The prediction of airfoil characteristics
A 1930 NASA technical report on predicting airfoil performance, a plain engineering document with charts rather than a general-readership book. Its pictures are graph plots of drag coefficient, lift-to-drag ratio and lift coefficient against angle of attack, each set against a computed curve and an observed curve drawn with dashed lines on gridded paper. A designer might take the sparse black-and-white grid layouts, labelled axes and paired solid-and-dashed line treatments as a clean data-graphic vocabulary.
