In the early 1900s, General Electric successfully tested steam and gas turbines. By the time the United States entered World War I, GE superchargers were in mass production and seeing service with the Allied air forces.
Late in the 1930s, England's Frank Whittle produced a gas turbine for aircraft propulsion: a jet engine. However, wartime conditions prompted England to turn to the U.S. for further development.
Because of its turbosupercharger and turbine development work, in October 1941 GE was awarded the government contract to produce America's first jet engine, based on the Whittle design. A year later, two GE I-A engines powered the United States' first jet aircraft, the Bell XP-59A.
The I-A turbojet GE jet engines for fighters and bombers advanced the state of the art over the next decade. More than 17,000 J79 turbojets, the most advanced fighter jet engine of this era, were built for military fighters around the world, including the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II and the Lockheed F-104 Star fighter.
The 1960s saw technical advances continue, the aircraft engine business grow, and GE moving into business jets and vertical lift systems. Intercontinental commercial flight was becoming a factor.
Today GE Aircraft Engines is a leading manufacturer of military and commercial jet engines, along with gas generators for marine and industrial use.
The CFM56 core is based on the GE F101 engine (developed for the B-1 bomber) and employs a single-stage high-pressure turbine to drive a nine-stage compressor. Correspondingly, a Snecma advanced four- or five-stage, low-pressure turbine drives the Snecma fan and booster.
GE's commitment to the development of products that are environmentally friendly is helping achieve a balance that has long eluded the jet engine industry — reductions in emissions and noise without tradeoffs in power.
The world's two most popular families of aircraft engines, made by GE and one of its joint venture companies, Snecma of France, substantially reduce emissions of hydrocarbons (by 12 percent), carbon monoxide (by 22 percent) and nitrous oxide (by 49 percent). In fact, the GE CF6 and CFM56 engines not only meet or exceed all U.S. and international standards for emissions, but meet or exceed an even stricter set of standards that won't take effect until 2003.
The improvements resulted from the development of a combustion system that burns fuel at lower temperatures and in two stages.
The innovative combustion system is also being used in GE's new GE90, one of the world's largest and most powerful engines. It burns less fuel for each pound of thrust than previous generations of aircraft engines, which reduces production of greenhouse gases.
On the noise front, GE engineers substantially reduced noise by redesigning fans and fan blades, modifying the spacing and shape of blades, and using new light-but-strong materials. In fact, the Boeing 777, powered by two GE90 engines, is quieter than the Boeing 767, even though the former is 35 percent heavier.
GE is a 109-year-old enterprise that was involved in heavy manufacturing at a time when little was known about the impact of industrial practices. Fortunately today we know a great deal more about our environment and how to protect it.
Take, for example, GE's newest natural-gas generator, a revolutionary advance in power production that breaks an efficiency barrier once believed to be unreachable, and at the same time radically reduces emissions thought to contribute to global warming.