The British Royal Air Force officer and engineer Sir Frank Whittle (1907-1996) invented the turbojet method of aircraft propulsion.

Frank Whittle was born on June 1, 1907, in Coventry, England, the son of a mechanical engineer. He joined the Royal Air Force as an aircraft apprentice at Cranwell in 1923, where he underwent three years of training as an aircraft mechanic. Then he entered the R.A.F. College at Cranwell as an officer-cadet. Although he was just 21 years old by the time he graduated in 1928, Whittle was already focusing on ways to produce higher speeds and greater altitude for the propellor-driven aircraft of the time. The title of his final thesis, according to the magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology , was Future Developments in Aircraft Design. Its theme was a discussion of rocket propulsion and gas turbine-driven propellors, and ways in which they could be used as alternatives to the conventional...