Frank Whittle

British aeronautical engineer

• Born: June 1, 1907
• Birthplace: Coventry, Warwickshire, England
• Died: August 8, 1996
• Place of death: Columbia, Maryland

With a background that included flight experience, training in power-plant design, and metalworking skills, Whittle designed and built the first jet engine in Great Britain.

Early Life

Frank Whittle (WHIHT-tehl) was born in Coventry, England. His parents, of working-class background from Lancashire, had moved to Coventry, where Whittle’s father worked in a cotton mill. The elder Whittle was fascinated by machinery and spent his spare time tinkering, often with his son at his elbow. Eventually, the elder Whittle was able to buy a small machine firm, the Leamington Valve and Piston Ring Company, which he ran for years as a one-man operation. As a boy, Whittle performed odd jobs in his father’s business and eventually learned to use the various power tools, drilling valve stems and operating the lathe. In this way, he learned the fundamentals of drafting and metalworking, an understanding that proved to be valuable to designing and building the hand-tooled prototypes of jet engines.

At the age of eleven, Whittle won a scholarship to a secondary school that later became Leamington College. By his own account, Whittle did not set records as a scholar, but outside school he became an omnivorous reader of popular science books, spending hours in the public library. His chief interest lay in aviation, and this interest led to his decision to join the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1922. He passed the RAF’s written exams with high marks but was rejected because of his small size he was only five feet tall. An active and competitive young man, Whittle sought out a friendly physical education instructor, who put him on a regime of exercises and a carefully planned diet. Whittle grew three inches and eventually became one of six hundred apprentices to the RAF training school at Cranwell in 1923.

For the next three years, Whittle studied the technicalities of rigging metal airplanes, a new specialty at that time, since aircraft construction was still dominated by wood and fabric. More important, he became very active in a local model airplane group that designed and built an impressive gas-engine aircraft with a wingspan of ten feet. This ambitious project caught the attention of his superiors, and Whittle was appointed as a cadet at the RAF College at Cranwell: He was on his way to becoming an RAF officer as well as a pilot. After Whittle was graduated second in his class from Cranwell in 1928, he was posted to a fighter squadron, then went on to a special school for flight instructors. During this time, the concept of using a gas turbine power plant for aircraft began to crystallize for him. He made some calculations, and the idea seemed feasible.

Life’s Work

Whittle’s idea had first taken shape at Cranwell, where he wrote a thesis, “Future Developments in Aircraft Design,” in which he concluded that high-speed, long-range aircraft would have to fly at very high altitudes, where low air density would enhance their performance. At a time when RAF fighters scuttled along at 150 miles per hour, Whittle was postulating speeds of 500 miles per hour. As for power plants, his thesis discussed the possibility of rocket engines and gas turbines driving propellers. In the following months, after considering an arrangement in which a conventional piston engine was linked to a compressor and a low-pressure jet, he suddenly had the idea to substitute a turbine for the piston engine. He found that a high-pressure gas turbine could produce the energy to propel an aircraft. Although Whittle submitted sketches and calculations to appropriate offices in the Air Ministry, the response was disappointing. Nevertheless, he had sufficient faith in his proposal to take out a patent, which was filed in January, 1930.

Also during 1930, he was married to Dorothy Mary Lee and was posted to Felixstowe as a floatplane test pilot. Because of his flying skills and exemplary work at Felixstowe, Whittle went on to an officers’ engineering course; a stellar performance in the class won for him a special appointment to take an honors course in mechanical engineering at the University of Cambridge. Throughout this time, Whittle periodically visited all the commercial firms he thought might have an interest in gas turbines. Unfortunately, it was the era of the Great Depression, and no business had money to sink into a radical new power system. Companies also complained that Whittle’s design was ahead of the metallurgical state of the art by many years. Whittle was having a difficult time as well. His family now included two young children, and he was struggling to make ends meet on a young officer’s salary. When his jet engine patent was due for renewal in 1935, he allowed it to lapse because he could not afford the renewal fee of five pounds.

At this point, his career took a dramatic turn. At Cambridge, two former RAF officers became convinced that Whittle’s jet engine had merit. After reestablishing the basic patent and adding to it, they set out to find adequate financing to pursue the idea. Eventually a complex set of agreements was concluded that involved Whittle, his associates, the Air Ministry, a turbine engineering company, and an adventurous firm of investment bankers. In January, 1936, a contract was negotiated for the design and manufacture of an experimental jet engine. The Air Ministry allowed Whittle to work on the contract for six hours per week. The company organized to fabricate the engine was christened Power Jets Limited.

Meanwhile, Whittle received first-class honors in the engineering exams at Cambridge and was rewarded with a postgraduate year to conduct research on gas turbine engines. By 1937, he had been placed on the RAF’s special duty list to work full-time on the jet engine. Coping with a multitude of problems, Whittle and the Power Jets team nevertheless built a full-sized bench-test engine and made a brief, though encouraging, run on April 12, 1937. This was a milestone and also won for the company a series of development contracts from the Air Ministry.

After an additional two years of experimental work, Power Jets received a government contract for a full-scale flight model of the Whittle engine, and Gloster Aircraft was to design the airplane, designated as E.28/39. The outbreak of World War II in September, 1939, added to the pressures of engine development. The strain took its toll on Whittle’s health, and doctors were forced to hospitalize him more than once over the next few years.

Meanwhile, a series of combustion problems seemed to be resolved after liaison with engineers at Shell Group, who had been doing advanced research in fuels and combustion techniques. A series of endurance runs on a new engine design was successful, clearing the way for installation of a flight engine in the Gloster Aircraft model. Taxi trials were run during April, 1941, including some with Whittle at the controls. On May 15, 1941, as Whittle proudly looked on, the E.28/39 successfully took to the air, the hallmark of a new era in aviation.

During 1941, following a visit to Great Britain by American General Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, it was decided to have the United States share in jet engine development. Because of its work on turbo superchargers, General Electric was selected for production in the United States. In October, 1941, a disassembled engine and a team from Power Jets flew across the Atlantic in the bomb bay of a B-24 Liberator. Whittle himself came to the United States the next year and stayed several months to advise the Americans on jet engine development. In October, 1942, the Bell P-59 made its first flight, beginning the jet age in the United States.

During the remaining years of the war, Whittle was closely involved in the development of the Gloster Meteor (a twin-engine jet fighter that shot down a number of V-1 rocket bombs before the war’s end) and spent considerable time in the coordination of jet engine manufacturing in Great Britain. Power Jets was not set up for volume production, and this task went to the large companies, such as Rolls Royce. Eventually, because of the government funds expended on Power Jets since 1939, the company was nationalized; the organization finally disintegrated, although its employees easily found positions in the many firms that were now entering the field. Whittle was later awarded œ100,000, tax free, for his contributions. Because of medical problems, Whittle retired from the RAF in 1948, with the rank of air commodore. His contributions to the field of jet engineering were now well known, and he received the honor of knighthood from George VI in the same year.

For the next two decades, Whittle became a technical adviser and consultant to leading aviation firms. After his first marriage ended, he married Hazel S. Hall in 1976. In 1977, Whittle accepted a position on the faculty of the U.S. Naval Academy, at Annapolis, Maryland, and while there he completed a technical book, Gas Turbine Aero-Thermodynamics, published by Pergamon Press in 1981.

Significance

Although a German jet flew two years earlier than the British model, Whittle’s pioneering efforts had major consequences for postwar military and civil aviation development. The leading German engineer in the field of jet propulsion was Hans von Ohain, who experimented with a jet engine fueled with gaseous hydrogen, early in 1937. As von Ohain himself noted, dates and comparisons were “not meaningful,” since Whittle’s engine, tested in April of 1937, was operated with liquid fuel. In any case, the Germans surged ahead, because of the powerful influence of the Heinkel Corporation, one of the leading German aircraft manufacturers; the decision by military leaders to launch a crash program in jet engines; and the much less stringent reliability requirements of the German air ministry. The Heinkel He-178 took to the air on August 27, 1939. Like its Gloster counterpart, it was strictly an experimental airplane, quickly superseded by operational designs such as the Messerschmitt Me-262, a formidable opponent for Allied air forces over Europe late in the war.

In any event, American and British jets such as the Lockheed P-80 and the Gloster Meteor were in production by the war’s end, ready to meet the Luftwaffe’s jet challenge. The Allied jet fighters exemplified one of Whittle’s most important legacies, stemming from the remarkable selflessness that had led the British to share this state-of-the-art technology and representing the expertise of the original Power Jets team. Commercially, Whittle’s work led to the development of the famous de Havilland Comet jet transport of the 1950’s and to its successors around the world. Commercial jet travel has been one of the most striking phenomena in transportation since World War II, with a major impact on business organization and the travel industry. In time-distance relationships, jet travel has literally brought all parts of the world closer together.

Bibliography

Constant, Edward W., II. The Origins of the Turbojet Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. This prizewinning scholarly study traces jet technology in the early twentieth century. Constant’s book includes an excellent, detailed survey of Whittle’s work, as well as that of von Ohain. He also summarizes the transition from Whittle’s centrifugal flow design to the modern axial flow turbojet.

Cumpsty, Nicholas. Jet Propulsion: A Simple Guide to the Aerodynamics and Thermodynamic Design and Performance of Jet Engines. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Comprehensive overview of the history, function, and design of turbojet engines. Bibliographic references and index.

Heiman, Grover. Jet Pioneers. New York: Duel, Sloan and Pearce, 1963. A popular survey of several figures, including Whittle and von Ohain. Sprinkled with illustrations, this is a good introduction to Whittle and to the jet era.

Nahum, Andrew. Frank Whittle: Invention of the Jet. Cambridge, England: Icon/Totem Books, 2005. Describes Whittle’s ideas for building jet engines and chronicles the development of his aeronautical technology.

Whittle, Frank. “The Birth of the Jet Engine in Britain.” In The Jet Age, edited by Walter Boyne and Donald Lopez. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979. An excellent essay by Whittle that closely follows his book Jet.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Jet: The Story of a Pioneer. London: Frederick Muller, 1953. An autobiographical review of Whittle’s work that concludes with his retirement from the RAF in 1948. Valuable for its details on jet engine development and for details on the complex relationships of Power Jets to the Air Ministry as well as to other manufacturers.