Episode Details

In a freezing English foundry, a 126-pound man covered in stress eczema, surviving on stimulants by day and tranquilizers by night, secretly built the engine that would shrink the globe. Frank Whittle wrote the thesis outlining the turbojet at 21, patented it at 23, and watched his own government dismiss it as "impracticable" and let the patent lapse rather than pay a five-pound renewal fee.

This episode follows the five-foot working-class teenager who trained his own body taller to pass the RAF physical, the daredevil pilot whose logbook dripped red ink, and the bureaucratic indifference that forced him to build the future on borrowed money while a rival German program raced unseen. It ends with the extraordinary friendship between Whittle and Hans von Ohain, whose chilling verdict, that proper funding might have deterred World War II entirely, and a final flight home aboard a Boeing 777.

• Rejected twice for being too small: the self-engineered body that got him into the RAF
• Suck, squeeze, bang, blow: the 1928 cadet thesis that saw opportunity in thin air
• The five-pound patent fee: how the Air Ministry let the jet engine slip into the public record
• Racing a rival he never knew: Whittle, von Ohain, and the friendship that followed the war
• Gatekeepers then and now: what the Air Ministry's blindness says about modern innovation