Edgar Buckingham

Who was Edgar Buckingham?

Edgar Buckingham was a physicist.

He graduated from Harvard with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1887. He did additional graduate work at the University of Strasbourg and the University of Leipzig, where he studied under chemist Wilhelm Ostwald. Buckingham received a PhD from Leipzig in 1893. He worked at the USDA Bureau of Soils from 1902 to 1906 as a soil physicist. He worked at the National Bureau of Standards 1906-1937. His fields of expertise included soil physics, gas properties, acoustics, fluid mechanics, and blackbody radiation. He is also the originator of the Buckingham π theorem in the field of dimensional analysis.

In 1923, Edgar Buckingham published a report which voiced skepticism that jet propulsion would be economically competitive with prop driven aircraft at low altitudes and at the speeds of that period.

Buckingham's first work on soil physics is on soil aeration, particularly the loss of carbon dioxide from the soil and its subsequent replacement by oxygen. From his experiments he found that the rate of gas diffusion in soil was not dependent significantly on the soil structure, compactness or water content of the soil. Using an empirical formula based on his data, Buckingham was able to give the diffusion coefficient as a function of air content. This relation is still commonly cited in many modern textbooks and used in modern research. The outcomes of his research on gas transport were to conclude that the exchange of gases in soil aeration takes place by diffusion and is sensibly independent of the variations of the outside barometric pressure.