1899-1909: Key Years for Shock Wave and Detonation Theory

One century ago, in 1909, finished one of the most creative decade for the progress of shock wave and detonation understanding. Before these years, many experiments were undetaken and analyzed by Berthelot, Mallard, Vieille, Le Ch\^atellier and Dixon, especially about reactive gaseous mixtures. In 1899, Chapman provided the basis of what is called now the Chapman- Jouguet theory. During the following years, an unusual high number papers were published by different authors (Jouguet, Hadamard, Crussard, Duhem, Dixon and the hungarish Zemplen...) who yielded important contributions to the understanding of shock wave and detonation propagation. They tried to precise the former knowledge and to extend it to real geometries and to real materials. These years finished in 1909 with Duhem's paper which gathered some properties concerning real materials. After these years, the number of papers about shock waves and detonation strongly decreased. The main questions were raised, some of them were solved and the others had to wait up to several decades to be answered, by Von Neumann, Bethe, Zel'dovitch and others. Then Jouguet focused on deflagration, others retired or moved to other topics. We have collected an exhaustive bibliography. If most of these papers are now historical, some formulae or ideas like the forgotten concept of ``quasi-wave,'' with finite thickness, has a renewed interest for numerical or modern studies.