Developing The Jet Engine

It was not until World War II was imminent that Sir Frank Whittle, after struggling for almost a decade, received any Government support for his revolutionary proposal of the centrifugal jet engine. The way of a pioneer can, indeed, be a hard one, and without staff and workshop facilities, he took his first design to the British Thomson Houston Company at Rugby, who agreed to manufacture the first engine for him.

When the first engine (designed for 1,200 lb thrust) ran in the test shop at Rugby on April 12, 1937, its strange noise and tremendous acceleration scared the living daylights out of the observers. There was a stampede for the door which the managing director and chief engineer are reputed to have got jammed. Frank Whittle was at the engine throttle and said that he would have been with them, but was too petrified to move!

Later, Power Jets was formed and, with the help of a contract from the Air Ministry in 1938, had its own elementary test and manufacturing facilities in an old disused iron foundry at Lutterworth, near Rugby, and the slow process of developing the first W. 1 Whittle jet engine began.

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