Rolls-Royce had been making piston engines for 40 years before its first jet engine, the Welland, powered Britain's first jet aircraft, the Gloster Meteor, in 1944. In the post-war world, the jet engine was soon embraced as the key to the future for both civil and military aircraft. Meeting the demand for steadily larger and more sophisticated jet engines quickly transformed the business of Rolls-Royce. And half a century later, of course, we can look back on a thousand ways in which jet-engine technology has transformed the world at large.

The evolution of today's hugely powerful engines has been an extraordinary story of continuous incremental improvements, with the occasional leap forward to bigger and better things. So, too, with this book. It first appeared in 1955, and has since then been carefully updated and revised through a further four editions, the last in 1996. This latest edition, though, marks a considerable advance. The layout has been extensively re-designed and the text comprehensively rewritten, to take full account of the enormous progress made on jet engines over the past 20 years.

Sir John Rose