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The "Science" That 1930s Automotive Designers Used to Determine Car Shapes
A demonstration of "Streamlines"
Here's a fascinating look inside Chevrolet's research facilities circa 1936. This is an era when the shapes of cars came from pencils wielded by designers operating on intuition, not market research or computer simulations.
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Enter a caption (optional)In order to promote their design savvy, General Motors and Chevy developed a rather interesting water-based contraption to illustrate the benefits of streamlining.
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Enter a caption (optional)They then put together this short video to show how this, and some primitive wind tunnel technology, is translated into automotive design. It's also hilarious to hear of some of the supposed benefits conferred by their styling choices:
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I think a cursory read through of the Wikipedia page on the navier-stokes equation should be enough to convince you to remove the air quotes around "science". Streamlines aren't handwavey 1930's marketing wank, they're a foundational observation of continuum mechanics and form a basis for modern computational fluid dynamics.
I love your content, Rain, but I have to sympathize with Joe Jonston here. Testing, measuring, and adapting is science in the finest tradition. While we're more concerned with not being wasteful of fuel today, aerodynamics made a significant contribution to vehicle range in those early times, continuing the process of unifying the country. Most of the spin-off benefits they cited are sound, or could be developed into something sound. I'll buy that the issue of increased storage space is a little suspicious, tho. Nothing beats a box for storage efficiency.
RIP the diving board.