Frank Whittle (Icon Science) E-Book

Andrew Nahum

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: Icon Science
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 193

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The story of the jet engine has everything: genius, tragedy, heroism, a world war, the individual vs. the state, and an idea that would change the world. Frank Whittle always maintained that he was held back by a lack of government support. At the very moment in 1943 when his invention was unveiled to the world, his company, Power Jets, was forcibly nationalised. Yet Whittle's brilliance, charm and charisma helped him recruit major support from the British government and the RAF, who gave him the green light to build a jet engine at a time when to do so made little sense. Here is a story of what pushing technology to its limits can achieve - and the effect that such achievement can have on those involved.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

List of Figures and Plates

Acknowledgements

Dedication

About the Author

Foreword

Introduction

1 Whittle’s Early Jet Ideas

2 The Formation of Power Jets Limited

3 Wartime Development

4 Even With All the Mistakes – Human and Otherwise

5 The ‘Straight Through’ Engine

6 The Origins of the Jet Engine Programme in the USA

7 The Nationalisation of Power Jets

8 A State-Owned Firm: Power Jets (R&D) Ltd

9 The End of Power Jets: Formation of the National Gas Turbine Establishment

10 Jet Modernity: the Comet

11 Comet Failure

12 The Leadership So Narrowly Missed

13 New Jets

Endnotes

A Jet Without Whittle? Developments in the USA

The Jet in Germany

Jet Histories

Notes

Bibliography

This edition published in the UK in 2017 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

Originally published in 2004 and 2005 by Icon Books Ltd

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia by Grantham Book Services, Trent Road, Grantham NG31 7XQ

Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710

Distributed in Canada by Publishers Group Canada, 76 Stafford Street, Unit 300, Toronto, Ontario M6J 2S1

Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District, 41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925

ISBN: 978-1-78578-241-1

eISBN: 978-1-78578-256-5

Text copyright © 2017 Andrew Nahum

The author has asserted his moral rights

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher

LIST OF FIGURES

1 The essential Whittle design

2 Diagrammatical view of an axial flow engine

3 A ‘straight through’ centrifugal compressor engine

LIST OF PLATES

1 Whittle in his study in 1946

2 The first ground test engine (the W.U.) at Power Jets’ works in Lutterworth

3 The rotors of a Power Jets W.2/700 and a Metrovick F2 engine

4 Whittle and colleagues recreating the test of the first engine for the official film, Jet Propulsion

5 The Gloster-Whittle E.28/39

6 The headline story from the Daily Express for Friday 7 January 1944

7 The de Havilland Comet 1 prototype

8 Vickers VC10 airliner used for flight tests of the new Rolls-Royce RB 211

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Over a number of years I have been very fortunate in being able to talk to a large number of people who were involved in wartime and post-war aeronautical research and development, some, sadly, no longer with us. A number of these were ‘Reactionaries’ – members of the informal association for members of Frank Whittle’s team at Power Jets – while others have been from industry and from the government research establishments. Some are acknowledged directly in the text, although others are anonymous. However I thank them all warmly. Some years ago, the Reactionaries most kindly asked me to their 40th anniversary dinner, held at the wartime headquarters of Brownsover Hall, near Rugby, which started a number of these conversations.

At the Science Museum, my predecessor as Curator of Aeronautics, the late John Bagley, always encouraged my interest in engines and aeronautical history. Through many conversations he also gave an illuminating insight, from his own time as an aerodynamicist at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, into the culture of government defence research and into the relationship between industry and the research establishments.

It would have been impossible to undertake this study without the generous help of the Science Museum, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge the impetus given by Robert Bud, as Head of Research, and Lindsay Sharp as Director. Furthermore, Jon Tucker, Heather Mayfield and Tim Boon have given excellent encouragement.

Special thanks also to Simon Flynn, Jon Turney and Ruth Nelson at Icon Books whose comments and impulsion have helped tremendously.

DEDICATION

For Fiona

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew Nahum is a curator, writer and historian. He is Keeper Emeritus at the Science Museum where he led the creation of the landmark gallery Making the Modern World (2000) and many other exhibitions including Inside the Spitfire (2005), Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-tech Britain (2008) and Churchill’s Scientists (2015). In 2017 he curated the exhibition Ferrari – Under the Skin, at the Design Museum, London.

He has written extensively on the history of technology and on design, and his books include Alec Issigonis and the Mini (Icon Books, 2005), a contribution to the history of British aeronautics in the Cold War, ‘The Royal Aircraft Establishment from 1945 to Concorde’ in Cold War, Hot Science, (Science Museum, 2002) and Fifty Cars that Changed the World (Design Museum, 2009 and 2016).

FOREWORD

Since the publication of earlier editions of this book, the remarkable phenomenon of the development of the jet engine under the pressures of the Second World War has benefited from renewed and welcome historical attention. However, the account here remains unique in that it sets specifically out to study the pervasive and sometimes misleading ‘invention story’ of the British jet engine, and to calibrate it against the available contemporary accounts and recollections from many of the actors involved in the drama – for drama it certainly was.

It is often said that Britain is good at inventing but bad at supporting its inventors. This book shows that wartime Britain was the reverse – a highly technocratic state eager to find scientific and technical solutions in warfare, and as a result Whittle was provided with a factory and extensive support from the Royal Aircraft Establishment.

The story that emerges is very different from the conventional one. Research, development and engineering were marshalled in a new and uniquely British disposition, under Winston Churchill, to wring the utmost war potential out of this tiny island.

INTRODUCTION

Early in 1940, Arthur Tedder, a Royal Air Force officer, was taken to see the top-secret Whittle jet engine project. Defeat in France was looming, and Tedder’s task at that time was to procure new engines, aircraft and weapons for the next phase of the war. The physical surroundings of the early test were completely different from the well-ordered experimental engine shops of Rolls-Royce or the Bristol aero engine company with which he was familiar, but the improvisation he found at Whittle’s company, Power Jets, may well have added to the magical power of the occasion. Tedder found there echoes of the ‘crazy inventor’ aesthetic that had long been satirised affectionately by British cartoonists, for he recorded his impressions of the test rig as ‘pure unadulterated Heath Robinson’. In ‘what looked like, and I believe was, a derelict motor garage’, he saw what he called ‘a typical Emett design’ – the prototype of the Whittle engine – and he was astonished, and converted, when he saw, for the first time, the glowing combustion chamber and ‘the blazing blue jet flame roaring out into the open’.

Another, almost disastrous, visit by Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, Commander in Chief of Fighter Command, again underlined the drama of the jet for those who had not seen it before. Whittle showed him the engine and took him round to the outside of the test house where the noise of the jet roar made speech impossible. As they stood about three metres from where the jet nozzle protruded through the test-house wall Whittle pointed to the nozzle, to indicate ‘the business end of the engine’. He was aghast as Dowding, practically a god to a middle-ranking Wing Commander like Whittle, misunderstood the gesture and set off briskly almost into the exhaust to be struck by the jet and thrown reeling and staggering across the concrete, his coat torn open and hat rolling away. ‘I stood petrified with horror, and when Sir Hugh recovered himself, apparently unhurt, I … certainly could not speak. … Until that moment I had not realized how deceptively invisible the jet was to a stranger.’

Like Dowding, Arthur Tedder was a hard-headed airman, and from 1940 he successfully ran the combined air force side of the war in North Africa, playing an important part in the defeat of Rommel, and then becoming General Eisenhower’s deputy for Operation Overlord – the D-Day landings and the invasion of German-occupied France. But as with other influential visitors to Power Jets, he felt that he was in the presence of ‘a real war winner, justifying the manufacture of an initial batch of engines and aircraft to match, straight off the drawing board.’ This kind of ‘conversion experience’ was not unusual among those who went to see the early jet. It suggests that even when making hugely expensive technological choices – events we might expect to be ruled by cold technical constraint and rationality – we cannot rule out elements of theatre and even of romance.

The Whittle story has a powerful human quality. He showed brilliance, charm and charisma which helped him to recruit major support from government and the RAF for his engine. To the banker L.L. Whyte, ‘it was like love at first sight, the impression he made was overwhelming.’ Ralph Dudley Williams, Whittle’s principle partner in the engine venture, said simply that on meeting him, ‘I just fell for him.’ However, in late 1943, just as the jet achievement was unveiled in the press (‘Britain has fighter with no propeller’ was the headline in the Daily Express), his company, Power Jets, was nationalised. A colleague called it ‘Greek tragedy in the modern world; the hero publicly acclaimed at the very moment when his deeper ambition is frustrated.’ The reasons for this drama have never been fully analysed.

Whittle’s own account, Jet, published in 1953, was, understandably, written in a spirit of bitterness and disappointment. He described at length the difficulties he and the Power Jets team experienced in their dealings with government agencies, and his account of the invention certainly has a compelling quality that resonates with our familiar beliefs about the lot of inventors. Subsequently, virtually all other accounts have followed his view.

The popular histories naturally take an emphatic line on the supposed poor treatment meted out to Whittle, frequently wheeling out the jet story as a supporting element for the familiar assertion that ‘Britain is good at inventing but bad at developing.’ Whittle’s death in 1996 produced a virtual orgy of this kind of comment, with even the most serious newspapers peddling accounts which verged on the absurd and revealed a startling ignorance both of the realities of engineering development and of historical analysis. Some suggested that the jet could have been practical reality years earlier, even in time to give a convincing technical superiority to the RAF in the Battle of Britain. Typical of the genre was the obituary in the Daily Telegraph which referred to Whittle ‘at times using scrap metal’ which intentionally conjured the image of the great inventor rootling for rusty scrap in a car breaker’s yard. (Whittle’s own statement was simply that ‘at least half the engine ought to have been scrapped because of general deterioration.’) The Times asserted that his ideas were ‘scoffed at’ by the Air Ministry while the Guardian claimed, quite misleadingly, that the Air Ministry ‘repeatedly declared … the idea was largely pie in the sky.’

All these accounts show, or affect, surprising ignorance of the pre-existing background to gas turbine work in several countries. Furthermore, the ‘technological determinism’ implied by the insistence that a major technological development flows uniquely from a single person’s individual genius and persistence (as famously emphasised by Samuel Smiles for James Watt and the other ‘heroes’ of the Industrial Revolution) is now seen as a less useful way of analysing complex technological changes. Rather few historians, or indeed engineers, given a moment to reflect, would now assert that there would have been no jet engine without Whittle but the obituarist in the Independent contended, like those in most of the other newspapers, that ‘Whittle changed the lives of countless millions of people throughout the world.’ Ascribing a marvellous immutability to the historical account (actually the obituarist’s own book) it asserted as fact that ‘the Ministry of Aircraft Production did not take the pressure off him and allow him to get on with the job’ and that this was ‘well documented and part of history’.

It is clear that the notion that Whittle accomplished his engine work against a background of official indifference, or in the teeth of Air Ministry opposition, is so prevalent that it has entered the folklore of the subject both at a scholarly and at a popular level. This view, and the reasons for it, needs to be examined critically.

A study of the jet is also intriguing because of its astonishing effect on world travel and world consciousness. F.T. Marinetti, in a striking anticipation of Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the ‘global village’, wrote, in a typically clamorous 1913 Futurist manifesto, of the dawning transport possibilities. He foresaw ‘The earth shrunk by speed. New sense of the world. … Vast increase of a sense of humanity.’ Weighing that notional ‘sense of humanity’ against the environmental impact and cultural erosion caused by mass travel, or against the global reach of both terrorism and state military action (both equally reliant on the jet), is not the task of this book. But the ‘earth shrunk by speed’ has now come about, indisputably through the gas turbine engine.

For Britain, particularly, the jet had a special role for it came to form part of the essential underpinnings of a kind of ‘Defiant Modernism’ – a renewed post-war belief in the role of technology in national life. A replacement ‘empire’ of high technology with a regenerated industry would sustain the nation and, in this, the story of the invention of the jet, along with the new engines and aircraft themselves, became important symbols of new technique. Furthermore, the jet project became closely bound up with Stafford Cripps’ aim, as Minister of Aircraft Production, to modernise the aircraft industry. From 1943, as reconstruction plans got under way, Stafford Cripps argued presciently, and long before terms like ‘rust belt’ entered the vocabulary, that it would be advanced industries like aviation ‘and no longer … coal and cotton’ on which we would now depend. These ideas translated into centralised government direction and generous support for the aircraft and aero engine industries, driven in part by an ambitious policy to rival the USA in civil aviation. This ‘Crippsian spirit’ infused the post-war Ministry of Supply (MoS) and was carried through by both Labour and Conservative governments to the 1960s when a growing scepticism about the benefits and alarm at the costs of aircraft programmes provoked a reappraisal.

The linkage between jet work and the government began in the 1930s, so it will be necessary to trace the progress of the Whittle jet from the inventor’s initial ideas, through pre-war developments, the launch of the Power Jets company and the troubled wartime attempts to build and productionise the engine, to the development of a structure for a post-war gas turbine industry, in which several firms were making and researching gas turbines, supported by the Ministry of Supply.

In all this, the debate is still alive about the way Whittle was treated and the episode raises wider questions about the British management of R&D and its translation into successful business. We will see that the jet programme was both more influential, in terms of providing a new orientation for the UK industry, but also less successful, with respect to the particular progress of the Whittle team, than has generally been appreciated. We will also examine the question that has often been raised as to whether the Air Ministry did too little to assist Whittle. Events in the Whittle saga are still debated and are more than a little mysterious.

The jet engine programme had a complex history, in terms of engineering development, the official administration of the project, the structure of Frank Whittle’s firm, Power Jets, and the collaboration between the various firms brought in to manufacture the engine. All these strands suggest, contrary to the accepted view, a considerable degree of flexibility, and indeed originality, on the official side in fostering the new engine and the new industry.

There was the establishment and funding of Power Jets, the company set up in 1936 to develop the Whittle engine, which, it will become clear, was from the outset almost a surrogate official project, and not simply the independent entrepreneurial venture, battling against adversity, that is usually depicted. Then there was the formation of the Gas Turbine Collaboration Committee which became an unusual mechanism for pooling experience across all the aero engine companies and government agencies engaged in the wartime jet engine programme, almost irrespective of commercial rights. The nationalisation of Power Jets in 1944 and its merger with the turbine engine department of the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) to form a government-owned company also suggests a contemporary open-mindedness about exploring new kinds of organisation, and there is finally the conversion of this government firm into a more conventional state research establishment – the National Gas Turbine Establishment (NGTE).

Much of this account is new and draws on a range of interviews over several years, some with key participants, as well as on new archival resources. We will discover that Whittle was treated with considerable indulgence by the Air Ministry and by the Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP). Fresh sources from the Power Jets side, and official papers, have made it possible to uncover the nature of the wartime relationship between Power Jets and the MAP and the sources of friction. It has also been possible to throw new light on the wartime nationalisation of Power Jets (an event that was particularly resented by Whittle’s adherents) and to show that the impetus to take this politically tricky action gained sufficient force because it appeared to satisfy two quite different policy aims. There was, on the one hand, the desire of MAP officials to deal with the stalled jet engine programme and the acrimonious relationship with Power Jets. On the other hand there was the visionary and strategic intention of Stafford Cripps, as Minister for Aircraft Production, to modernise Britain’s industrial base and his intention to establish a vibrant aircraft sector sustained by vigorous government R&D establishments. In his scheme Power Jets, with its undoubted talents and brainpower, would become one of these centres.

This book follows the jet from Whittle’s first ideas on through the war years, looking at the progress of both the jet team and the engine, and then looks at the de Havilland Comet. The programme to build this jet airliner links closely to the jet ‘story’ for it was born in the closing stages of the war out of a desire to announce to the world ‘the pioneering work on jet propulsion in this country’.

This sense of ‘jet modernity’ even survived the Comet crashes to sustain the will to build Concorde and to recover ‘the leadership we so narrowly missed’. Concorde, therefore, is considered here as a project in intimate connection with the pioneering wartime engine work.

The narrative finally considers the Rolls-Royce RB 211, which emerges as the watershed in the post-war development of the jet, for this engine bankrupted the great national champion during development, but also enabled Rolls-Royce to grow subsequently to become one of the major engine builders in the world, equalling its US rivals in size and market share. Even though it was conceived almost 40 years after Whittle began to promote his engine ideas, the RB 211 still relates to the Whittle story, not least because Whittle himself conceived all the ‘mutations’ of the jet engine, including this type of bypass or ‘fan-jet’, but also because the huge initial public commitment to fund this project, through ‘launch aid’, and to finance completion during the period of receivership, relied on a national belief in the value of the jet – a belief that had been instilled into national consciousness by the epic nature of the story of Whittle and the jet.

In the end pages of the book, some final notes attempt to tease out further some intriguing points: Without the war to spur development, would jet aircraft have arrived in any event? Would they have come later? There is also the wartime development of the jet in Germany to consider, which followed a quite different pattern of control and direction and makes a useful comparison with the development in Britain. And how ‘revolutionary’ was the jet; is it helpful to analyse it, or to describe it, in this way?

• CHAPTER 1 •

WHITTLE’S EARLY JET IDEAS

Frank Whittle entered the Royal Air Force as an aircraft apprentice in 1923. The three-year course on which he enrolled was designed to produce the aircraft mechanics and service personnel required to repair and maintain RAF aircraft. However, by exceptional ability and effort, he was one of only five apprentices (out of 600 in the initial intake) selected to go on to train as an officer cadet and pilot at Cranwell, the RAF training college. Whittle took a keen interest in aeronautical developments and in 1928 his contribution for the cadets’ termly thesis was entitled Future Developments in Aircraft Design. He anticipated a large improvement in aircraft speed, coupled with an increase in the heights at which aircraft flew, in order to take advantage of reduced air resistance at high altitude. He recognised that in a conventional piston engine power falls off with altitude and considered in some detail, as part of this overall view of aircraft evolution, the efficiency and thermodynamic design of a gas turbine. He observed that although a steam turbine would be impractical for aircraft owing to the weight of boiler and condenser, nevertheless ‘the turbine is the most efficient prime mover known [so] it is possible that it will be developed for aircraft, especially if some means of driving [it] by petrol could be devised.’