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3. Jet Engines
The first jet propulsion engine designed by Frank Whittle, c. 1938. In May 1941 the jet-propelled craft took off from Cranwell in the first real proof that jet propulsion was a viable alternative to the propeller.
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Frank Whittle, an English engineer with the Royal Air Force, filed the first patent for the jet engine in 1930. But the first country to fly a jet engine plane was Germany, which performed a flight test of its model on August 27, 1939, just a few days before the country invaded Poland.
“Both Germany and Japan had been really getting ready for World War II for about a decade,” says Rob Wallace, the STEM education specialist at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans.
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D-Day
With the onset of the war, the British government developed planes based on Whittle’s designs. The first Allied plane to use jet propulsion took flight on May 15, 1941. Jet planes could go faster than propeller planes, yet also required a lot more fuel and were more difficult to handle. Though they didn’t have an impact on the war (they were still early in their development), jet engines would later transform both military and civilian transportation.
WATCH: Modern Marvels: Jet Engines on HISTORY Vault
4. Blood Plasma Transfusion
Medics tending to a wounded soldier on D-Day, administer a blood plasma transfusion.
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During World War II, a U.S. surgeon named Charles Drew standardized the production of blood plasma for medical use.
“They developed this whole system where they sent two sterile jars, one with water in it and one with freeze-dried blood plasma and they’d mix them together,” Wallace says.
Unlike whole blood, plasma can be given to anyone regardless of a person’s blood type, making it easier to administer on the battlefield.
5. Electronic Computers
The women seen here belonged to the Women's Royal Naval Service, (WRNS) October 1943. Colossus was the world's first electronic programmable computer at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, where cryptographers deciphered top-secret military communiques between Hitler and his armed forces.
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In the 1940s, the word “computers” referred to people (mostly women) who performed complex calculations by hand. During World War II, the United States began to develop new machines to do calculations for ballistics trajectories, and those who had been doing computations by hand took jobs programming these machines.
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