The Origins of Clifford Truesdell's Program for Rewriting the History of Early Modern Mechanics

The American mathematical physicist Clifford Ambrose Truesdell III (1919-2000) is remembered for having been both one of the founders of modern continuum mechanics and the greatest historian of mechanics in the twentieth century. These two activities cannot be separated. Truesdell began to be interested in the history of mechanics while looking for the origin of the fundamental theorems of continuum mechanics, and his historical work helped him to understand the methodology and aims of mathematical physics. A careful examination of Truesdell's historical works shows that they form a vast research program in the history of the exact sciences, and in particular in the history of classical mechanics. This program has influenced generations of historians. To understand its breadth and purpose, it is necessary to reconstruct the early biography of Truesdell, to trace the beginnings of his interest in the history of mechanics and to describe the origins of his great histories of eighteenth-century mechanics, the Rational fluid Mechanics, 1687–1765 (1954) and the Rational mechanics of elastic or flexible bodies, 1638–1788 (1960).