So now that jet engines made things go fast, it became increasingly obvious that shit would happen correspondingly faster too. Meaning that if trouble did strike, there was a lot less time to save your butt.
Enter the ejection seat. The first ones were arguably conceived by Germany in the years between the wars when they were spending a lot of energy not arming themselves to the teeth. I say this because there is debate the the Brits had a few ideas of there own too about the same time.
No doubt as aircraft performance increased, the possibility of simply climbing out of the stupid thing, walking to the edge of the wing and jumping off with your parachute, decreased.
The early plan was a lot like a Wyle E. Coyote episode. That is to say the ejection from the aircraft was accomplished by a really big spring. Nice. Of course, the pilot opened the canopy first. Otherwise he had a headache.
The Germans actually did work out the concepts before the UK. In fact they had a few workable ideas in the early 30's. They thought of the spring under the seat method and and external style spring powered device that was like a small crane above the pilot that yanked the pilot free from above and tossed him kind of like a trebuchet. I'm thinking I might want to walk off the end of the wing.
The British version of the spring thing did not eject the seat, only the pilot. Christ. In reality, they never got farther than the drawing board and didn't look at the idea till after the Second World War when they had a chance to look at captured German aircraft.
Cooler, and smarter heads prevailed and by the start of the war they had moved on to compressed air and explosive charge systems.
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