The Heinkel He 178 made its first flight in Germany in 1939 and became the first aircraft powered by a turbojet engine. Although still experimental, it opened the jet age. The technology promised much greater speed and would soon reshape military and civil aviation.

The jet intensified modern literature's association of flight with speed, noise, and the compression of time. It also fed the darker wartime imagination in which scientific brilliance and destructive power advanced together.