Two young engineers, unaware of each other, raced to build the first jet engine
Frank Whittle, an RAF College Cranwell cadet, put his turbojet idea to his superiors in 1928 and patented it in 1930, but could not get the British government interested. In Germany, Hans von Ohain began a similar design in 1935, knowing nothing of Whittle, and found a backer almost at once.
Propellers were running out of road. As blade tips neared the speed of sound their efficiency fell, so faster aircraft needed a new kind of push. The key was a gas turbine that drives its own compressor, an old notion: John Barber patented a stationary turbine in England in 1791, and Norway's Ægidius Elling ran the first self-sustaining one in 1903. Maxime Guillaume filed the first patent for powering an aircraft this way in 1921, though compressors of the day could not make it real, and A.A. Griffith's 1926 paper on turbine aerodynamics later made practical axial compressors possible.
Von Ohain's first rig could only run on outside power, but it proved the principle, and the aircraft industrialist Ernst Heinkel saw its promise immediately. Working with the machinist Max Hahn, von Ohain had the hydrogen-fed HeS 1 running by September 1937. A petrol version, the HeS 3, went into Heinkel's compact He 178, which Erich Warsitz flew from Rostock-Marienehe early on 27 August 1939, the first jet plane. Britain's Gloster E28/39, powered by Whittle's company Power Jets, first flew on 15 May 1941. In Spain, the engineer Virgilio Leret Ruiz had patented his own jet design in 1935, but he was killed early in the Spanish Civil War; his wife, Carlota O'Neill, later passed his hidden plans to the British embassy.
The first two jets in operational service arrived within three months of each other in 1944: the Messerschmitt Me 262, using Anselm Franz's axial-flow Jumo 004, in April and the Gloster Meteor in July. Axial-flow compressors, rather than Whittle's centrifugal type, became the standard for most manufacturers by the 1950s.
Civil progress was dramatic. Airliner engine thrust climbed from about 22 kilonewtons in the 1950s de Havilland Ghost to 510 in the 1990s General Electric GE90, while in-flight shutdowns fell from 40 per 100,000 engine hours to fewer than one. High-bypass turbofans arrived in the 1970s and matched the fuel efficiency of the best piston engines, and together those gains let twin-engined airliners cross the Atlantic routinely.
Source: Jet engine
