In 1942, a group of GE engineers working in secret for ten months built America’s first jet engine. Their mission was to win the war, but they ended up shrinking the world. “They called us the Hush-Hush Boys,” says Joseph Sorota, one of the last living veterans of the project, who just turned 95.

The team working on the project had some 1,000 workers, but only about a tenth of them, including Sorota, knew what they were doing. The war effort has become largely forgotten, but a GE historian discovered a 1952 film about the building of the jet engine. Take a look.