The world’s first jet aircraft flew during the Second World War and the first jet engines entered museum collections not long after. The display of early jet engines in technical museums changed over the twentieth-century, as the engines were fit into new narratives reflecting contemporary concerns, and in this way, the history of the jet engine has been created and recreated in the public sphere. In this paper, I will trace the history of the acquisition of early jet engines by the Science Museum in London, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. and the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Each museum came by their early jet engines in different ways and each presented them to national audiences with very different relationships to the British and German inventors or co-inventors of the jet engine, Frank Whittle and Hans von Ohain. In Britain, Whittle was an important post-war national hero. In the United States, where both inventors lived by the mid-1970s, the two men invented a machine that was perfected by Americans. In Germany, the first public celebration of von Ohain did not take place until 1980. Through their authoritative displays, leading museums not only disseminate but also create knowledge about the history of technology. By virtue of the public authority behind these accounts, museum exhibits are a focus point for different interests - scholarly, political, engineering. Recognizing this, various communities have sought to shape museum practice in different ways. The changing aviation exhibits at the three leading museums discussed in this paper thus reflected not only changing museum practice and varying museum goals but also distinct and changing national discourses about identity, technology and technological museums.