In 1791 the English inventor John Barber (1734-1801) patented "an Engine for using Inflammable Air for the Purpose of procuring Motion." We now know his invention as the gas turbine, a mechanism that was simultaneously 150 years before its time and based on an idea more than 1,700 years old.
A turbine is a machine that turns the energy of moving gas or liquid into rotational energy During the first century, the Greek inventor Hero of Alexandria developed the first steam turbine. His device drove steam from boiling water through curved nozzles to rotate a cylinder. John Barber's engine, while based on similar principles, included features not present in its ancient predecessor.
A gas turbine engine such as Barber's has three main components: a compressor to increase the pressure of the air, a combustion chamber in which the air is combined with fuel to produce an explosion, and a turbine wheel that is spun by the expanding combustion products.
Barber's design was sound, but the metallurgy required to support the high temperatures required by gas turbines was not available to him. Although many people worked on gas turbines in the nineteenth century, the first successful gas turbine was probably the eleven-horsepower engine built by Aegidius Filing in 1903.
Two uses of the gas turbine stand out: power generation (in which most of the energy goes into spinning the turbine) and jet propulsion (in which most of the energy goes into high-velocity exhaust gases). Both applications saw their first practical embodiments in 1939: A commercial power plant with gas turbines began operating in Switzerland, and the first jet aircraft flew in Germany.
