Fifty Years of Aero‐Engine and Fuel Development: A Classic Study of the Advantages of Co‐operation and Effects of Government Aid in Progressive Evolution, with Frank Expositions of the Factors that Caused Delays Available to Purchase

When the gas turbine took the aeronautical stronghold by storm it brought with it an opportunity, never wholly available to the piston engine designer, to apply thermodynamic theory more or less rigidly to the behaviour of the working fluid. For the first time in long years an internal combustion prime mover became amenable to mathematical analysis and, what is more, the predicted component performance could be realized on the test‐bed to a degree never possible with the reciprocating type. None the less the piston engine, with nearly 50 years of active application, has reached a remarkable standard of perfection on virtually ad hoc development alone in the hands of a multitude of experts whose efforts have undoubtedly made aviation history.