Timeline of Jet Power - The Leadup (1791-1929)

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 it he describes a turbine.
• 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.
• 1903-1906: The team of Armengaud and Lemale in France build a complete gas turbine engine. It uses three separate compressors driven by a single turbine. Limits on the turbine temperatures allow for only a 3:1 compression ratio, and the turbine is not based on a Parsons-like "fan", but a Pelton wheel-like arrangement. The engine is so inefficient, at about 3% thermal efficiency, that the work is abandoned.
• 1908: Hans Holzwarth starts work on extensive research on an "explosive cycle" gas turbine, based on the Otto cycle. This design burns fuel at a constant volume and is somewhat more efficient. By 1927, when the work ended, he has reached about 13% thermal efficiency.
• 1908: René Lorin patents a design for the ramjet engine.
• 1909: Marconnt proposes a modification of Lorin's design using a resonant compression chamber, creating the pulsejet.
• 1910: Romanian inventor Henri Coandă builds the Coandă-1910 which he exhibits at the International Aeronautic Salon in Paris. In the 1950s he said he tested it December 1910 at the airfield in Issy-les-Moulineaux, that it was the first motorjet, and that it crashed and burned on its first brief flight. He was contradicted by some aviation historians who said that the aircraft never flew and that its ducted fan engine did not burn fuel in the airstream.
• 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: J.S. Harris patents a "Motor Jet" design.
• 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.
• 1925: Wilhelm Pape patents a constant-volume engine design.
• 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.