Inventive Genius:

Frank Whittle

FRANK Whittle was a Royal Air Force officer who made a major contribution to the invention of the jet engine. The son of a mechanic, he was born on June 1, 1907 in Coventry. His first attempts to join the RAF failed as a result of his lack of height, but on his third attempt he was accepted as an apprentice in 1923. He qualified as a pilot officer in 1928. As a cadet Whittle had written a thesis arguing that planes would need to fly at high altitudes, where air resistance is much lower, in order to achieve long ranges and high speeds. Piston engines and propellers were unsuitable for this purpose, so he concluded that rocket propulsion or gas turbines driving propellers would be required. Jet propulsion was not in his thinking at this stage. By October 1929, Whittle had considered using a fan enclosed in the fuselage to generate a fast flow of air to propel a plane at high altitude. A piston engine would use too much fuel, so he thought of using a gas turbine. After the Air Ministry turned him down, he patented the idea himself. In 1935, Whittle secured financial backing and, with Royal Air Force approval, Power Jets Ltd was formed. They began constructing a test engine in July 1936, but it proved inconclusive. Whittle concluded that a complete rebuild was required, but lacked the necessary finances. Protracted negotiations with the Air Ministry followed and the project was secured in 1940. By April 1941, the engine was ready for tests. The first flight was made on 15 May 1941. By October the United States had heard of the project and asked for the details and an engine. A Power Jets team and the engine were flown to Washington to enable General Electric to examine it and begin construction. The Americans worked quickly and their XP-59A Airacomet was airborne in October 1942, some time before the British Meteor, which became operational in 1944. The jet engine proved to be a winner, particularly in America where the technology was enthusiastically embraced. Whittle retired from the RAF in 1948 with the rank of air commodore. He was knighted in the same year and went to work in the US shortly afterwards, becoming a research professor at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. Whittle died in 1996. Having battled his way past social, academic and financial obstacles, he succeeded in creating something which changed the world - and shrank it too. Britain was reluctant to celebrate the centenary of Sir Frank Whittle, the man who invented the jet engine. Across Britain, Sir Frank is remembered by a ring road in Derby, a couple of roundabouts, six side streets and a university laboratory. There used to be a pub called The Jet And Whittle in Leamington Spa (where he grew up) but then someone decided to drop the Whittle. But what is wrong with poor Sir Frank ? The man was a working-class hero who could have spared us the Battle of Britain and the Blitz if the British Establishment had been quicker to listen to him. He patented the engine, but few in Britain saw the merits of the technology. Others saw its merits, however, and German diplomats in London wasted no time ordering copies of the patent. When the patent expired in 1935, Whittle could not even afford the £5 renewal fee. According to German prisoners interrogated after World War II, Whittle’s plans were being circulated around Germany. The secret of an invention which might have stopped the war was well and truly out. The RAF remained supportive of their young genius, however, financing Whittle through Cambridge where, needless to say, he took a First Class degree in Mechanical Sciences. All the while, he was still designing the jet engine he knew would work. Finally, two friends helped him secure enough backing to start a company called Power Jets Ltd, and in April 1937 he fired up an experimental jet engine for the first time. In 1941, a Gloster E28 plane took off with a Whittle jet engine inside it - 12 years after he had first had the idea. Britain had taken the lead in what would be known as the jet age. Whittle had been proved right all along. Production of his jet engine could finally begin. By then, however, the Nazis - equipped with Whittle’s original patent - had already beaten him into the air. In 1939, a German engineer called Hans von Ohain had built the first jet plane to take to the sky. It was unreliable and could travel for only six minutes, but history had been made. Back in Britain, industry could see the commercial merits of Whittle’s vision and there was no shortage of scheming and incompetence, notably by his supposed business “partners” at Rover.