Recently I was on a flight at Heathrow Airport waiting behind Concorde for takeoff. The most impressive thing about this was the noise. As Concorde started its roll and the pilot switched on the afterburners, the windows of my aircraft crackled in protest and the whole airframe seemed to shake. And, as it gathered speed and moved away down the runway, I could see the reheat flames in the jetpipes. On a darkening winter afternoon at Heathrow the impression of power was overwhelming. This is an article, not about the Olympus 593, which actually powers Concorde, but about the engine that was supposed to power Concorde. Had Concorde been smaller (as was originally intended), it would have been fitted with the smaller Olympus 320. But in the design stage Concorde started to grow, so its engine was also redesigned to increase its thrust from a maximum of 30,000 pounds to nearly 38,000 pounds. The afterburner was designed and built by the French aeroengine company, SNECMA, while the basic engine, the turbojet, was, like its predecessors, designed and produced at Bristol Siddeley Engines (BSE), a firm that was, as its name suggests, based in the British city of Bristol.
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John Law (1992) studied this question.