Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith (22 March 1909 – 3 December 1981)[2] was a British polymath historian of aeronautics and aviation.
[1] Upon retirement, he was chosen as the first Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History at the National Air and Space Museum in 1978, for which he spent a year in the United States studying the papers of the Wright brothers.
[4] In The Invention of the Aeroplane 1799–1909,[9] Gibbs-Smith wrote a concise account of aeronautical developments which led slowly to functional fixed-wing aircraft.
Gibbs-Smith wrote a rebuttal to Coandă, describing how the aircraft had no injection or combustion of fuel in the air stream.
Gibbs-Smith said that it would have been suicidal to the pilot to attain combustion of the turbine-compressed air as the open cockpit would be subjected to the heat of the exhaust.