Customer Reviews:
 An "administrative" history July 12, 2008
Charles Hall (Raleigh, NC USA)
This is a fascinating and well written book, however it is not about the history of the jet engine. It is primarily concerned with identifying which corporate and government interests were involved and how valid their claims to the invention were. While interesting, I was hoping to learn more about the invention of the jet engine from a technical point of view!
There's a nice chapter at the end which sheds a little new light on the Comet disaster, and another chapter describing the lineage of the present day Concorde and Rolls Royce fanjet engines back to the immediate post-war planning by Brabazon. There are also bits of interesting trivia about the ultimate fate of the German jet designers.
 Disappointing January 1, 2008
Ole Bjrsvik (5172 Loddefjord, - Norway)
Higly disappointing. Hardly any new information, almost none insight or analysis, and it gives close to none of technical insight or technical history. As usual the book is focused in the buracrautic battle, that always gets the focus as soon as Frank Whittle's name is mentioned. - So much has been written in defence of Frank Whittle one way or another it starts to get embarassing. - Perhaps he really was so unproductive as someone obviously thought..
 Dispelling the Whittle myths May 2, 2006
Peter Louw (Cape Town, South Africa)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Those readers who have believed that Frank Whittle invented the jet engine may be in for a surprise. Andrew Nahum's incisive book, Frank Whittle - Invention of the Jet, aims to dispel the myths surrounding this topic and Whittle's role in it.
As with so many important inventions, the development of the jet engine was to a large extent driven by the necessities of war. Particularly the British, Germans and Americans worked feverishly to produce a war-winning jet fighter during the Second World War, but the Germans won this particular arms race by being the first to get effective and combat-ready jet aeroplanes in the air, though it came too late to influence the eventual outcome of the war.
Britain's inability to beat the Germans in this respect, and its subsequent failure to lead the way in the postwar jet aircraft industry despite Whittle's pioneering work, have led many, including Whittle himself, to criticise those in authority in the wartime years for lack of government support and for failing to appreciate the work done by Whittle's Power Jets company, which was forcibly nationalised by the wartime government in 1944. It is this apparent failure of appreciation, feeding on the age-old stereotype of the misunderstood genius battling against reactionary conservatives still imprisoned by dated paradigms, from which grew the various misconceptions surrounding Whittle's role which Nahum seeks to dispel.
Andrew Nahum is principal curator of transport technologies at the Science Museum in London and a visiting professor in vehicle design at the Royal College of Art. He is also the author of i.a. Flying Machines, one of the DK Eyewitness Guides.
Nahum makes a convincing case for his main point that, in fact, the then British government was not at all indifferent to Whittle's foresight and energy and supported him and his colleagues as far as reasonably possible in a critical time when the needs of a conventional propeller-driven air force under intense attack from Germany had to be balanced with Whittle's demands for desperately needed funds to finance long-term and still experimental weapons such as the jet.
The book includes chapters on Whittle's early jet ideas, wartime development and the difficult problems with the Whittle W.2 jet design, the rise and fall of Whittle's Power Jets company, jet developments in the US, and the first jet airliner (the Comet) and why it failed. In a fascinating endnotes section Nahum discusses jet development in Germany and if the jet would have been developed without Whittle. His answers to this question are particularly illuminating, for instance when quoting Sir Harry Ricardo who said, "... we are too fond ... of crediting a few particular individuals with a monopoly of inventive genius ... Most intelligent people come to much the same conclusion, at much the same time."
Though this book aims to be a necessary correction to deeply-held perceptions and misconceptions it recognises Whittle's important contributions. Nahum credits Whittle for giving Britain an early launch into the turbine industry and discusses eventual developments such as the supersonic Concorde achievement as partly resulting from Whittle's pioneering work.
This concise little book, only 177 pages, is not a biography and we do not learn much about Whittle the man. Being a layman I would have liked more diagrams than the three provided, and the book would also have benefited from a table clearly illustrating the various achievements together with dates, so as to provide a historical overview and draw the welter of information together. But then more illustrations would have increased the very reasonable price of this book.
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