I am more versed in inventing things (all VERY minor compared to planes, jet engines, radar etc.!) My familiarity with patents is more applying and paying for them and a Patent Agent, but overs the years I have picked up a little about the history of patents and inventions. It would take a Patent Lawyer to give a really clear account of the technicalities, and even these can be subject to legal wrangles!
jondc9 The Jet Engine is yet another example of an invention with a long and noble history dating from a VERY long time before it was "invented" for aeroplanes!
Ultimately turbines are a combination of the key elements of levers and wheels, like most mechanical inventions, so in a sense Archimedes' Screw could be called the first recorded one.
Various turbines were invented over the centuries, but the first person to make and use a practical turbine engine, powered by steam, was Charles Algernon Parsons.
Various other developments and progress towards a jet engine for aircraft occurred in various nations by various people, culminating in Sir Frank Whittle from 1930.
Whittle was massively messed around by the British government, sadly still far too common, and they/the Patent Office saw no future for his engine and did not even bother to classify his Patent application, which is bog standard procedure for every invention with the slightest possibility of having any military potential.
Whittle was left struggling to pay for patents, was grossly under-funded and then forced by the government to work with the Rover CAR company to develop the jet!
Brain-dead buffle-headed bureaucratic buffoonery of the highest order!
Pabst von Ohain was thus free to study Whittle's patents and commence work in Germany, with massive state backing and encouragement. The Heinkel He 178 claimed the first flight for a turbo-jet plane, with an engine based on parts of Whittle's patent. This described the two main forms of turbo jet but stated that centrifugal, though weaker, would be more reliable with the available technology; he clearly stated that axial flow would be best long term, but unreliable until new technology - particularly metallurgy - was developed. He was right.
Juan Trippe apparently gave Whittle a life-time pass on Pan Am for what his work had done for airlines, but I hope I have made it clear that the work of Whittle and others was part of a very long process.