engguy wrote:
All those stinking jets belong in museums. Bring back the recips now. Much better fuel economy, and just plain sound better. And since we all know that with proper design a piston plane can pretty much cruise with a jet, look at the P51, and thats old school.
It was so much easier when the world was flat, and there were just believers and heritics, wasn't it?
Walrus 7 wrote:
You know I'm a big fan of your work, but I have to question the statement that Whittle invented the jet engine. That's a bit like saying that James Cook discovered Australia. Each claimed credit, but both were just adding to the knowledge discovered by others.
To my mind, the inventor of the jet engine was Romanian Henri Coanda, who exhibited his jet-powered aeroplane at the Paris Exposition in 1910. Yes, that's right, only seven years after the Wright Brothers, and a long time before Whittle. His "air-reactive" engine powered an unmanned aircraft on one flight in October 1910.
Coanda also framed one of the two main principles of flight that explain the production of lift.
Hi Walrus,
Thanks for the polite correction. I absolutely agree that it was most slack of me to say that Whittle 'invented' the jet. He was indeed developing ideas in part based on other work as he would have said; but the critical point was that he (and von Ohan) developed the idea and prototypes to successful working engines. Coandă deserves much credit (and the Deutsches Museum has a model of his aircraft) but Coandă's aircraft did not result in any further work - one may as well credit Hero.
Coandă also developed a
piston engine powered reaction motor not a 'pure' jet engine of any type, but a hybrid - regarded today generally as a dead end concept; only used in prototype form, by him, and Caproni, primarily.
Whittle deserves his fame not just because of his work, but the fact that he persisted in the face of enormous discouragement and multiple obstacles. As far as Whittle knew, if he gave up, we'd still have been messing about with the piston engines discussed above! We now know about the German work, so we also know that the jet was an inevitable invention where the time had come, but it was not Greece, Rumania, Spain or Italy (all with 'jet reaction pioneers') where the first successful jet aircraft were developed to mass use - but Germany and Britain.
As to Cook, he mapped a previously disputed continent - good enough for me, couple with him being called 'James' too.
(He's generally regarded as one of the greatest cartographers and map makers in history. It was RAAF Seagulls which 'added to' Cooks' maps and work exploring the previously uncharted coast of Australia in the 1920s and 30s.)
It's important to recognise pioneers - but what
matters is who converts that pioneering into success.
Just my view!
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