At the first specialist conference on waterhammer, pressure surges and unsteady flow in a new century, it is inevitable that we should feel the need to take stock of where we are now by looking back as well as looking forwards. To paraphrase the philosopher Santayana, if we forget our past we are condemned to re-live it. Indeed, in refereeing and reviewing the potential contributions to this Conference, the Technical Advisory Committee was struck by the fact that the very maturity of our field seems to be creating a situation where some of the established (or so we thought) lessons of the past appear to have been forgotten and are now being (sometimes painfully) rediscovered. It is partly for this reason that we have introduced at this Conference the Open Discussion Forum on a number of key issues. Half a century ago, Leliavsky (1951) noted fallacies in hydraulics that had been promulgated through failure to understand their historical perspective. The Committee hope that this Conference and its Proceedings will encourage the fluid transients community to avoid similar pitfalls.
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