Jet turbines have undergone massive development and improvement over the periods before and after the 747. Of course, the British and Germans pioneered the development of turbine aircraft engines prior to WWII and the Germans pioneered the revolutionary ME262 during the war itself, too late to do the Nazis much good, and hampered by Der Fuhrer's micro-managing. The British had centrifugal type compressors in their early jets, which were probably more durable than the German design but not as advanced in development.

Then came the very unfortunate debacle with the deHavilland Comet. It is a very important development in aviation history, where they pioneered a beautiful jet passenger aircraft but did not allow for stress fractures in the airframe due to the repetitive pressurization cycles of high altitude flight. I believe they had rectangular windows, for instance, a major no-no in pressurization and stress accomodation. The fuselages literally burst. This resulted in several horrific accidents with high loss of life, pioneering recovery and research work in analyzing the shards of wreckage, discovery of the problem, and the American 'snatching' of the technical lead since the Comets took time to be re-engineered and manufactured while Boeing came out with the 707 and Douglas came out with the DC-9.

In a way, the crashes of the Space Shuttles were a kind of 'echo' of this sad fact of engineering: You do something new and there are new gremlins out there to bite you.

In former times jet transports sounded not unlike rockets when taking off. Due to the optimizing of the engines to make the inlet blades function as fans, they have become far quieter and more efficient in fuel use.