The University of Manchester

Osborne Reynolds grew up on the eastern side of England, in the town of Debach, situated between the more notable cities of Ipswich and Norwich (Jackson, Derek, Launder). Both Leonardo da Vinci and Obsorne Reynolds grew up with fathers that were notable intellectual figures who looked to instill similar principles in their sons. da Vinci’s father was a prominent notary, who had Leonardo apprentice under Andrea del Verrochio, a leading Renaissance artist (Da Vinci). Reynold’s father, a respected reverend and Fellow of Queens’ College, taught Osborne Reynolds personally, but then similarly had Reynolds enter an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering. However, while da Vinci’s education stopped at the apprenticeship, Osborne Reynolds’ was just beginning, as subsequently attended the University of Cambridge for a degree in mathematics and then held a Fellowship at Queens’ College. While da Vinci’s understanding of fluid mechanics derived from personal observations and vocational roles, Reynolds was being surrounded by some of the greatest minds in the field, such as Sir George Stokes, one of Reynold’s professors (Jackson, Derek, Launder).

Following some consulting roles at private engineering firms, Reynolds settled into a role as one of the first engineering professors in England, at the University of Manchester. It was at the University of Manchester that Reynolds spent the entirety of his entire career. It was here that he studied fluid transitions from laminar to turbulent flow, and developed Reynolds number and the Reynolds-average Navier-Stokes equations. And most closely related to da Vinci’s previous work on fluid mechanics, Reynolds developed Reynolds Decomposition (Jackson, Derek, Launder).

The University of Manchester in 1903, two years before Reynold's retirement (Curry)

Citations:

“DA VINCI — THE RENAISSANCE MAN The Inventor. The Scientist. The Artist.” Museum of Science, www.mos.org/leonardo/biography.

Jackson, Derek, and Brian Launder. “Osborne Reynolds and the Publication of His Papers on Turbulent Flow.” Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, vol. 39, no. 1, 2007, pp. 19–35., doi:10.1146/annurev.fluid.39.050905.110241.

Image: 

Curry, Emma. “In Pictures: How The University of Manchester Has Changed over the Years.” Manchester Evening News, 22 Nov. 2015, www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/nostalgia/pictures-how-university-m....

Parent Map

da Vinci and the Renaissance 2020 Map

Coordinates

Latitude: 53.466849800000
Longitude: -2.233883700000

Timeline of Events Associated with The University of Manchester

Date Event Manage

Leonardo's sketch of water flowing into a pool
1894

Osborne Reynolds proposes Reynolds Decomposition

Osborne Reynolds, a professor of engineering in Manchester and an innovator of fluid mechanics, proposed the concept of Reynolds Decomposition in a correspondence with another pioneer in the field, Sir George Stokes (Jackson, Derek, Launder). The theory proposed that a given fluid stream will be the combination of an expected component and a fluctuation component. The expected component would be found from taking the average of repeatedly conducted experiments, while the fluctuations would be defined as the remaining component that deviates a specific result from the expected component (Adrian).

To some, Reynolds’ theories may have seemed radical and beyond the imagination of 19th-century science. However, like most scientific discoveries, theorems, or laws, the concepts that Reynolds formulated were not entirely his own. Science evolves because innovators combine insights of their forefathers with ideas of their own. In order for Leonardo da Vinci to master linear perspective in The Last Supper, he needed to not only be familiar with the works of those before him, like Leon Battista Alberti’s Della pittura, but also have looked over Piazza San Marco from St. Mark’s Clocktower in order to see the full effects of linear perspective first hand (Heydenreich).

In a similar manner, historians believe that Osborne Reynolds must have been familiar with Leonardo da Vinci’s work on fluid dynamics when he was hypothesizing Reynolds decomposition (Gad-El-Hak). The field of fluid mechanics was in its infancy in Leonardo da Vinci’s era, with few equations available to account for the complexity of fluid motion. However, 400 years before Reynold’s proposed his theory, Leonardo drew an image of a water jet exiting a square hole into a pool. da Vinci wrote that the water appeared to have two separate motions, “one part of which is due to the principal current, the other to random and reverse motion’ (Gad-El-Hak). Leonardo’s breaking down fluid motion into expected and random components was only a qualitative description of the technique that Osborne Reynolds later quantitatively described. But the ideological foundation that da Vinci laid for his predecessors helped solve problems hundreds of years down the road. 

Citations:

Adrian, R. J., et al. “Analysis and Interpretation of Instantaneous Turbulent Velocity Fields.” Experiments in Fluids, vol. 29, no. 3, June 2000, pp. 275–290., doi:10.1007/s003489900087.

Gad-El-Hak, Mohamed. “Fluid Mechanics from the Beginning to the Third Millennium.” International Applied Mechanics, vol. 14, no. 3, 1998, pp. 177–185., doi:10.1007/bf02681956.

Heydenreich, Ludwig Heinrich. “Second Florentine Period (1500–08).” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 22 Aug. 2019, www.britannica.com/biography/Leonardo-da-Vinci/Second-Florentine-period-....

Jackson, Derek, and Brian Launder. “Osborne Reynolds and the Publication of His Papers on Turbulent Flow.” Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, vol. 39, no. 1, 2007, pp. 19–35., doi:10.1146/annurev.fluid.39.050905.110241.

Image:

“Mean Motion and Fluctuations:” NPTEL, nptel.ac.in/content/storage2/courses/112104120/lecture3/3_4.htm.

 A Reynold's graph showing expected (black line) and fluctuating (purple line) motion