Timeline of jet power

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.

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