The dawn of the jet age: the first 10 years

One of the ironies of aviation history is that the most obvious potential power source for a fixed-wing aircraft was barely considered by the early pioneers.

Embryonic rockets first soared into the atmosphere of China almost seven centuries before the Wright brothers' biplane staggered into the air-and into history-at Kitty Hawk, NC, on December 17, 1903. Its feeble internal-combustion engine and crude wooden propeller sustained it for just about a dozen seconds. Yet 44 years later, it was to be a rocket engine that pushed the Bell XS-1 past Mach 1.0, and rockets that have taken man into space.

However, rockets were, and are, challenging pieces of technology to harness, and the bravery (or foolhardiness) of those early pioneers was undoubtedly stretched sufficiently far without giving their flimsy flying machines the added dimension of a power-to-weight ratio of huge proportions with unpredictable results. In fact, if rocketry had been seriously pursued as a power source, it is possible that the evolution of aviation would have been delayed for decades. Quite simply, rocket power, real and potential, was in another league compared to wood and canvas aircraft design and capability-even if a solution had been found to the very difficult problem of achieving a fully throttleable engine.