Upon the recent arrival of the 80th Anniversary of the first flight of a turbojet powered airplane (1939), I summarize here the key factors and people leading to the resulting “turbojet revolution”. Also included are some of the major developments in the decades following the significant advances made during and immediately after WWII by engineers in the USA, including immigrants trained in Europe who became award-winning naturalized citizens. This account is presented from the vantage point of an interdisciplinary academic engineer/researcher whose career (in education, research and industrial consulting, commencing ca. 1959) was dramatically influenced by this particular invention-----and the generic research needs it spawned. I conclude with some comparisons between the earliest configurations and the layouts/ performance of current “fan-jet” engines for inter-continental civilian air travel, as well as with some “lessons learned” from this particular example in the “history of technology”.