In 1910, when aviation was in its incipient stage, a Romanian named Henri Coanda (1886-1972) ventured beyond his time and tested the first jet aircraft in history.

Henri Marie Coanda was born in Bucharest in 1886 in a family with a tradition in exact sciences – his father, Constantin Coanda was a Mathematics Professor at a technical school in Bucharest and Prime Minister of Romania in the troubled year 1918; his mother, Aida Danet was the daughter of the French physician Gustave Danet. Even since he was a child, Henri Coanda was fascinated by ”the miracle of the wind”.

Coanda studied in Bucharest and, while he was in highschool, his father moved him to Iasi, at a prestigious military school, as Constantin Coanda wanted him to follow this career. Young Henri Coanda respected his father’s wishes, but preserved his interest for applied sciences. He spent some time in Germany at the Institute of Technology in Charlottenburg and in Belgium, at the Science University in Liege. When he returned to the country, he enrolled in an artillery regiment, built a missile airplane for the Romanian army, but he didn’t resist for long in the military restricted universe, so he got the permisson to leave it and went into a long automobile trip to Isfahan, Teheran and Tibet. When he returned, he started following the courses of Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Ingenieurs en Construction Aeronautique in Paris and he graduated as head of the first class of aeronautical engineers in 1910.

That same year, at the International Aeronautic Salon in Paris, at Issy-les-Moulineaux airport near Paris, he presented the first jet powered aircraft, called Coanda-10 (which he had designed and built in engineer Gianni Caproni’s workshop). The innovation this new flying device brought was that is used a four-cylinder piston engine to power a compressor, which fed two burners for thrust, instead using a propeller. Unfortunately, the jet wasn’t too stable and Coanda not a very experienced pilot, so he lost control of the device, which hit a wall near the taking off grounds and burst into fire. Coanda managed to jump out of the jet before this happened and he only suffered a couple of minor injuries. However, neither the public, nor the scientific world was too interested in his innovation and he abandoned it for some time. Gustave Eiffel, the constructor of the Eiffel Tower and of the Statue of Liberty said about the 24 year old Henri Coanda that he was born 50 years earlier than he should have.

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