| During the period between the World Wars, aircraft engines improved dramatically and made possible unprecedented progress in aircraft design. Engine development in those days, and to a large extent even today, is a very laborious, detailed process of building an engine, running it to destruction, analyzing what broke, designing a fix, and repeating the process. No product ever comes | to market without some engineers having spent many long, lonely, anxious hours perfecting that product. This is especially true of aircraft engines, which by their very nature push all the limits of ingenuity, materials, and manufacturing processes. Improvements in superchargers greatly assisted the increased production of power, and also allowed the engine to produce sea-level | power at considerably greater altitudes than non-supercharged engines. Early superchargers were just "rotary induction systems", and served little purpose other than to assure equal distribution of fuel to all cylinders. As engine development progressed, superchargers became better and better compressors by providing higher pressure while consuming less power. |
