Photography of supersonic shock waves (Mach)
Fotografía de las ondas de choque supersónicas (Mach)
- Date
- 1887 · confidence high
- Place
- Prague, Bohemia, Czechia
- Credited to
- Ernst Mach and Peter Salcher
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
Using spark photography, Mach and Salcher photographed for the first time the shock-wave cone of a bullet exceeding the speed of sound. From it came the relation between an object's speed and the speed of sound named after Mach.
Mach taught at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague; Salcher, a professor at the Naval Academy in Fiume (Rijeka, Croatia), took part of the photographs in 1886. The paper was read in Vienna in 1887.
What it led to
- supersonic aerodynamics and exterior ballistics
- the Mach number, named by Ackeret in 1929
- flow visualisation techniques (schlieren, shadowgraphs)