Steam generation at high altitudes required air to be pressurized to sea level pressure and delivered at a constant rate to a steam generator's burners; Price proposed using a centrifugal compressor powered by a small gas turbine which was in turn driven by the hot gasses from a burner located between the compressor and turbine.

By this time Price had the basic design of his jet completed and was able to attract the interest of Lockheed's Chief Research Engineer, Kelly Johnson, who would later found the company's famous Skunk Works.

Johnson had been thinking about a new high-speed design after running into various compressibility problems at high speed with the P-38 and the jet engine seemed like a natural fit in this project.

Later that year the Tizard Mission arrived in the US and presented many technological advances being worked on in England, including information on Frank Whittle's jet engine designs.

The main combustor was a "canular" type with twelve flame cans in an annular container, feeding their exhaust to a five-stage axial turbine.

For testing purposes the compressor blades had no airfoil shaping and were attached to the central hub on rotating mounts to allow their angles to be changed between runs.

The low-pressure compressor was encased in a two-part cylindrical casing with stiffening ribs, which gave it an odd appearance similar to the bottom of an egg carton.

In June 1943 the Army eventually demonstrated their interest in a Lockheed jet design but contracted for the P-80 Shooting Star, to be powered by a licensed version of the centrifugal-flow Halford H.1.

The XJ37 was being worked on at the same time as competing Westinghouse axial-flow designs undergoing development, the 19A and 19B, were being test-run through the 1943-45 period, resulting in America's first production axial-flow turbojet engine, the Westinghouse J30, of which some 260 examples were made for the earliest American military jets for the U.S. Navy, and for the first American delta-wing fighter design, the Convair XF-92.

However, by 1948 advances in airframe design, particularly the introduction of the swept wing, allowed the bomber to move to jet power, eventually leading to the B-52 Stratofortress.