Frank Whittle

1903 was the first one that actually worked.

1930, Frank Whittle, you may know that, patented the first gas turbine engine designed for jet propulsion.

Now we're getting down to it.

And successfully bench tested a prototype in 1937.

There were a lot of fundamental problems and they just assumed that in their usual fashion, as they had done with the Merlin, that they would overcome the problems by working on them all at once and have this marvelous engine, which was at the time, expected to be the stepping stone from the four-stroke aero engine, such as the Merlin and Griffin V-12s that powered Spitfires and Hurricane air defense fighters, and the gas turbine, which was resisted for a long time by the Air Ministry as if it were some kind of cult.

And poor Frank Whittle was driven practically to a nervous breakdown.

He was a serving officer of the RAF, and he was treated as if when they finally accepted the idea of the gas turbine and took it over, their attitude was, well, It was your duty to invent the gas turbine.

You're a serving member of the RAF.

The jet engine changed all that, and like so many inventions that improved the quality of life in the 1950s, it came out of the fight for survival that was the Second World War.

[bomb whistling] [bomb exploding] It was the brainchild of one man, RAF engineer Frank Whittle.

Son of a Coventry toolmaker, Whittle initially failed his RAF medical for being too short.

He was only five foot tall, but he went on to become a giant in aviation history.

The year is 1939.

A British engineer named Frank Whittle has been working on jet propulsion for most of a decade, mostly ignored by the British establishment.

In Germany, a man named Hans von Ohain has independently arrived at the same idea, and he has found a patron in Ernst Heinkel, a manufacturer who has been watching the war clouds build and understands that whoever owns speed owns the sky.

On August 27th, 1939, just five days before Germany invades Poland, a small aircraft sits on the runway at Marienehe Airfield outside Rostock.

The Battle of Britain had been fought and narrowly won the year before, and the British had something they desperately wanted to share with their American allies, something that could change the war if it could be built fast enough.

Frank Whittle.

If you know anything about the history of jet propulsion, you know that name.

Whittle was a Royal Air Force officer, an engineer of almost supernatural persistence who had been working on the idea of a gas turbine jet engine since the late 1920s.

Pull up a chair sometime near a jet engine at run-up.

Listen to that rising whine, the way the thrust builds rather than snaps, the smooth authority of it.

That sound traces back to Frank Whittle, working in a cramped workshop on inadequate funding with the stubborn certainty that he was right.

And it goes back to a morning in the Mojave in '42 when an American test pilot found out beyond any doubt that he was two primary sources for today include the National Museum of the United States Air Force, the Air Force Historical Research Agency, and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's documentation of the early jet propulsion program.

We don't actually jump up and down.

Yeah, but I'll just put in with that, I'll throw in the name Sir Frank Whittle.

Jet engines.

We, you know, Sir Frank Whittle.

Do we get any credit? No, because the Americans took that on and they productionised it and they made a big thing because they invested in it.

And so, of course, everyone thinks Americans, the jet, you know, it's not.

The TSU-11 motor jet was intended to increase the Oka's range, allowing it to be launched from farther away, but the war ended before it could ever be deployed.

In the end, however, the motor jet proved a technological dead end with the development of true turbojet engines by Hans von Ohren in Germany and Frank Whittle in Britain rendering the concept obsolete almost overnight.

But while Henry Cronada's 1910 creation might not have been a true jet aircraft and would almost certainly not have worked as built, it was nonetheless a remarkable farsighted glimpse into the future of aviation.

Indeed, while it's dismissive of most of Coanada's claims, Charles Gibbs Smith nonetheless praised the Romanian inventor's creativity in 1970, writing, Although inevitably earthbound, this aircraft stands as the first full-size attempt at a jet-propelled airplane.