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Frank Whittle fires up the "Whittle Unit" in 1939. Painting by Rod Lovesey, as shown on the Midland Air Museum website.

'Gentlemen, I give you the Whittle engine' (part 1)

And at Muroc, in October 1942, Robert Stanley of Bell Aircraft taxied across the hardpan and took to the air in another secret craft, a trout-like fighter with a wide flat wing. He was airborne for half an hour at an altitude of twenty-five feet, an unremarkable flight compared to what other airplanes had been doing for most of the century. But Stanley's flight was epochal, for his Bell XP-59A had no propeller.

"What a strange feeling this seemingly giant bird gave us as it approached," recalled Ted Rogers, a civilian engineer from the General Electric company, which had supplied the P-59's engines. "There was dead silence as it passed directly overhead--then a low rumbling roar like a blowtorch--and it was gone, leaving a smell of kerosene in the air." The Jet Age had come to North America.

More specifically, it had been imported to North America. The P-59 was an American product, but its engines were designed in Britain by a Royal Air Force officer named Frank Whittle.

I was a schoolboy when the P-59 took flight, though of course I knew nothing about it until World War II was nearly won. What I did know--because it was drilled into me in geography class and reinforced by great washes of pink on every globe and atlas--was that the sun never set on the British Empire. This illusion wasn't confined to American schoolchildren. In Britain, imperial pride helped lull government ministers into handing the turbojet engine over to the United States without any apprehension about the competition they were creating for their own aircraft industry.

Nor did General Electric realize that it had received a technology that would transform a stodgy vendor of light bulbs and steam generators into the world's preeminent builder of aircraft engines. Ted Rogers would live to see his company's turbojets powering most of the world's air traffic--a tale of unintended consequences that began with one man's struggle.

In retrospect, what is most astonishing about the turbojet is how early it came on the scene. By the 1920s, inventors in Britain, France, Switzerland, and the United States were all trying to replace the Wright brothers' propeller with a plume of hot air.

Among them was Pilot Officer Frank Whittle of the Royal Air Force. In 1929, PO Whittle sketched an engine in which a piston-driven compressor would inject fuel and air into a firebox, where it would burn, expand, and be vented out the rear. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so as the exhaust rushed out at the back, the aircraft must move forward. The jet's efficiency would increase with altitude, and there would also be a ram effect, meaning that the faster the jet flew, the faster it would be able to fly--500 mph, Whittle thought, at a time when his own frontline fighter was rated at 150 mph.

Whittle abandoned the piston-jet hybrid when he calculated that it would weigh as much as a conventional engine, deliver no additional thrust, and burn more fuel. (The Italians would built an engine very like the one Whittle had first envisaged, with results much as he predicted.)

Then "the penny dropped," as he later said. "I suddenly thought, Why not substitute a turbine for the piston engine?" He took this plan to the Air Ministry Laboratory in London, where a respected government scientist, Alan Griffith (known as "Soap Bubble" for his use of a soapy film to measure stress in metals), was working on a gas turbine engine that would drive a conventional propeller. Whittle was twenty-two years old.

In a reciprocating engine, the piston compresses air in a chamber to be burned, and on its rebound converts the combustion energy into the mechanical energy that turns a crankshaft. Griffith's gas turbine, a refinement of industrial engines that had been around since the turn of the century, substituted a vaned wheel for the piston. This turbine transmitted energy to the propeller, meanwhile turning the rotary compressor that made the whole thing possible--an approach that was at once more complicated and less risky than Whittle's concept of an airplane driven by hot gasses alone.

When Griffith reviewed Whittle's proposal, his own experience convinced him that the performance required of the turbine and compressor was unattainable. He demonstrated his skepticism by finding an error in the young man's calculations. Thank you, PO Whittle, and goodbye.

For seven years Whittle struggled with the turbojet without financial help from his government, meanwhile working with an RAF scholarship toward his baccalaureate degree from Cambridge University. During that period he managed to find backers for a prototype "Whittle Unit" to be assembled from parts supplied by the British Thomson-Houston (BTH) in Rugby. The actual construction would be done by his own small company, Power Jets Limited.

In 1937 the Air Ministry finally offered a small subsidy to Power Jets, thanks to the foresight of a scientist named Henry Tizard, then the ministry's chairman of scientific research. Tizard by most accounts was a clear thinker who formed his opinions without regard to politics, and as a result had little influence on the political process. He pronounced the turbojet "streets ahead" of any other proposal he had seen. However, this was an era of peace, as everyone believed except an out-of-favor politician named Winston Churchill. A year would pass before Tizard's committee managed to come up with the $25,000 it had pledged to Whittle's project.

By the time the Whittle Unit screeched to life in March 1939, German troops had occupied Austria and part of Czechoslovakia. Nine years after it might have acted, the Air Ministry gave Power Jets a contract to build a working aircraft engine, to be called the W-1. The Gloster company would provide the airframe.

In September Germany invaded Poland. Britain honored its treaty obligation by declaring war on the aggressor, and Europe knew that once again it would be ruined by war.

"That is when I became acquainted with Whittle and his work," said Lord Kings Norton, a puckish 90-year-old whom I interviewed at his home in Chipping Campden in March 1992. He was outfitted with a cane, a blue blazer, and a tie with a motif of hot-air balloons. With great ceremony, he mixed me a gin and tonic and graced it with a slice of lemon.

In September 1939, Kings Norten was a government scientist with the more plebian name of Harold Roxbee Cox, assigned to the development of civil aircraft. At the outbreak of hostilities, Roxbee Cox reported to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Harrogate, where Air Vice Marshal Arthur Tedder put him in charge of engine development, including Whittle's turbojet.

"He was a very astonishing man," Kings Norton said of Whittle. "He came from a humble family in Coventry, and he was a boy [apprentice] in the Royal Air Force.... They turned this boy into a damned fine officer who could have done anything, had he chosen to apply his intelligence to a [military] career.... He would have been an air chief marshal, no doubt about it. But he was absorbed in his invention."

Whittle was given the use of an old BTH foundry near Rugby called the Ladywood Works--"drab, pinch-penny, and sometimes frightening," as he later described it. He and a handful of engineers set to work, turning his design into a working aircraft engine.

A big piston engine like the Rolls Royce Merlin did its best work at 2,000 revolutions per minute. Whittle's W-1 would turn at 17,750 rpm, at which point its compressor blades would go supersonic and its firebox temperature would exceed anything then known to metallurgy. The Ladywood Works was impregnated with foundry sand, which during engine run-ups fell from crevices in the roof like an English rain. Occasionally it got into the engine, destroying parts machined to exquisite tolerances.

Whittle developed an explosive temper. He suffered from eczema, boils, insomnia, and heart palpitations. His weight dropped to 126 pounds, and he looks decades older than his thirty-three years. To drive himself through sixteen-hour workdays, he sniffed Benzedrine--what a later generation would call an "upper"--from a nasal inhaler. Then he took tranquilizers and sleeping pills--"downers"--so he could sleep through the night, rise next morning, and start again.

In the spring of 1940, Germany overran Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France. Britain's response was to bring Winston Churchill out of political exile. In one of his first acts as prime minister, Churchill created a Ministry of Aircraft Production and put it in the hands of a close friend and advisor, the newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook.

In the fall, the Germans came at Britain from the air, in what would be called the Battle of Britain. It is tempting to believe, remembering how the Hawker Hurricane and the Vickers-Supermarine Spitfire fought the Battle, that Beaverbrook had an easy job of it. Yet the triumph of these fighters and their powerplant--the Merlin engine, which increased its power output by 100 percent between 1940 and 1945--belied an anemic air industry that relied almost wholly on foreign suppliers for sophisticated machine tools. Beaverbrook, panicked by the desperate need for Spitfires that could defend Britain right now, canceled the priority order for the Whittle engine.

"Beaverbrook was a difficult chap," recalled Lord Kings Norton--the scientist Roxbee Cox, whom the new minister inherited along with the turbojet project. "He did some very stupid things. He tore up all the [household] railings ... and he encouraged women to give up their iron saucepans" for scrap. (As Kings Norton told the story, the women took advantage of Beaverbrook's scrap drive to upgrade their kitchens with aluminum pans.) "Nevertheless, he was not unlikable. I was a relatively young man at the time, and I remember that when I was leaving his office he always insisted on helping me on with my overcoat."

Beaverbrook also inherited Henry Tizard as his scientific advisor. From this vantage, Tizard was able to divert resources once again to the Whittle-Gloster turbojet project. "Tizard was on the right side of this," Kings Norton said. "He supported Whittle, no doubt about that."

Whittle now had three supporters at the Ministry of Aircraft Production: Tizard, Roxbee Cox, and Air Vice Marshal Tedder. But they were reluctant--Tedder especially--to share their enthusiasm with the minister. "Tedder was anxious that he never hear about it until it was further advanced [for fear that] Beaverbrook, whose eye was on doing things quickly and getting a lot of [aircraft] made on the double, would stop the longer-term project," Kings Norton said. "Nevertheless, Beaverbrook did hear about it. He did send for me, I did talk to him, and I brought Whittle to meet him. And of course he took to Whittle."

Even then, there were obstacles. "There were people who believed we should stick to the old-fashioned piston engine, and this newfangled thing wouldn't work," Kings Norton recalled. There were doubts about the inventor, too, or at least about his ability to manage an industrial enterprise--doubts based on his youth, his management style, and perhaps his humble background. "Tedder didn't feel that engine production should be in Whittle's hands, and there he was wrong, in my view," Kings Norton said.