First and foremost, it is now being recognized as the first air-reactive engine (jet) aircraft, making its first and only flight October, 1910.
The Coanda - 1910 Air Reactive (Jet) Aeroplane
Second International Aeronautical Exhibition
Grand Palais, Champ-Elysees, Paris, France
Circa October 1910
Quite right Bluffcove. All they have in common is a basic conformity with Newtonian physics, as does such technically advanced concepts as walking. Is Ironman or some other gobsh1te going to tell us the Americans invented that too, I wonder.
The basic problem is he can’t tell the difference between “jet engines” (which refers to any form of propulsion using continuous combustion with atmospheric oxygen to generate a stream of high velocity gas) and the “gas turbine engine” which is commonly known as the “jet engine” and is what Whittle held the patents for. The gas turbine engine was of course the first practical jet engine - prior attempts (which mostly followed the Coanda model - there have been others similar) had inferior performance, fuel consumption and reliability to existing piston engines, and were an evolutionary dead end.
The jet airplane was developed by the United States, Britain and Germany independantly and at the same time. Germany simply tried using them in war first. The US had a jet airplane by 1942, and a war servicable jet fighter by 1944, but they were not built in enough numbers in time to use them for the expected invasion of Japan.
Now to say that the US was involved in the development at the same time as the UK and Germany and to say that they were independent of the UK is incorrect which we have endeavoured to point out to you but you are not able to see. The US developed bugger all until the UK gave them the information on turbojets. And a war serviceable jet by 1945 (50 p59s) not 44.
That means the US got his ideas and began to investigate the technology. Still with me?
No, they got an engine not an idea, if we only gave them the idea they would not have had and aircraft in the air. The US built the engine under licence, they did not develop their own. Later they did improve on the engine, but they had the resources to do that, as it was nice and peaceful in the US with the lights on.
The development of post war US aircraft design is based on the work of the Germans. The UK also plundered this and used the swept wing research extensively.
Once more, nobody said the US invented the jet engine or had the 1st flying jet airplane
Well you did
In June 1942, Whittle was flown to Boston to help General Electric to overcome problems. They built the engine under licence in America with the astonishing result that Bell Aircraft’s experimental Airacomet flew in the autumn of 1942, beating the Meteor into the skies by five months."
It is not astonishing that the US got an aircraft into the air six months before the UK got its fighter aircraft into the air, they had flown their prototype in May 41.
The US did not develop the jet independently of the UK, the UK gave the information to the US who then advanced the research.
As for post war development you have the Comet, which was developed into the Nimrod
Now you are confusing turbojets (Whittle) with thermojets (Henri Coanda) now to say that it flew is a slight exageration, it left the ground and crashed in flames when on test and out of control. The engine was a piston engine which provided compresed air that was forced into a combustion chamber and mixed with fuel to provid thrust. The turbojet dispenses with the piston engine and so is a new design and a more workable one as the power to wieght ratio is far better. The first proper flight of the thermojet was in Italy by Campini Caproni CC2 in 27 August 1940. Two prototypes were biult one ended up in Farnbourgh and the other is in Aeronautical Museum of Vigna di Valle. So the first true flight of the turbojet was in 1940 not 1910. But then you could say, using your criteria that blowing up a baloon and letting the air out and watching it fly was the first jet, some may disagree.
First and foremost, it is now being recognized as the first air-reactive engine (jet) aircraft, making its first and only flight October, 1910.
The Coanda - 1910 Air Reactive (Jet) Aeroplane
Second International Aeronautical Exhibition
Grand Palais, Champ-Elysees, Paris, France
Circa October 1910
The US got a prototype jet engine from Britain. After that, they continued to develop the engine without assistance from the British.
The Germans got the concept from the British and developed the jet engine without asssistance from the British.
Had either of those countries worked with Britain jointly to develop the jet engine it would be obvious that they did not develop it independantly of each other. But ofcourse they got the concept somewhere, that does not mean that they worked together on it. What’s so hard about understanding about the US and Germany developing jet engine technology further without british assistance?
It seems some of you are debating the wrong thing because you are misunderstanding difference between the concepts of development and invention.
These are the definitions of the words as they apply to our discussion:
"Mariam-Webster
Jet: 1 a (1) : a usually forceful stream of fluid (as water or gas) discharged from a narrow opening or a nozzle"
BTW, carburators have what is commonly referred to as “jets” which expell a stream of fuel into a chamber.
“Develop: 2 : to work out the possibilities of”
Conada’a plane was a jet enjne because of it’s method of combustion: it uses a chamber of air which is compressed by a propellor or fan into which a “jet”, or small, forceful stream of fuel flows, which is ignited to produce a thrusting force.
The US and Germany developed the jet engine independantly of Britain because they took the concept and henceforth worked out the possibilities of it’s design to improve upon it. To develop something does not imply to invent it.
Again you are trying to do a nifty footwork. :lol: I have no qualms about German’s development of the turbojet as one of the reasons the Meteor was not put up against the 262 was the concern that the Germans may their hands on the engine.
My point is that until after the war the US did very little development on the jet engine. The US formed a team to look at jet after they had seen a demo in the UK. They were supplied with plans and achieved bugger all, so Whittle went over with an engine to sort them out. When they produced the Airocomet it was exchanged with a Meteor as an exchange of idea. The RAF were not enamoured by the US aircraft, and it would seem nor was the USAAF as only 50 were built and it was scraped within a year of the end of the war and replaced by the P80. The Meteor served a long and distinguished life being sold to a number of countries and claming 3 Migs in Korea. This seems more like an exchange of ideas, or spoon-feeding, as apposed to independent development.
Can any one tell me the type of fuel the 262 used?
Ofcourse the US got the concept from the British Whittle engine, as did Fiat in Italy, de Havilland in Britain, others. Remember, the technology was not classified as secret by the British government, so it spread quickly from the British, since the Germans, who invented the jet engine in coincidence with the British, did not share the invention on their part.
However, the US was not “spoon-fed” the technology as you so crudely claim. Despite the fact that the British provided the US with it’s initial engine design by providing the Whittle engine, the first jet engine ever to operate on US soil was the 1-A designed and built by US company General Electric in 1942. From that moment onward, the US continued to develop it’s own jet engines, and made significant advancements in the power output (more than doubled it) over the British jet engines.
"Finally in 1941, GE received its first contract from the U.S. Army Air Corps to build a gas turbine engine based on Frank Whittle’s design. Six months later, on April 18, 1942, GE’s engineers successfully ran their I-A engine—the first jet engine to operate in the United States. On October 1, 1942, a Bell P-59 powered by General Electric J-16 turbojet engines made its first flight at California’s Muroc Army Air Field. The jet age had come to America. The company followed shortly with the J-31, the first turbojet produced in quantity in the United States.
Two years later, in June 1944, the Air Corps’ first operational fighter, the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star, flew powered by a J33/I-40 engine rated at 4,000 pounds (17,793 newtons) thrust. In 1947, it would set a world speed record at 620 miles per hour (998 kilometers per hour)."
“Over the next two years, GE engineers developed ever more powerful engines. Their J33 produced four times the thrust of the I-A.”
So you see my friend, the US did develop the jet engine independantly. From the very first jet engine to operate on US soil forward, the US developed, designed, and manufactured it’s own jet engines, and continued to improve the performance of jet engines in the process, having developed at least 3 seperate designs, each an improvement in performance over the other, before 1945. The fact that they were adaptations of the British designs does not mean that the adaptations are not development. All jet engines developed during the war, including the British ones, were adaptations (developments) of the original Whittle design.
British Whittle W1 (1941) Thrust: 850 lbs.
British Gloster E28/39 (1941) Thrust: 1,760 lbs.
US GE-1A (1942) Thrust: 1,650 lbs.
US GE J31 (1942) Thrust: 1,650 lbs.
British Rolls-Royce W.2B/Welland (1943) Thrust: 1,700 lbs.
US GE J31-GE-5 (1943) Thrust: 2,000 lbs.
“GE’s subsequent success validated Gen. Arnold’s decision, as the company advanced rapidly from initial receipt of Whittle’s drawings in October 1941, to first bench testing in March 1942, and to production of an original design of a 4,000 lbs. thrust engine for the P-80A in June 1944.”
British Rolls-Royce Derwent I (1944) Thrust: 2,000 lbs
US Allison J33 (1944) - Thrust: 4,600 lbs. (5,400 lbs. with water/alcohol injection)
“Stanley Hooker, who had been in charge of the Rolls-Royce design team that refined the Derwent, visited the US in the spring of 1944, and found that General Electric was developing two turbojet engines with thrust ratings of 17.6 kN (1,800 kgp / 4,000 lbf) or higher. Hooker, realizing that the British had been thinking small, went back to Britain and initiated a fast track project to build a new, much more powerful centrifugal-flow engine.”
So, after 2 years of US development, the British were behind in jet engine technology, and came back to the American jet engines to keep up with the new standard in jet engine power.
British Rolls Royce RB.41 (1944) - Thrust 5,000 lbs.
Do you realize that 3 pages of stuff has been posted trying to disprove that the US developed the jet engine independantly, and here we have the historical facts that show that they not only developed it, but made significant advancements. What a bunch of wasted space that was eh? Was it all becauise they confused the concepts of “invent” and “develop”? I think that’s partly it. :!:
Ofcourse the US got the concept from the British Whittle engine, as did Fiat in Italy, de Havilland in Britain, others. Remember, the technology was not classified as secret by the British government, so it spread quickly from the British, since the Germans, who invented the jet engine in coincidence with the British, did not share the invention on their part.
However, the US was not “spoon-fed” the technology as you so crudely claim. Despite the fact that the British provided the US with it’s initial engine design by providing the Whittle engine, the first jet engine ever to operate on US soil was the 1-A designed and built by US company General Electric in 1942. From that moment onward, the US continued to develop it’s own jet engines, and made significant advancements in the power output (more than doubled it) over the British jet engines.
"Finally in 1941, GE received its first contract from the U.S. Army Air Corps to build a gas turbine engine based on Frank Whittle’s design. Six months later, on April 18, 1942, GE’s engineers successfully ran their I-A engine—the first jet engine to operate in the United States. On October 1, 1942, a Bell P-59 powered by General Electric J-16 turbojet engines made its first flight at California’s Muroc Army Air Field. The jet age had come to America. The company followed shortly with the J-31, the first turbojet produced in quantity in the United States.
Two years later, in June 1944, the Air Corps’ first operational fighter, the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star, flew powered by a J33/I-40 engine rated at 4,000 pounds (17,793 newtons) thrust. In 1947, it would set a world speed record at 620 miles per hour (998 kilometers per hour)."
“Over the next two years, GE engineers developed ever more powerful engines. Their J33 produced four times the thrust of the I-A.”
So you see my friend, the US did develop the jet engine independantly. From the very first jet engine to operate on US soil forward, the US developed, designed, and manufactured it’s own jet engines, and continued to improve the performance of jet engines in the process, having developed at least 3 seperate designs, each an improvement in performance over the other, before 1945. The fact that they were adaptations of the British designs does not mean that the adaptations are not development. All jet engines developed during the war, including the British ones, were adaptations (developments) of the original Whittle design.
British Whittle W1 (1941) Thrust: 850 lbs.
British Gloster E28/39 (1941) Thrust: 1,760 lbs.
US GE-1A (1942) Thrust: 1,650 lbs.
US GE J31 (1942) Thrust: 1,650 lbs.
British Rolls-Royce W.2B/Welland (1943) Thrust: 1,700 lbs.
US GE J31-GE-5 (1943) Thrust: 2,000 lbs.
“GE’s subsequent success validated Gen. Arnold’s decision, as the company advanced rapidly from initial receipt of Whittle’s drawings in October 1941, to first bench testing in March 1942, and to production of an original design of a 4,000 lbs. thrust engine for the P-80A in June 1944.”
British Rolls-Royce Derwent I (1944) Thrust: 2,000 lbs
US Allison J33 (1944) - Thrust: 4,600 lbs. (5,400 lbs. with water/alcohol injection)
“Stanley Hooker, who had been in charge of the Rolls-Royce design team that refined the Derwent, visited the US in the spring of 1944, and found that General Electric was developing two turbojet engines with thrust ratings of 17.6 kN (1,800 kgp / 4,000 lbf) or higher. Hooker, realizing that the British had been thinking small, went back to Britain and initiated a fast track project to build a new, much more powerful centrifugal-flow engine.”
So, after 2 years of US development, the British were behind in jet engine technology, and came back to the American jet engines to keep up with the new standard in jet engine power.
British Rolls Royce RB.41 (1944) - Thrust 5,000 lbs.
Do you realize that 3 pages of stuff has been posted trying to disprove that the US developed the jet engine independantly, and here we have the historical facts that show that they not only developed it, but made significant advancements. What a bunch of wasted space that was eh? Was it all becauise they confused the concepts of “invent” and “develop”? I think that’s partly it. :!:[/quote]
No, as I have read the posts following your latest post, NO-ONE was disaproving that the U.S. were develping the Jet engine independently. You just must of read it wrong or misunderstood it, and that is what caused this little mess.
I never new that the first jet engine was put up by the British, I always suspected the Germans where the first. Anyway, I think that the Germans deffinetely had the best Jet Fighter planes during the period of WW2. Quite incredibly advancements. If it wasnt for the German Rocket scientists, we might of not landed on the moon yet.
Several posts trying to disprove that the US developed the jet engine are missing from this thread, so let’s start at the top:
First we start in on the Americans, because we are confused about the difference between the words “invent” and “develop”.
But then, so were the British jet engines. So what is the point? It’s simply a way of trying to discredit the development the US made with jet engines, that’s all.
Still confused, still trying to discredit the Americans somehow.
Trying to disprove the the US developed the jet engine independantly.
Still trying to disprove that the US developed the jet engine independantly.
Still trying to disprove that the US developed the jet engine independantly.
So, you see my South African Military, yes, they were trying to disprove that the US developed the jet engine independantly.
As there are companies outside the US, UK and Germany (which I believe are the only countries mentioned so far), that manufacture jet engines, is it fair to say that, for example, Japan has independently developed jet engines? How about China and Russia?
No doubt some development goes into the design - after all they don’t all use the same schematic do they?
Semantics I know, but important for the sake of clarity.
Shame they weren’t actually very good. There’s a very good reason that none of the ideas developed by the Germans for their jets during WW2 (with the exception of active blade cooling in their engines, which was forced on them due to their inferior metallurgy).
There were three significant designs, which I’ll analyse in turn. Note that my degree is in aero engineering, so I’ve got some idea of what goes on.
Me-163/263:
Rocket fighter which while it had very high performance for the time was of very little range indeed. Basically, it could be used if the attacking aircraft passed within about 10 miles of it’s airfield, in which case it would get about 5 minutes in combat before it had to attempt to land. Being as you had to land on a skid at high speed (the undercarriage was jettisoned on takeoff), the fuel would dissolve the pilot if given half a chance, and the best L/D was only 10:1 or so.
You end up with a very draggy airframe that can only make one attack or two before having to land, with an airframe that will bite the pilot given half a chance. It looks very “buck rogers” but isn’t actually all that good.
He 162 “Volksjaeger”:
Complete lash up of a “fighter” with no discernible redeeming features. Once single chronically unreliable engine in a position that nobody since has tried to copy for a very good reason. Structurally weak. Allegedly very unpleasant handling - which considering it was intended to be flown by HJ pilots with very little training (on gliders) would have been a killer. Very limited endurance and armament.
Me-262:
Everyone thinks it was great because again it looks very “buck rogers”, but again it was pretty dire. While better than the rest of the German jet/rocket fighters (not hard) it still wasn’t very good. About the best you can say about it is that it had comparable performance to the best of the allied propeller fighters, and so could live in the sky with them.
However, it had some very major faults for a fighter aircraft:
Life on the engines - roughly 10 hours, but wasn’t thought a problem as the pilot’s life expectancy was even shorter.
Cannon - heavy shell and reasonably high ROF but the low muzzle velocity means unless you’re a genius at deflection shooting you won’t hit a manouvering target with it.
Swept wings - these were swept to counteract centre of gravity problems caused by poor turbine design/metallurgy in the engines. While swept wings do give some advantages in very high speed flight (not all that great though - the Bell X-1 had straight wings and was the first to break the sound barrier), they also have some major disadvantages. Notably in this case they would give the aircraft some very vicious stall characteristics and significantly increase drag.
Thick wings - kind of connected with above, and the reason the -262 didn’t get any benefit whatsoever from having swept wings. Ironically, both the Spitfire and the Tempest will have had a higher limiting Mach number simply because they had thinner wings. This is why when the Russians fitted a captured Me-262 with much better engines after the war (Rolls-Royce Derwents built under license, with roughly twice the power of the original engines) no performance improvement whatsoever was found.
Even the Gloster Meteor (a quick lash-up to get jets into service as fast as possible if ever there was one!) outperformed the Me-262 and was capable of far more development.
Finally, people often go on about the Ta-183, claiming that the MiG-15 and F-86 were copies of it. Nice theory, shame it’s total *******s. The Ta-183 was built in Argentina as the Pulqui II - which turned out to be a total dog and which was cancelled after a few prototypes were built, fortunately only killing one person in the process.
The only contribution the German aircraft industry made to these aircraft was the theoretical work done in the mid-1930s on the effect swept wings have in delaying the formation of shock waves. This theory was known on both sides of the atlantic immediately prior to WW2, but there was no point using it until the postwar era as engines simply weren’t powerful enough to make it worthwhile until then.
Would it not mean that to develop a technology would mean taking the existing technology and making modifications or changes in it’s design which afford some type of improvement in the technology? Is that not exactly what the US company General Electric did when they build a succession of engines, each an improvement over the other, culimating in a completely new design of jet engine (the J33) which provided at least twice the power output of any jet engine of date?
Surely you are not still stuck on thinking that because the British invented the jet engine, and that because the Whittle engine was provided to the US early in the war, that the US’s efforts, which resulted in the the J33 engine, were not the result of the development of the techology!
Is a unique, new design which provides twice the performance not a development in the technology of jet engine design? Ofcourse it is. The statement that “the US did little to develop the jet engine until after WWII” has been proven incorrect and laid to rest.
Now, you want to start a debate based on semantics which you hope may, by some miricle or word choice interpretation, ulitmately allow you to trick someone into believing that you have disproved that the US developed the jet engine independantly. But I will not debate semantics, but only facts, for we are discussing facts, and we are not debating semantics themselves.
I have provided for you historical references which show that:
…the first jet engine to operate in the US was built in the US.
…two US companies, General Electric, and Allison, built successively larger and more powerful jet engines in early-to-mid WWII that were loosely based on the Whillte design.
…the US company General Electric, built 3 successively more powerful engines before building the uniquely and original designed J33 engine in 1943, which provided twice the thrust of the latest British jet engine.
…the British revisited the US development team and realized that they had fallen behind in their own technology because the US designs were larger and produced twice as much power.
…the J33 jet engine, a completely new design having little in common with the Whittle design, achieved twice the power output of any British jet engine, and set world speed record shortly after WWII.
What have I left out. There must be other things. Oh well.
Now which of these historical facts is it that you are now trying to set up a condition that you believe, by your use of semantics and despite historical facts, will somehow allow you to disprove it?
Haha, I agree , he guess he didnt work with the navigation department.[/quote]
Sigh. Tom Lehrer is/was an American comedian known for rhyming comedy songs like “poisoning pigeons in the park”. Cuts merely copied his style as a joke. There is no record of it being an actual quote.
RR Welland dry thrust: 1,700 lbs static (first flight july 1943)
J33 dry thrust: 4,600lbs static (first flight may 1944)
RR Derwent dry thrust: 3,500 lbs static (some time in 1944)
RR Nene dry thrust: 5,100lbs static (first ran november 1944 - can’t find a first flight date offhand, adopted by the US as the J48)
Armstrong-Whitworth ASX: 2,600 lbs static (some time in 1943, captive-carry testing only)
DH Goblin: 2,300lbs (1943)
Your statement may or may not be true depending on if you count the ASX as a valid engine - in any case, it’s largely irrelevant as scaling jet engines is relatively easy.
The way any engineer would look at this is to see what work the US did to advance the state of the art of the jet engine. I’m not seeing anything myself - the future was with the axial flow jets, and while the US was doing some work on these nothing noticeable arrived until several years postwar. The Germans had several in combat, and the UK had the Metrovick Beryl (later Armstrong Siddely Sapphire, in US service as the J65 which was used by among other things the A-4 Skyhawk).
All depends on what you define as the “latest British engine” - the ASX clearly had more than half the power of the J33. Note that UK engines were constrained by the Metor design - we were fighting a war for survival and needed jet aircraft extremely quickly to counter the V-1. Hence, we didn’t have the luxury of time enjoyed by the US who could come up with engines for future optimised fighter designs.
So they promptly went back and built the Nene. Which the US built under license. Clear evidence that the US engines were much better!
7 Nov 1945
Herne Bay, Great Britain
H J Wilson
Great Britain
Gloster Meteor F Mk4
Turbojet
606.38
First jet-engined record
7 Sep 1946
Littlehampton, Great Britain
Edward M Donaldson
Great Britian
Gloster Meteor F Mk4
Turbojet
615.77
19 Jun 1947
Muroc, USA
Albert Boyd
USA
Lockheed XP-80R Shooting Star
Turbojet
623.85
Hence (surprise surprise) while your statement is technically correct it is also downright misleading - it took the US two whole years after WW2 to come up with a jet better than the Meteor for air speed. Given the quality of the Meteor design that really isn’t impressive.
