Coandă you fly?

I'll just jump ahead thousand years or so (because I want to ) and leap into the modern age a bit. What I really mean is about 1910.

In this year a Romanian engineer by the name of Henri Coandă built the very first jet powered airplane, the unimaginatively named Coandă 1910. You figure he could have named it after a bird at least.

No matter. He originally joined the military at the behest of his father. He was always interested in flight and paid special attention to artillery. However his inventive spirit and the army life was not a good fit and in 1908 he left to pursue a career in science. He found his way to Paris and enrolled in the École Nationale Superieure d'Ingenieurs en Construction Aéronautique. Two years later he was an aeronautical engineer. The year is only 1910.

He moved quickly. He was curious about how wind moved over the surfaces of airplanes and experimented with many shapes first using a fast train to mount his test subjects on, and then developing a wind tunnel, complete with smoke trails. Again, this guy was doing this stuff in 1910.

He then sat down and built the world's first jet airplane. Just like that. It was powered by a genuine jet engine, not an exploding keg of gunpowder strapped under the wing. Although not that powerful, and destined to be the poor cousin of jet propulsion, the thermojet engine he built was an amazing device indeed. A standard 4 cylinder piston engine powered an air compressor that forced air at amazing high speed into a combustion chamber where fuel was delivered and set alight. The roaring flames out the back pushed the plane through the air. In an age when inventors flew their creations, you got to figure he had as much raw courage as technical skill.

The damn thing flew, but crashed on later flight and burnt up. He walked away. By then though interest and money were lacking, so jet planes were put on the back burner. He continued to design and build airplanes over the years, but he maintained a quirky side throughout his life. He developed a jet powered sleigh and an early version of the hovercraft.