Ludwig Wittgenstein's conception of the role of objects in our philosophical understanding of the logic of our language is critical for his early philosophy in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. While the important connections between Heinrich Hertz's Principles of Mechanics and Wittgenstein's Tractatus have long been recognized, recent work by Jed Buchwald has deepened our knowledge of the importance of the object-orientation of Hertz's scientiªc work in a manner that should also deepen our understanding of the nature of objects in the Tractatus. I will argue that there are important ontological links, involving “a certain physical scheme, one that had powerful implications for thinking as well as doing”, between Hertz's work and Wittgenstein's early philosophy.

Before he studied philosophy under Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein was trained as an engineer at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin. He then worked as a graduate research engineer at the University of Manchester, where he designed a variable volume combustion chamber and received a patent for an innovative propeller design in 1911. I argue that the methodology of contemporary aeronautical engineering research, involving the systematic use of experiments and scale models, affected the Bild theory of language in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . The principle of similitude, underlying the mathematical resolution of scale effect problems associated with wind tunnel research on models, is reºected in the law of projection in the Tractatus .