The story of Frank Whittle and the invention of the jet engine would make a great B movie, and probably has. I can just see all the mustachioed boffins of the Air Ministry conferring in their offices about how to rid themselves of this pestilential fellow obsessively slaving away in a brick basement in the countryside, while we in the audience, knowing that the jet age is just around the corner, cluck over their folly. The obtuseness of military bureaucrats harassed poor Whittle for a time into a diet of amphetamines and barbiturates, but he still managed to die at 89 – good news for worried substance-abusers.
His German counterpart, Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain, seemingly had quite a different experience. Von Ohain, who worked for bomber manufacturer Ernst Heinkel, seems to have sailed from paper sketches to an airworthy jet engine in the space of three or four years, while poor Whittle, who had a head start, took a dozen.
