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Frank Whittle: Invention of the jet by Andrew Nahum, Icon Books, £9.99, ISBN 1840465387 Reviewed by Roy Herbert

THERE are surprises in the first few pages here. When Air Marshal Hugh Dowding, commander-in-chief of the Royal Air Force’s Fighter Command, visited Frank Whittle’s company Power Jets, in 1940, Whittle showed him the experimental engine, whose jet issued from a nozzle in a wall. The roaring jet made talk impossible. Some gesture of Whittle’s appeared to invite Dowding to inspect it. He was sent flying across the concrete yard, losing his hat and having his coat torn open. Another surprise is Andrew Nahum’s claim, which he justifies, that there is no truth in the well-known story that Whittle’s brilliant invention was frustrated by official indifference to its possibilities, and progress hampered at every stage by the blindness of ministries and high-level committees.

In fact, Whittle got much backing via unconventional financial arrangements, though at first that decision was taken, so as to preserve secrecy and minimise delay in development, by keeping the Treasury out of it. Eventually Power Jets got money from the Air Ministry, but finance was always complicated and worrying.

Part of Whittle’s undoubted genius was his fierce determination not to allow anyone to take over his ideas. This proved awkward when the time came to go into commercial production of jet engines for aircraft – to “productionise”, as the book horribly terms it.

The firm chosen to do this was Rover Cars. In the Whittle design, air being compressed had to make two right-angle turns before entering the combustion chamber. Rover modified the design to reach a “straight-through” flow. Although this was an improvement, it led to problems. Whittle suspected that Rover might patent the jet engine under his nose. The situation threatened to dissolve in quarrels, personality clashes and managerial problems.

At last, in 1943, Stafford Cripps cut this collection of Gordian knots and nationalised Power Jets, offering it the central role in a government research establishment. Neither Whittle nor most of his engineers found this agreeable. They resigned. The National Gas Turbine Establishment was formed in 1946.

So Nahum’s book is a straightforward history of the jet engine, though this is perhaps not what the title, Frank Whittle, promises. Whittle is certainly a star player but he is only one of a large cast. The game’s the thing.