The jet engine was first thought of back in 150 B.C. by a man named Ernest Protheroe. His first model was a ball of water with a nozzle on top and on the bottom where steam can escape and spin the ball on an axis. There were no applications for this invention, but just curiosity. The first functional ramjet was built in 1913 by a French aerospace engineer Rene Lorin. Since a ramjet is an engine that compresses and combusts air and fuel in a supersonic air flow it was not feasible as it wasn’t possible to develop a working prototype at the time.
After many years Hans Von Ohain, a German engineer designed and patent the first functional turbojet engine. Unfortunately the technology didn’t exist yet to build the plane that could handle the high speeds the turbo jet could produce. So they waited until 1941 where the redesigned that engine to fit on to the Heinkel He 178 airplane for a test flight. Unfortunately shortly after the realized how inefficient a turbojet engine was due to the mass fuel consumption. So the engine was redesigned multiple times to try and get the efficiency up but it was still a massive gas guzzler. This was one of the biggest disadvantage with using it with airliners, the tickets were insanely expensive, one because flight travel was relatively new, and two because of the mass fuel consumption created by these engines.
There are positives for the turbojet engine. One was they are incredibly fast, so fast that the SR-71 Blackbird was able to go Mach 3+ which is 2301 mph+. It could travel the whole width of the united states in a little over an hour! Another positive was without the jet engine we wouldn’t have invented the turbofan engine which is much more efficient than the turbojet. History was made when the first commercial flight to break the sound barrier in 1969. The Concorde was the peak in jet technology when it surpassed Mach 2 going 1,354 miles per hour. It could fly from London to New York in about 3.5 hours which is an 8.5 flight in a normal plane today.
The British Airways owned Concorde supersonic jet aircraft lands in Boston, Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2003, as part of its farewell tour. The plane is to be retired from commercial service before the end of the year. (AP Photo/Robert E. Klein)