Making Jet Engines in World War II: Britain, Germany, and the United States
In this brilliant study of the early history of jet engines, Hermione Giffard demolishes the myth of German aeronautical triumph and transforms the way we should think about technological change in general. While conventional histories of technology focus on the inventor-hero struggling to fulfil a vision in a corporate laboratory, Giffard turns her attention to the larger institutional-industrial context. - History Today
There are many myths surrounding the development of the jet engine in the Second World War. With Making Jet Engines in World War II, Giffard produces the best analysis to date of this complex issue. In the process of providing a fine, detailed analysis of the German, British, and American experience, she clears away the myths and leaves us with a clear understanding of the real history. - Richard Overy, University of Exeter
Giffard has produced a bold and novel analysis that contributes to the deepening debate over the models used to explain the relation between science and technology. Making Jet Engines in World War II is written in a straightforward, thought-provoking, and economical manner, and it is gratifyingly free of theoretical and methodological pretension. A perceptive, well-researched book, it will be an essential resource for teachers and researchers in the field of science and technology studies. - David Bloor, University of Edinburgh
Making Jet Engines in World War II is a tremendously valuable contribution to the history of technology. Giffard delivers a brilliantly comparative three-nation history, showing a level of attention to national context that is essential for comparative studies, but rarely achieved. The book is grounded in truly impressive research, involving archival collections in three countries and vast troves of published technical literature. Sure to appeal to serious aviation history enthusiasts, aeronautical engineers, historians of technology, and scholars of innovation, Giffard's argument is well-written and sharply original, and it represents a major revision to the history of the turbojet and an important contribution to the historiography of invention. - Eric Schatzberg, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This original study not only makes a valuable contribution to the literature on industry in World War II but also speaks to larger questions about the history of technology and invention. - Enterprise & Society
Students of the histories of aviation, technology, invention, and the formation of public memory should put Making Jet Engines in World War II high on their must-read list. - Michigan War Studies Review
Given what we already know from Constant and others, it is not immediately clear why anyone should delve again into this familiar moment of aviation history. But Making Jet Engines in World War II shows how our inability to see the problems that beset our histories of the jet engine are the product of faults that run deep within how scholars think about technical change in the twentieth century. . . . As Giffard points out, machines crucial to the twentieth century ships, trains, cars were not produced by lone inventors or scientists, but depended on a vast array of figures centred around industrial firms. Making Jet Engines in World War II is just one example of a history of technical change that discusses where invention really happens. Hopefully Giffard's hugely transformative insights will be rendered banal. We really should have many more works that seriously grapple with the historical reality of invention. - British Journal for the History of Science
This provocative, iconoclastic monograph stands on its head one of the foundational paradigms of this journal and the Society for the History of Technology. . . . there is no denying that this new lens significantly alters our understanding of this topic. . . .
- Technology and Culture
"An excellent book that sets technical development in a historical and organisational context." - Society of Model and Experimental Engineers