Whittle

1074 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AXI) CULTURE aspects, often neglected topics, will prove to be indispensable to the history of French aviation, and it exemplifies the type of approach necessary to place the history of aviation in its broader historical context and thus in the mainstream of historical study. John H. Morrow, Jr. Dr. Morrow, Franklin Professor of History at the University of Georgia, was recently the Charles Lindbergh Professor at the National Air and Space Museum. He is the author of two books on early German air power and is currently writing a history of air power in World War I. Whittle: The True Story. By John Golley. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987. Pp. 272; illustrations, bibliography, appen­ dixes, index. $24.95. Not all of the heroism of World War II is found on the battlefields of Europe. The courage and tenacity of Frank Whittle and his team at Power Jets, Ltd., is the core of John Golley’s account of the conceptualization, design, and development of the first turbojet engine. Told with understated humor and grace characteristic of Whittle himself, the story records Whittle’s struggle to win financial backing for his new company, his initial success, and his subsequent disillusionment as he saw the turbojet taken away from Power Jets by more powerful commercial interests. Golley tells a good story, but as history the book is a disappointment. “The true story,” in fact, seems less true than Whittle’s own account in Jet: The Story of a Pioneer (London: Frederick Muller, 1953), from which much of this work is drawn in the form of long quotations without citation. The author has added new information from Sir Stanley Hooker’s autobiography, Not Much of an Engineer (Shrews­ bury: Airlife, 1984), to flesh out the role of Rolls Royce in early jet engine development, but the chapter on Whittle’s visit to America and the development of the Whittle engine by General Electric is without substance. Golley appears to have missed a golden opportunity to ask Sir Frank Whittle to fill in the details of his life after World War II and his views of the evolution of propulsion technology from the turbojet to the turbofan. The inclusion of “A Brief Summary of Power Jets’ Work on Turbofans” in technical appendix 6 only whets our appetites to know more of the true story. Virginia P. Dawson Dr. Dawson teaches at Cleveland State University. She recently completed Engines and Innovation: A History of Lewis Laboratory, under a National Aeronautics and Space Administration contract

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