Frank Whittle (Icon Science): The Invention of the Jet by Andrew Nahum

Author:Andrew Nahum [Nahum, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781785782565
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2017-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

• CHAPTER 6 •

THE ORIGINS OF THE JET ENGINE PROGRAMME IN THE USA

In the USA, as in Britain, the origins of the gas turbine engine were much more complicated than has generally been appreciated. Nevertheless, also as in Britain, the Whittle engine played a crucial role in stimulating development.

While still a student at the University of California in 1895, the engineer Sanford Moss had conceived a gas turbine, intended as a stationary unit for industry, commenting later wryly that ‘like most of the other inventors, [I] … at first thought [I] was alone in the gas turbine field’. Moss developed the gas turbine to the hardware stage at General Electric (GE) in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1904, but concluded that ‘as the power for compression was more than the turbine power … the experiment was a flat failure’. However, Moss went on to become a central figure in the development of the turbo-supercharger for piston aero engines by GE at Lynn. This work, intriguingly, became an important link in the transfer of Whittle’s ideas to the USA.

During the 1930s various turbine schemes were considered in America. Most notable were those at Northrop for a complex turboprop (the Turbodyne) and Lockheed’s interesting jet project, the L-1000, conceived by Nathan C. Price, formerly a steam turbine engineer, who had worked for a while with the Doble steam car concern, which was aiming at a 600 mph aircraft flying at 50,000 feet. However, none of these ambitious schemes could be funded by the inventors or manufacturers, and the US army and navy were not tempted, before the war, to back a new type of engine and underwrite the research and development. As discussed in Chapter 2, the decision in Britain to back the powerful but thirsty Whittle jet was propelled in part by Britain’s vulnerability to air attack from Europe and the short warning time of the approach of hostile bombers. This was not a strategic concern in the USA at the time. It was the impending entry of the USA into the war, and the discovery that active, well-advanced jet work was going on in Britain and in Germany, which acted as the spur.

The actual circumstances in which service and industrial people in the USA became aware of the British work are still somewhat mysterious. For example, it has often been suggested that when General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, as head of the US Army Air Corps (USAAC),4 visited Britain in the spring of 1941, he was told about the Whittle engine by officials and, it is said, ‘was astonished when, by chance’, he learned that British jet engines were in an advanced state of development and were ‘about to be flown’. It has also been suggested that he witnessed taxi trials of the E.28/39, and, on his return, asked for a competent US engineer to be sent over to study the Whittle engine. However, the coming of Lend-Lease, and the supply to Britain of turbosupercharged American aircraft for use by the RAF, had

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