Osborne Reynolds
Osborne Reynolds FRS (23 August 1842 – 21 February 1912) was an Irish-born[1][2][3] British[4] innovator in the understanding of fluid dynamics. Separately, his studies of heat transfer between solids and fluids brought improvements in boiler and condenser design. He spent his entire career at what is now the University of Manchester.
Osborne Reynolds
23 October 1842
21 February 1912 (aged 69)
Royal Medal (1888)
Dalton Medal (1903)
Life[edit]
Osborne Reynolds was born in Belfast and moved with his parents soon afterward to Dedham, Essex.[5] His father, Reverend Osborne Reynolds, was a Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge who worked as a school headmaster and clergyman, but was also a very able mathematician with a keen interest in mechanics. The father took out a number of patents for improvements to agricultural equipment, and the son credits him with being his chief teacher as a boy. Reynolds showed an early aptitude and liking for the study of mechanics. In his late teens, for the year before entering university, he went to work as an apprentice at the workshop of Edward Hayes, a well known shipbuilder in Stony Stratford, where he obtained practical experience in the manufacture and fitting out of coastal steamers (and thus gained an early appreciation of the practical value of understanding fluid dynamics).[6]
Osborne Reynolds attended Queens' College, Cambridge and graduated in 1867 as the seventh wrangler in mathematics.[7] He had chosen to study mathematics at Cambridge because, in his own words in his 1868 application for the professorship, "From my earliest recollection I have had an irresistible liking for mechanics and the physical laws on which mechanics as a science is based.... my attention drawn to various mechanical phenomena, for the explanation of which I discovered that a knowledge of mathematics was essential."[8]
For the year immediately following his graduation from Cambridge he again took up a post with a civil engineering firm, Lawson and Mansergh of London, as a practising civil engineer working with the London (Croydon) sewage transport system.[6]
In 1868 he was appointed to the newly instituted Chair of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at Owens College in Manchester (now the University of Manchester),[6] becoming in that year one of the first professors in UK university history to hold the title of "Professor of Engineering". This professorship had been newly created and financed by a group of manufacturing industrialists in the Manchester area, and they also had a leading role in selecting the 25–year–old Reynolds to fill the position.[8]
Reynolds remained at Owens College for the rest of his career – in 1880 the college became a constituent college of the newly founded Victoria University.[6]
Reynolds was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1877 and awarded the Royal Medal in 1888. He retired in 1905 and died of influenza 21 February 1912 at Watchet in Somerset.[8][9] He was buried at the Church of St Decuman, Watchet.[9]
Other work[edit]
Reynolds published about seventy science and engineering research reports. When towards the end of his career these were republished as a collection they filled three volumes. For a catalogue and short summaries of them see the External links. Areas covered besides fluid dynamics included thermodynamics, kinetic theory of gases, condensation of steam, screw-propeller-type ship propulsion, turbine-type ship propulsion, hydraulic brakes, hydrodynamic lubrication,[10] and laboratory apparatus for better measurement of Joule's mechanical equivalent of heat. For his work on lubrication, he was named by Duncan Dowson as one of the 23 "Men of Tribology".[11]
One of the subjects that Reynolds studied in the 1880s was the properties of granular materials, including dilatant materials. In 1903 appeared his 250-page book The Sub-Mechanics of the Universe, in which he tried to generalise the mechanics of granular materials to be "capable of accounting for all the physical evidence, as we know it, in the Universe". His aim seems to have been to construct a theory of aether, which he considered to be in a liquid state. The ideas were extremely difficult to understand or evaluate, and in any case were overtaken by other developments in physics around the same time.