No, really.
11:45, 14 Jun 2026
The ill-fated “Avrocar”, based on Coandă’s ideas(Image: Wikimedia Commons)
It’s in the nature of conspiracy theory fans that their beliefs are fluid, changing all the time with whatever’s fashionable or whatever fits their paranoid world-view. So Nazi flying saucers used to be big, but aren’t really in vogue anymore.
The belief that Hitler’s boffins, eager to develop new “wonder weapons”, came up with flying discs, never completely went away, and it’s partly down to a Romanian genius whose 140th birthday was on June 7 and who worked in Bristol for three years.
Step forward Henri Coandă (1886-1972), inventor, engineer, physicist, a man of astonishing intellect. The Nikola Tesla of aviation, if you like.
So for instance, who invented the jet engine? Sir Frank Whittle, right? Well yes, but as early as 1910 Coandă exhibited his Coandă-1910 aircraft in Paris. He called it his “turbo-propulseur” and it had no propellor, but instead the engine powered a bladed rotary compressor to propel the craft by sucking at the front and blowing air out of a rear duct.
It never flew, because it couldn’t. Though many years later when everyone was getting excited about proper jet engines he claimed it had done. He also designed a sleigh for the Tsar of Russia using the same engine, though there’s no evidence it was ever built. So he invented the snowmobile as well. In theory.
In 1911 he came to Bristol and worked here until 1914 for the British & Colonial Aeroplane Company, where he came up with a series of monoplanes, mostly for use in training pilots.
Coandă’s 1910 experimental aircraft on show in Paris, October 1910. Its engine powered a turbine rather than a propeller, making it a forerunner of the jet. It probably never flew. He arrived in Bristol the following year to design more conventional aircraft.(Image: Roger Viollet via Getty Images)
In the 1930s he obtained a patent in France based on the “Coandă effect”, the tendency of air (or fluids) to cling to a nearby surface rather than following a straight line. He was in France when the Germans took over in 1940 and he worked for the Nazis, apparently trying to make the 1910 “turbo-propulseur” a reality.
But it was the Coandă effect which seems to have been what led some to claim he’d built a flying saucer for the Nazis.
After the war, Avro Canada applied the Coandă effect to try and develop a “flying saucer”, a top secret project which also interested the US Air Force. The thing never worked properly and was abandoned in 1961. The VZ-9 Avrocar, as it was called, was in practice more like a hovercraft.
If you want to pile more conspiracist stuff on, then Coandă also moved back to Romania in 1969, which by then was being run by the unpleasant and increasingly weird regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu. He died three years later.
The machines he built during his three years here were at the leading edge of technology at the time, but Bristol back then was much too sensible for any far-out nonsense.
But if you want to give the conspiracist in your life a little fun, tell them to ask the internet about Coandă and Nazi UFOs and watch them disappear down a rabbit hole.
“This most marvellous development”
Monday was the 130th anniversary of the first time – that we know of! – that Bristolians ever saw moving pictures.
On Monday June 8 1896 the “Animatographe” came to the Tivoli Music Hall in Broadmead (where the Tesco Express is nowadays) offering “living moving pictures” in a “thoroughly up to date” programme twice daily and twice each evening.
The 300-capacity venue under the management of Edward “Teddy” Leon was very successful. Leon also owned the Empire music hall in Old Market and would book acts to run at both theatres simultaneously, the performers running from one to the other in costume and make-up.
He also owned a chain of dentist’s practices in South Wales and the West of England.
The moving picture show was a great success, comprising a series of short films accompanied by the Tivoli’s in-house band, with Mr Leon Bassett providing violin solos.
Audiences saw a sequence of very short films, one of which (appropriately enough) showed a dental extraction. There was a re-creation of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, a wrestling match between a man and a dog, a Spanish dance and the burning of Joan of Arc. Another was what sounds like a scene of dancing black children, though described in terms that would be considered offensive nowadays.
Of the films, one paper said: “perhaps the most pleasing is a capital representation of a skirt dancer, the graceful movements of the lady being depicted with startling realism.”
The Bristol Magpie, the leading local publication when it came to news of local entertainment, plumped for the film of a village blacksmith: “in which the forge and fire are seen, the smoke ascending and sparks flying, the hammer striking the red-hot iron, the blowing of the bellows …
“All Bristol should embrace this opportunity of seeing this most marvellous development of electricity.”
It would be unwise to overstate the excitement that moving pictures generated at that point. They were remarked on in the local press but regarded as a novelty, just the sort of thing for a music hall.
No-one in 1896 seems to have been saying that this was the start of a revolution in entertainment, though it wasn’t long before everyone realised that it was.
By 1910 the Tivoli had stopped being a music hall and was now a full-blown picture house, two years after Bristol’s first cinema, the Bio, had opened on Counterslip.