ABSTRACT
Dismissed as an irrelevant theoretician for eighteenth-century engineers, Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) nonetheless had a significant impact on the practical discourse of Enlightenment technology. As he developed the methodologies of algebraic calculus and rational mechanics, he investigated such technical topics as solid mechanics, cartography, navigation, hydraulics, ballistics, naval architecture and machine design. In Scientia Navalis (1749) he applied variational techniques to minimize the hydrodynamic friction of naval vessels; derived the ‘Bernoulli equation’ of fluid mechanics to analyze the kinematics and kinetics of fluid propulsion; and conducted a fundamental development of rigid-body dynamics to study ship oscillations.1 Euler’s analysis of the three-body problem in celestial mechanics was especially significant for determining longitude at sea, perhaps the most pressing scientific problem of the early modern era. Tobias Meyer relied on this analysis to compute his famous lunar tables.2 Among structural engineers, Euler is recognized for deriving Muschenbroek’s empirical relationship of beam buckling. And yet his contributions to ballistics and gunnery remain relatively obscure. In a previously published article, I argue that Euler’s scientific critique and mathematical expansion of Benjamin Robins’s New Principles of Gunnery (1742) was integral in transforming ballistics into a Newtonian, calculus-based science during the War of the Austrian Succession.3 In this chapter I intend to develop that argument by focusing on Euler’s analysis of interior ballistics and its reception by leading artillery establishments up to the French Revolutionary War. This examination will challenge the persistent notion that, during the Enlightenment, engineers and operators of machinery turned a deaf ear to Euler’s voluminous research of mechanical technology.
