During the early winter of 1955, well-known travel writer William W. Yates of the Chicago Daily Tribune paused to reflect on the state of commercial aviation in the ten years since the end of World War II. Every five seconds saw the takeoff of a propeller-driven airliner on a long-distance flight that would take passengers and cargo across continents and oceans. Flying through all types of weather to one of the 3,500 international airports around the world was as routine as driving a car along Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. More than 324 million passengers had taken flight since 1945. Propeller-driven airliners had turned the “ocean of the air” into a “highway for the traffic of all nations.” Yates acknowledged that aircraft capable of flying “higher, faster, and farther” made that worldwide travel revolution possible. The technology at that crucial intersection of altitude, speed, and range found in modern high performance aircraft since the 1930s was the propeller.

As one of the most important innovations of the Aeronautical Revolution, the variable-pitch propeller was a transformative technology that made the modern airplane a weapon of war and instrument of global travel through the rapid onset of the Air Age during the 1940s and 1950s. That triumph was the result of the perseverance of propeller specialists over the preceding two decades. Ironically, within twenty years after World War II, a significant portion of the aeronautical community and society in general came to consider the propeller an obsolete relic of aviation's past. The variable-pitch propeller was no longer a technology capable of making commercial and military airplanes fly even higher, faster, and farther. With the introduction of the jet, a new cultural resistance against the continued use and further refinement of the propeller emerged.

Modern Propellers at War

During the 1940s, nations in Asia, Europe, and North America fought each other around the world with airplanes that were, at their technical foundations, the product of the interwar period. The Aeronautical Revolution of the 1920s and 1930s created the modern airplane and World War II solidified its position as a global technology. It was clear that the revolution in propeller design and construction was well over by the spring of 1941.