Email me     Production of Rolls-Royce Derwent I engines at Newcastle under Lyme. Courtesy of Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust. back The Development and Production of Turbojet Aero-Engines in Britain, Germany and the United States, 1936-1945. Hermione Giffard The history of the jet engine in Britain, Germany and the United States between 1936 and 1945 has long been recognised by historians as a rich subject for investigating the nature of technological change in comparative perspective. Outside academia, it has captured the public imagination as a story of heroic invention. Both kinds of account have much in common, including a focus on the same successful engines and inventors. This thesis will change both types of accounts by taking a comprehensive and critical approach to reinterpret and broaden the existing history of the jet engine. This new story of the turbojet is centred on production and on industry, rather than on the work of individual inventors. It brings attention to the extent and significance of jet engine production during the Second World War, and illustrates that production, development and invention Ð activities often treated as separate Ð are fundamentally linked. Here, the jet engine is understood as emerging from the existing aero-engine industry rather than as arising outside it. I thus give new accounts of famous institutions outside of the aeroengine industry that made crucial contributions. Through a detailed study of the work of the main companies and institutions that worked on jet engines during the war, which draws on sources ranging from popular accounts to archival research, this thesis recalibrates our understanding of the importance of different actors in the history of the jet engine, which has been distorted by the greater visibility of particular groups. The necessity of such a re-evaluation is made clear through a historical exploration of how the popular story of the jet engine emerged. In bringing attention to the variety of sources of technical change, this thesis suggests the outlines of a new account of the sources of technical novelty in the twentieth-century.