Spitfire engines
The original Supermarine Spitfire was powered by the 27-litre, water and glycolcooled, Rolls-Royce Merlin 60o V-12 48 valve engine designed by Cyril Lovesey (1899–1976), among others.
In the early 1930s Rolls-Royce decided that it needed to make a larger, more powerful aircraft engine, leading to the design of the Merlin in 1933. Production started in 1936 and ended in the 1950s. It wasn’t the most powerful aircraft engine of WWII, but it is widely regarded as the best. It was the engine that powered the North American P52 Mustangs as well as the Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire fighters that defeated the German Luftwaffe in 1940s Battle of Britain.
More than 150,000 Merlins were manufactured by Rolls-Royce and Ford in Britain, and by Packard in the US. Lovesey was in charge of the development work, which increased the output of the engine from 1000hp to 2000hp over the course of the war, while famous engineer Stanley Hooker (1907–1984) was the designer of the two-stage supercharging, with twin intercoolers, which, along with improvements in its fuel’s octane rating, was responsible for the dramatic power increase.
Hooker was knighted in 1974 in recognition of his work on jet engines. He died the day before his biography, Not Much of an Engineer, was published.
More Merlins were actually used in the Avro Lancaster heavy bomber and in the de Havilland Mosquito fighter-bomber than were used in Spitfires.