Aero‐Engine Development: A Review of the Basic Trends in Design During the Past Thirty Years

THE history of aviation engines shows that most of the important pioneering in design has been done, with a few notable exceptions, by the United States. Research on all related problems and even empirical methods have been tried again and again, until each detail was worked out towards the betterment of a particular engine. Despite long and sometimes vociferous patent disagreements, progress has been on the whole satisfactory. We can see how the accomplishments of our various aviation engines, sturdy and non‐spectacular during the war, quite spectacular and reliable in the boom period since 1927, are directly the result of painstaking and quiet research on the part of metallurgists, fuel experts, cooling investigators, ignition experimenters, designers, dabblers in oil and now and then a mechanic. In a word, the whole history of engines is to be found in the elimination or addition of details—details of design.