Frank Whittle: The Invention Of Jet Engines

Jet engines are commonly known to be on various aircraft. Whether it be an airplane or a rocket, jet engines are what allow these aircraft to fly through the air at tremendous speeds. In 1926, Frank Whittle had to write a thesis in order to graduate from officer training. Whittle chose his thesis topic to be over the future of aviation. In his paper, he discussed that with the way planes were gaining thrust, which was by propellers, the planes would never be able to fly higher than twenty thousand feet since the air was too thin for the propellers to give the plane forward thrust. Starting development in the 1930s, Frank Whittle was named the inventor of the jet engine for airplanes (Sisson). The invention of the jet engine has changed the way the world travels. Although the credit for the invention of the jet engine was given to Whittle, Sir Isaac Newton was the first person to describe the principle of how the jet engine should work. Newton had a unique way of describing the idea of how jet propulsion should work (Newton). He had said that if you take a balloon and fill it up with a gas, then with the open end of the balloon untied, the gas would be expelled with a force pushing away from the balloon. That force would then cause the balloon to move forward (Newton). This concept follows …show more content…
Every design of jet engines require a combustion chamber, the combustion chamber is what creates the exhaust which in turn helps to give the engine thrust. Compressed air is forced into the combustion chamber, which is then mixed with fuel. The fuel enters the chamber by what is called fuel injectors (Shaw). After an initial spark for ignition, the fuel and air mixture inside the chamber constantly ignites with the high temperatures of the air reaching up to 2700 degrees Celsius or 4892 degrees Fahrenheit. The expanded gases produced in the chamber are used for thrust to give the aircraft propulsion