# Who introduced velocity potential?

Wikipedia cites John Anderson’s A History of Aerodynamics and says that velocity potential was introduced by Lagrange in 1788. However, I could trace it at least to Euler 1752, where he published his famous fluid equations. Is it Euler who introduced velocity potential or somebody even before him? It is also possible that Wikipedia is correct and I am misunderstanding something.

"The potential as stored vis viva in an elastic system was first mentioned by Daniel Bernoulli in a letter to Euler of 20 October 1743: ‘For a naturally elastic band, I express the potential live force of the curved band as $$\int ds/r^2$$ [...] Since no one has perfected the isoperimetric method as much as you, you will easily solve this problem of making $$\int ds/r^2$$ a minimum.’ Euler proceeded immediately to develop this suggestion in his ‘On the elastic curve’ (1744)... A few years later Euler introduced the potential in fluid dynamics; believing (erroneously) that every stationary flux of an incompressible homogeneous fluid is irrotational, he applied the first elements of differential forms and arrived at ‘Laplace’s equation’: $$\frac{\partial^2S}{\partial x^2}+\frac{\partial^2S}{\partial y^2}+\frac{\partial^2S}{\partial z^2}=0,$$ where $$S$$ is the velocity potential (1761a). Moreover, following d’Alembert’s lead in the use of complex numbers in two-dimensional fluid dynamics, Euler (1757c) also introduced what we would now call a complex potential."