This book provides the first fully-fledged history of hydrodynamics, including lively accounts of the concrete problems of hydraulics, navigation, blood circulation, meteorology, and aeronautics that motivated the main conceptual innovations. Richly illustrated it becomes a standard reference for any interested in fluid mechanics.

Olivier Darrigol is Research Director at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France. His previous book, Electrodynamics from Ampere to Einstein (OUP 2000), won the Marc-Auguste Pictet prize of the Société de Physique et d'Histoire Naturelle de Geneve in 2000. In 2004, he was awarded the Grammaticakis-Neumann prize of the French Academy of Sciences.

• 1: The dynamical equations


• 2: Water waves


• 3: Viscosity


• 4: Vortices


• 5: Instability


• 6: Turbulence


• 7: Drag and lift