Frank Whittle turbine engine development

The "engineer solves problems that must be solved" half of the Ragone dichotomy. Whittle's quote: "It's a good thing I was too stupid to know it wouldn't work."

There's also the quote from Frank Whittle, the British engineer who developed the first turbine engine. He did this in the 1930s and early 40s, and there were predictions by other scientists that this is impossible. Remember Lord Kelvin's quote, something about powered flight being impossible. Well Kelvin was wrong. And it turns out people were telling [Whittle] that you couldn't build the turbine engine, it wouldn't work. His quote was: it's a good thing I was stupid, I was too stupid to know it wouldn't work. Because he made it work. He was an engineer. So one of the differences is, the scientist will simplify the problem to where it can be solved; an engineer has to figure a way around the problem.

The guy who invented the jet engine — I have a quote somewhere in my office. Lord Kelvin, or some great scientist from a number of years before, had said it was impossible to build something like a gas turbine. They didn't call it a gas turbine then. But Whittle, who designed the first gas turbine in England in the late thirties, said it's a good thing he didn't know that this scientific fact was true, or he never would have tried. Often it's someone who doesn't understand things very well who goes ahead and tries something, and it ends up working. For every one of those, there are 999 who tried something that didn't work, but every now and then there's someone who comes along — and dumb luck is great. The flame in the vacuum chamber: you won't get any damage to your part; after a while the oil will just fill up the vacuum chamber and your part will be completely preserved in oil. I guess that's creativity.

British engineer who invented the turbine engine in the late 1930s. Famous quote about not knowing the conventional wisdom that it was impossible.

You can look at the operating temperature of jet engines. This is a plot of the firing temperature of engines. These are structural materials. Back in the 1950s, a man named Whittle invented the turbine engine. He was a British engineer. In the late '30s he had this idea for a turbine engine. He's sort of famous for the quote — I don't have it with me right now — that it's a good thing he didn't know the conventional wisdom at the time that what he was doing was impossible, because otherwise he never would have tried. The materials they had were things like stainless steels, and then they had some nickel-based alloys — and then Mar-M is Martin Marietta, Udimet, Rene is General Electric, IN is International Nickel, GTD-111 is kind of interesting — that big heavy turbine blade may or may not be GTD-111.