Credit: ©The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.14594

    Diagram to assess the air's resistance to projectiles

    Date
    4 March 1687
    Creator
    Unknown, Artist
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Manuscript page number
    p76
    Dimensions
    height (page): 377mm
    width (page): 237mm
    Description
    John Wallis's study of the air's resistance to projectiles was initially presented to the Royal Society at its meeting on 26 January 1687 and printed in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society vol. 16, no. 186 (1687). Wallis elaborated further on his thoughts in a letter to Edmond Halley, which was read to the Society on 9 March 1687. This diagram belongs to this latter letter.

    This image is copied from RBO/7/053.
    Object history
    At the meeting of the Royal Society on 26 January 1687, ‘A letter of Dr. Wallis was read, concerning the resistance of the medium to bodies projected through it, as likewise to the fall of bodies: and it was ordered to be printed in one of the next Philosophical Transactions’ (Birch 4:521). This was duly printed in John Wallis, ‘A discourse concerning the measure of the airs resistance to bodies moved in it’, Phil. Trans. vol. 16, no. 186 (1687), pp. 269-80.

    At the meeting of the Royal Society on 9 March 1687, ‘A letter of Dr. Wallis to Mr. Halley, dated at Oxford March 4, 1686/7, was read, containing a farther illustration of his calculus of the opposition of the air to projects; together with some reflexions on Mr. Hooke’s hypothesis of the mutability of the poles of the earth’ (Birch 4:528).
    Related fellows
    John Wallis (1650, British) , Mathematician
    Edmond Halley (1656 - 1742, British) , Astronomer
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > Europe
          > United Kingdom
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