Item 18 - Draft of lecture entitled 'Aeronautics before 1920', by G. I. Taylor

Geoffrey Ingram Taylor was born on 7 March 1886, the son of Edward Ingram Taylor and his wife Margaret, who was the daughter of the mathematician George Boole. He was admitted to Trinity College Cambridge in 1905 where he read first Mathematics and then Natural Sciences and was awarded first a Scholarship and then a Fellowship which he held from 1910 to his death, with a short gap during the First World War when he joined many other Trinity scientists at the RAF factory at Farnborough where he worked on problems in aerodynamics.
Before the war he had joined an expedition to observe the flow of icebergs in the wake of the Titanic disaster which led him to the study of turbulence, which he was able to pick up again on his return to Cambridge in 1919. Over the next 3 decades he produced a series of seminal articles which transformed understanding of the subject. In 1923 he was appointed Royal Society Yarrow research professor, a post he held until 1952. During the Second World War he spent some time working with the staff of the Los Alamos project. After his retirement from the chair he continued to research at the Cavendish Laboratory. He died in 1975.