In 1933, a 21-year-old physics student at Germany's University of Göttingen watched a deafening, rattling airplane fly overhead and thought: there has to be a better way. That moment of irritation launched one of history's most consequential engineering races. Hans von Ohain — a physicist with no formal aeronautical training — set out to replace the violent, pulse-driven piston engine with something elegant: a continuous thermodynamic cycle that would compress, combust, and exhaust in one smooth, uninterrupted flow. The path from that idea to the world's first jet-powered flight ran through a car garage, a university courtyard flamethrower, and a secretive Heinkel aircraft facility, all while a British RAF officer named Frank Whittle was quietly sketching out a strikingly similar dream across the English Channel.

What followed was not just  ...