tetrahedronal curvilinear elements in TNs 17 and 18 (ref. 4), where the important new concept of the local sub-element was first presented. A further obvious extension of the approach should cover curved beams in space, and, what is much more important, shells. However, the realisation of a theory which includes such elements is not straightforward and requires some subtle considerations on the natural modes of a local sub-beam. In order to give a clear presentation of the underlying physical assumptions, we first discuss in this note the natural mode technique on a generalised basis and apply it then to a curved beam in space. The idea of the local sub-element emerges thereby in all its significance. The examples investigated here cover an arbitrary curved beam in space with initial curvature and twist and the special case of a circular arch. To limit the length of the note we have to exclude the effects of shear deformability in bending, and warping in torsion. Moreover, to simplify the formulae we assume that bend ing is defined about the principal axes. The beams in question may be classified as slender and are part of the ASKA library (CUBA for curved beam in space and CIRCA for circular aroh). Part II of the note will include the effect of large displacements and show how the ideas of ref. 4 may be adapted to curved beams and similar structural elements.

To describe steady, two-dimensional, constant-density flow in a laminar boundary layer on a curved surface, a single equation may be derived from the complete Navier-Stokes equations, with no approximations being necessary. The conditions under which similar solutions are attainable are discussed, and the validity of some previous calculations is upheld.

Measurements of skin friction were made with a set of rectangular mouthed pitot tubes of constant thickness ratio. The results gave a unique calibration between skin friction and pressure recorded by the tube when plotted after the method of Preston it the outside thickness is taken as the representative length. The calibration curve differs from that for circular Preston tubes when the effective centre of the pitot mouth lies within the sublayer.