Much of the development work took place at the Ladywood foundry in Lutterworth.
Whittle is remembered by a sculpture of a jet on a roundabout just outside the town and by this more modest memorial in its centre.
the eldest of the three children of Moses Whittle (1882–1965), engineer and inventor, who, in 1916 bought a small engineering business, and the young Frank learned the rudiments of engineering manufacture by working in the factory when he was ten years old.
Rather than doing homework he pored over texts on the theory of flight and practical flying in the public library. He was accepted by the Royal Air Force, and he was selected as one of the 1 per cent promoted to the officer training course.
For his obligatory thesis at the end of the course, Whittle chose 'Future developments in aircraft design', concluding that for high speed and long range it would be necessary to fly very high. He was thinking of 500 m.p.h., when the top speed of RAF fighters was only about 150 m.p.h. He concluded that a new type of power plant would be required and examined rocket propulsion and a gas turbine driving a propeller, but the scheme of a gas turbine providing jet propulsion directly occurred to him only later.
Whittle was posted to the Central Flying School at Wittering, as a pupil on the flying instructor's course. There he had the idea of a gas turbine producing a propelling jet directly, which was far superior to any of his earlier proposals.
One of the Central Flying School instructors had trained as a patent agent and helped Whittle to draft a patent, on 16 January 1930.
The Air Ministry showed no interest in this, and it was not placed on the classified list. With a view to exploiting his invention Whittle visited the British Thomson-Houston (BT-H) turbine factory, and Armstrong Siddeley, and the engine division of the Bristol Aeroplane Company.
On grounds of cost and the absence of suitable materials, all three companies declined to have any part in the development of Whittle's ideas, so he continued his service career, which included test-pilot duties and stunt-flying demonstrations at the RAF's annual Hendon air displays.
In 1932 Whittle was posted to the RAF officers' engineering course at Henlow, where he obtained outstanding results. This led him to apply to the Air Ministry to be sent to Cambridge University to take the mechanical sciences tripos.
The director of education of the Air Ministry obtained permission for Whittle to do a postgraduate year on research work, so that he was able to devote the greater part of his time to work on the engine.
The first test run of Whittle's prototype engine took place in the gallery of the BT-H turbine factory but after a normal light-up of the combustion chamber, there was a sudden acceleration from 2500 r.p.m. to about 8000 r.p.m.
The following day a second runaway took place and the cause was identified as fuel leakage from the main burner whenever the fuel pump was run. The fault was rectified, but the BT-H management decided that Whittle's operations could not continue in the main turbine shop. Instead they offered him their disused foundry at Ladywood works, Lutterworth where if things ended in disaster, nothing would be damaged or caught on fire.
Running of the engine at Lutterworth was resumed, the engine was rebuilt with ten separate combustion chambers instead of the single, and was ready for test running in the autumn of 1938.
Rapidly the development and testing progressed without fault, and by 1941, testing had progressed to airplanes and short test flights, and then the design had a small change with a pressure-jet system proposed by I. Lubbock of the Shell Petroleum Company. The final design was developed at Power Jets by the team of young engineers recruited by Whittle.
The first flight of the E28/39 aircraft took place in May 1941 at RAF Cranwell. The ten hours' flight trials were completed rapidly without any problems. Interest in jet propulsion developed rapidly in Britain, and with a complete set of drawings, and a team of three went to the General Electric Company's turbine factory at Lynn, Massachusetts, in the latter half of 1941. From this start, the development of jet propulsion proceeded apace in the USA.
By intensive development the performance was raised to an acceptable level, and the first Meteor I aircraft were delivered to the RAF in May 1944, and saw service against the German V-1 flying bomb. Meanwhile the aerodynamic design of the W2/700 was adopted by Rolls-Royce for their very successful Derwent V engine, which won a world airspeed record of 606 m.p.h. in a Meteor in 1945.
https://lutterworthmuseum.com/2010/10/14/hello-world/
http://liberalengland.blogspot.com/2017/06/sir-frank-whittle-remembered-in.html
https://lutterworth.magnapark.co.uk/gazeley-sponsors-the-whittle-memorial-jet-roundabout/
https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-67854
Thanks Steve!
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