This article outlines the important developments in the history of the development of the air-breathing (duct) jet engine. Although the most common type, the gas turbine powered jet engine, was certainly a 20th-century invention, many of the needed advances in theory and technology leading to this invention were made well before this time. The jet engine was clearly an idea whose time had come. Frank Whittle submitted his first patent in 1930. By the late 1930s there were six teams chasing development, three in Germany, two in the UK and one in Hungary. By 1942 they had been joined by another half dozen British companies, three more in the United States based on British technology, and early efforts in the Soviet Union and Japan based on British and German designs respectively. For some time after the World War II, British designs dominated, but by the 1950s there were many competitors, particularly in the US with its huge arms-buying programme.
Prehistoric times Ordovician period: the first known cephalopods: they swim by a natural built-in reciprocating hydrojet.
Ancient times 1st century AD: Aeolipile described by Hero of Alexandria – steam jet/rocket engine on a bearing
The leadup (1791–1929) 1791: John Barber receives British patent #1833 for A Method for Rising Inflammable Air for the Purposes of Producing Motion and Facilitating Metallurgical Operations. In the patent he describes a gas turbine and various applications for it including propulsion of ships, barges and boats by reaction. 1884: Charles Algernon Parsons patents the steam turbine. In the patent application he notes that the turbine could be driven "in reverse" to act as a compressor. He suggests using a compressor to feed air into a furnace, and a turbine to extract power to run the compressor. Although intended for factory use, he is clearly describing the gas turbine. 1887: Gustaf de Laval introduces nozzles design of small steam turbines. 1900: Sanford Alexander Moss publishes a paper on turbocompressors. He builds and runs a testbed example in 1903. 1903: Ægidius Elling builds a gas turbine using a centrifugal compressor which runs under its own power. By most definitions, this is the first working gas turbine. 1906: The Armengaud-Lemale gas turbine tested in France. This was a relatively large machine which included a 25 stage centrifugal compressor designed by Auguste Rateau. The gas turbine could sustain its own air compression but was too inefficient to produce useful work. 1907: Victor Kavarodine builds the first pulsejet engine based on his 1906 patent. 1908: René Lorin patents a design for the ramjet engine. 1908: Georges Marconnet patents the first valveless pulsejet and suggests its use in aircraft. 1910: Romanian inventor Henri Coandă builds the Coandă-1910 which he exhibits at the International Aeronautic Salon in Paris. It uses a ducted fan for propulsion instead of a propeller. Years later he claimed that it burned fuel in the duct and was thus a motorjet, but historians debate this claim, and his claims that the aircraft flew in December 1910 before crashing and burning. 1915: Albert Fonó devised a solution for increasing the range of artillery, comprising a gun-launched projectile which was to be united with a ramjet propulsion unit. This was to make it possible to obtain a long range with low initial muzzle velocities, allowing heavy shells to be fired from relatively lightweight guns. 1916: Auguste Rateau suggests using exhaust-powered compressors to improve high-altitude performance, the first example of the turbocharger. 1917: Sanford Alexander Moss starts work on turbochargers at General Electric, which goes on to be the world leader in this technology. 1917: James Stocker Harris patents a "Motor Jet" design on behalf of his brother inlaw Robert Alexander Raveau Bolton. 1920: W.J. Stern reports to the Royal Air Force that there is no future for the turbine engine in aircraft. He bases his argument on the extremely low efficiency of existing compressor designs. Stern's paper is so convincing there is little official interest in gas turbine engines anywhere, although this does not last long. 1921: Maxime Guillaume patents the axial-flow turbine engine. It uses multiple stages in both the compressor and turbine, combined with a single very large combustion chamber. Although sightly different in form, the design is significantly similar to future jet engines in operation. 1923: Edgar Buckingham at the United States National Bureau of Standards publishes a report on jets, coming to the same conclusion as W.J. Stern, that the turbine engine is not efficient enough. In particular he notes that a jet would use five times as much fuel as a piston engine. [1] 1926: Alan Arnold Griffith publishes his groundbreaking paper Aerodynamic Theory of Turbine Design, changing the low confidence in jet engines. In it he demonstrates that existing compressors are "flying stalled", and that major improvements can be made by redesigning the blades from a flat profile into an airfoil, going on to mathematically demonstrate that a practical engine is definitely possible and showing how to build a turboprop. 1927: Aurel Stodola publishes his "Steam and Gas Turbines" - basic reference for jet propulsion engineers in the USA. 1927: A testbed single-shaft turbocompressor based on Griffith's blade design is tested at the Royal Aircraft Establishment. Known as Anne, the tests are successful and plans are made to build a complete compressor-turbine assembly known as Betty. 1929: Frank Whittle's thesis on future aircraft design is published. In it he talks about the needs for high-speed flight and the use of turbojets as the only reasonable solution to the problem of propeller efficiency. 1929: Boris Stechkin publishes first theory of supersonic ramjet, based on compressible fluid theory.
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