National Physical Laboratory (NPL) was founded in 1900 at Bushy House, Teddington, London "for standardising and verifying instruments, for testing materials, and for the determination of physical constants." It is one of the oldest standardising laboratories in the world. It was originally conceived as an extension of Kew Observatory, which was situated round the corner in Old Deer Park at Richmond, and for the first 18 years of its existence, NPL was under the control of the Royal Society. Since its establishment, the research work at NPL has included all branches of physics, light, electricity and magnetism, radio communication, engineering, metallurgy, aeronautics and ship design. Many of Britain's most renowned scientists have been involved in work at NPL, including Alan Turing, Louis Essen and Donald Davies. Some of the most notable achievements carried out at NPL include the invention of the Automatic Computer Engine (ACE), packet switching, radar and the atomic clock. Their current address is National Physical Laboratory, Hampton Road, Teddington, Middlesex, TW11 0LW.

Ludwig Prandtl was born on 4 February 1875 in Gottingen. He was a physicist who is considered to be the father of aerodynamics. In 1901 Prandtl became professor of mechanics at the Technical Institute of Hannover, where he continued his earlier efforts to provide a sound theoretical basis for fluid mechanics. From 1904 to 1953, he served as professor of applied mechanics at the University of Göttingen, where he established a school of aerodynamics and hydrodynamics that achieved world renown. In 1925 he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm (later the Max Planck) Institute for Fluid Mechanics. His discovery in 1904 of the boundary layer, which adjoins the surface of a body moving in air or water, led to an understanding of skin friction drag and of the way in which streamlining reduces the drag of airplane wings and other moving bodies. His work on wing theory, which followed similar work by a British physicist, Frederick W. Lanchester, but was carried out independently, elucidated the process of airflow over airplane wings of finite span. That body of work is known as the Lanchester-Prandtl wing theory. Prandtl made decisive advances in boundary-layer and wing theories, and his work became the fundamental material of aerodynamics. He was an early pioneer in streamlining airships, and his advocacy of monoplanes greatly advanced heavier-than-air aviation. He contributed the Prandtl-Glaubert rule for subsonic airflow to describe the compressibility effects of air at high speeds. In addition to his important advances in the theories of supersonic flow and turbulence, he made notable innovations in the design of wind tunnels and other aerodynamic equipment. He also devised a soap-film analogy for analyzing the torsion forces of structures with noncircular cross sections. Prandtl died on 15 August 1953.