Monthly Archives: March 2009

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Recently, I followed Gavin Robinson's lead and tried out the British Library's EThOS beta. EThOS stands for Electronic Theses (dissertations) Online Service, and it's just what you'd expect from that -- an electronic thesis delivery service. There's not too much new about that, but EThOS does have some very impressive features. First is the scope: nearly all British Universities are participating (with two very major exceptions, unfortunately: Cambridge and Oxford). What's more, any thesis ever accepted in Britain is eligible for inclusion in the database, possibly going back to the 1600s, according to the FAQ. This could become a rich vein of primary source material for intellectual historians. Second is the fact that the theses have been OCRed, not just scanned. This means that you can do keyword searches on the PDFs, for example. Third is the fact that they are free! Mostly, anyway. If you only want an electronic copy, it's free (hardcopy costs, obviously). If the thesis you want hasn't been scanned yet, then you may be asked to contribute towards the cost of that, but in most cases, not. And it doesn't appear to matter whether you are in the UK or not (which is good, because I'm not).

As for the cryptic title above, one of the theses I downloaded was one I've long wanted to read but have never seen until now: Howard Roy Moon, The Invasion of the United Kingdom: Public Controversy and Official Planning 1888-1918 (London University, 1968). It's quite widely cited and I wondered why it hadn't been published. Now I know why: it's 735 pages long! I am suddenly feeling rather inadequate. Clearly, historians back then possessed superhuman powers. Or at least very strong arms, and hands adapted for furious typing and scribbling.

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Tarrant Tabor

The Tarrant Tabor, a prototype bomber designed and built in 1918-9. There were high hopes among strategic bombing advocates (including P. R. C. Groves) for this giant machine, but by the time it was ready for its maiden flight in May 1919, the war was over and its purpose now unclear. Not that this mattered much, for that first flight was abortive:
...continue reading

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A few articles have been appearing in the British press over the last few days about Harry Grindell Matthews, who (among many other things) claimed in 1924 to have invented a death ray. There's no actual news attached to these stories, as far as I can tell, other than the fact that a new biography of the man has just come out (Jonathan Foster, The Death Ray: The Secret Life of Harry Grindell Matthews). In them, and presumably in the book, Grindell Matthews is portrayed as an unrecognised scientific genius who will now hopefully get his due. While he's certainly a fascinating figure, and one who pops up in my thesis, I think he was another of those inventors who was as much showman as scientist, someone who claimed to have invented many amazing things but which somehow rarely seem to have resulted in a finished product.

The death ray itself is a good example of this. It was claimed to be an electromagnetic weapon which could kill over long ranges, or explode gunpowder, or stop an internal combustion engine. The last ability was key to the possible use of the death ray as an anti-aircraft weapon, and this is what most press attention at the time focused on. There was a press campaign waged on Grindell Matthews' behalf which clamoured for the government to acquire this weapon for Britain. Officials from the Air Ministry were given a demonstration, but were unimpressed. The government was not entirely uninterested, and even offered him a thousand pounds for a successful test under their own conditions. But Grindell Matthews lost patience and hopped over to Paris to hawk the death ray there. He came back to Britain, made a film with Pathé called The Death Ray, and eventually gave up and went to America.

This sounds a lot like charlatanism. Grindell Matthews claimed much for his invention, but was reluctant to submit it to reasonable scrutiny, even when offered when more than fair compensation for his time. On the other hand, the Wright brothers, for example, had been just as suspicious when trying to sell their flyers to the world's militaries, and ended up not making a whole lot of money from their inspiration and perspiration. So such behaviour wasn't unprecedented. On the other other hand, the reason why the Wrights didn't profit fully from their invention of flight was that other people duplicated it, refined it, improved it and marketed it. If Grindell Matthews was just a bad businessman, then why didn't a practical death ray ever appear from somebody else's lab?

It certainly wasn't because nobody else was trying. Here's a (partial) list of others who claimed to have invented a death ray before 1939:
...continue reading

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No. But let me explain ...

One of the nice things about tutoring is that you're getting paid to learn things (unless you happen to know everything about whatever it is that you are tutoring already, which I don't). And one thing I've learned recently is that the First World War started because French aircraft bombed western Germany. That was the German claim, anyway. Here's the relevant part of the German declaration of war on France on 3 August 1914, a letter from the German ambassador, Baron Wilhelm von Schoen, to Raymond Poincaré, the President of France:

The German administrative and military authorities have established a certain number of flagrantly hostile acts committed on German territory by French military aviators.

Several of these have openly violated the neutrality of Belgium by flying over the territory of that country; one has attempted to destroy buildings near Wesel; others have been seen in the district of the Eifel; one has thrown bombs on the railway near Carlsruhe and Nuremberg.

I am instructed, and I have the honour to inform your Excellency, that in the presence of these acts of aggression the German Empire considers itself in a state of war with France in consequence of the acts of this latter Power.

I don't think there is any doubt now that these aerial incidents never happened, and were invented by Germany to excuse its preplanned and unprovoked invasion of France and Belgium. The French government immediately denied the charges -- though it would, wouldn't it?

But that denial didn't put the question to rest. There was some discussion in the letters columns of the New York Times in 1916, and in 1917 a Liberal MP, J. M. Robertson, published a pamphlet called German Truth and a Matter of Fact. This last seems reasonably convincing, as it is based on some unofficial German investigations which found no evidence for any prewar aerial incursions. And at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the (Allied) commission on war guilt dismissed the charges as 'entirely false'. As late as 1929, though, the inimitable Harry Elmer Barnes questioned this narrative of falsification (JSTOR, see also transcript at eccentric revisionist website). While Barnes didn't claim that the air raids had happened, he did argue that the French had tampered with the telegrams sent by Berlin to Schoen so as to mutilate the portions relating to claims of ground incursions by the French. Schoen was therefore unable to mention these in his declaration of war and had to rely on the (admittedly mistaken, though not falsified) bombing stories. The French denied that any such 'mutilation' took place.

Why air raids anyway? I was thinking that they were plausible claims which were difficult to disprove, since aeroplanes come and go without leaving much trace (other than the odd bomb crater), unlike, say, a fully-fledged cavalry incursion across the frontier. But if Barnes/Schoen are to be believed, Germany did claim that France violated its terra firma too. It may have been intended to tar France with the brush of frightfulness, though bombs falling harmlessly near a railway track don't really do much in that direction. Again, if the reports were mistakes and not simply made up, it could be that they were phantom-airship type reports made by members of the public, which would not be at all surprising given the German mobilisation and the expectation that war would soon begin. Though actual explosions are harder to explain, admittedly.

Anyway, it's an interesting sidelight on the July Crisis, and perhaps an anticipation of the later belief that the next war would begin in the air.

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Military History Carnival 16 has been posted at American Presidents Blog. There's an easy choice for me (although the snails did make me go 'ewwww'): The Blogger will always get through has found an intact trench in East Sussex, which was part of the anti-invasion defences in the Second World War. Sterling work, and there is a video and another photo (and snails) in a follow-up post. Which is as good an opportunity as any to mention a link which Alun Salt passed on to me, a report by Wessex Archaeology of a Time Team excavation of possible Second World War defences in the Shooters Hill region of southeast London, including an underground bunker of unusual design. One the one hand, the idea of doing archaeology on such a recent period seems faintly ridiculous -- there are people still alive who would remember what was there, and there are plenty of paper records for historians to sift through. On the other hand, not everything about such defences will have been written down, and memories fade, so it's not actually ridiculous at all. More world war archaeology, I say, more!

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I've been reading a curious tome by Robert William Cole, called The Struggle for Empire. It's curious because the empire of the title is the British Empire, or rather the Anglo-Saxon Empire, and the struggle takes place in interstellar space. And because it was published in 1900! It has a good claim to being the first space opera ever written.

The basic plot is as follows. It is the year 2236. The Anglo-Saxon Empire rules, not just the Earth, but the entire Solar System and many stars beyond. Its only rival is Kairet, a planet orbiting Sirius which has a vast empire of its own. The two empires have co-existed uneasily until now, but Sirian settlers on a distant planet called Iosia clash with the Anglo-Saxons who nominally control it. The Anglo-Saxon Empire sees its chance and declares war. It assembles a huge fleet of warships and dispatches it towards Sirius. But deep in interstellar space, it encounters an even bigger Sirian fleet. The Earth forces are shattered, and fall back on the Solar System. Neptune is besieged. A titanic battle at Jupiter leads to the destruction of two of its moons and the scorching of its sky. Anglo-Saxon warships entrenched on the Moon ambush the approaching Sirian fleet, causing severe losses, but cannot prevent the bombardment and destruction of the imperial capital, London. But now an English scientist unveils a new weapon which makes Sirian warships fall from the sky. This decisively alters the course of the war: the Sirian fleet is destroyed, and Earth forces penetrate to Kairet and destroy its capital. The Sirians agree to pay a huge indemnity, and their ships are prohibited from leaving their system. The interstellar war has lasted for five years, and the struggle for empire has turned decisively in favour of the Anglo-Saxons ...
...continue reading

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Mars map (1962)

Via Bad Astronomy comes news of an update to the Mars component of Google Earth. Most interesting to me are the overlays of historical maps of Mars from the 19th and 20th centuries, including those made by Giovanni Schiaparelli (1890), Percival Lowell (1896) and E. M. Antoniadi (1909). Schiaparelli and Lowell's maps showed the infamous canals of Mars; Antoniadi's more detailed map did not, and is supposed to have finished off the canals as a scientific controversy, at least according to according to Steven J. Dick's brilliant history The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). But from some of my own work I've seen evidence that the canals and the associated question of intelligent life on Mars survived into the 1920s. And now Google Earth shows me this beautiful map made by the US Air Force in 1962. This Mars was festooned with canals, half a century after they had largely been discarded by the scientific community.

A little digging shows why. The map, known as the MEC-1 prototype, was prepared to assist with the upcoming Mariner missions to Mars. E. C. Slipher, late director of the Lowell Observatory (a major centre for planetary research), helped make it. Slipher had got his start under Lowell himself in the late 1900s, and used his mentor's old observations to compile MEC-1. So it's no surprise it has canals, then. Slipher seems to have remained an advocate of the canals right up until his death in 1964. Perhaps fortunately for him, he didn't live to witness Mariner 4's flyby of Mars in 1965, which revealed an apparently dead planet. But if it had not, the USAF would have been well placed to explore the Martian megascale hydraulic system.

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So, the thesis is done, if not dusted. What do I do now?

The first thing to do is to earn a living. That's now sorted, at least for the next few months; I'm doing a bit more IT work and, more interestingly, some sessional tutoring for the Arts Faculty. I last did that in 2006, so it's useful to be able to burnish my teaching credentials. The two subjects I'm tutoring are called Total War in Europe: World War One and From Homer to Hollywood. I'm enjoying both very much so far. Total War in Europe is of course right up my alley: this week in tutes we discussed militarism before 1914, and next week we'll be looking at the July Crisis. It's hard to make that material uninteresting, but I'm the man for the job. From Homer to Hollywood is an interdisciplinary breadth subject (for those familiar with the terminology of the Melbourne Model) for first year students, which examines representations of war in a variety of poems, novels, plays, paintings and films. We've started off with the Iliad and The Song of Roland; later we'll get to do War and Peace, Guernica and the film Gallipoli, among many other things. It's a bit outside my comfort zone in terms of approach (more litcrit than historical) but I'm learning a lot and enjoying teaching the first years.

Then there's the career. It's not exactly a good time to be looking for academic jobs (when is it ever), but I'm going to give it a bash. I need to publish though, and if I can get, say, two papers in the pipeline this year, that will help with that. I've got plenty of ideas, but as yet little inclination to get stuck into writing again. That will have to change! There's also the thesis-to-book process to begin, assuming it isn't roundly rubbished by the examiners, of course.

Finally, there's blogging. I do intend to keep writing at Airminded, although I'm not really sure what I'll have to say -- the problem with a research blog is that when you're not doing research, you're probably not going to be blogging that much either! That is something I'll have to cope with though, as I've just been made a member of Cliopatria, in place of the now-defunct Revise and Dissent. It's an honour but one which I'll have to work at justifying.

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A while back I wrote a post about Sir Malcolm Campbell, devil-may-care driving fool, and his possible connection with the British Union of Fascists -- specifically, the claim that he adorned Blue Bird with BUF insignia. I was sceptical, based on his fairly negative attitude in 1937, but couldn't rule out that he'd had some earlier flirtation with them. Now Philip Coupland has kindly provided me with some contemporary evidence of the Blue Bird claim. It's an article from the BUF newspaper, Blackshirt, 26 April 1935, 1, the entire text of which reads:

SIR MALCOLM CAMPBELL CARRIES THE FASTEST FLAG

On March 7, 1935, the Fascist pennant of the London Volunteer Transport Service was carried, at the suggestion of S.L. Vernon Pickering, by Captain Sir Malcolm Campbell, M.B.E., on his famous "Blue Bird." On that occasion this great British patriot created a new world's record for travelling on land. Prior to leaving England for Daytona, Sir Malcolm was offered the good wishes of the British Union of Fascists by S.L. Vernon Pickering, who himself has won over a hundred racing trophies.

So that would seem to confirm the Blue Bird story. It would be nice to have a statement from Campbell himself, or photographic evidence, or at least something not from the BUF. But it seems unlikely to have been made up, given the potential for a potentially punitive libel action. So I'm willing to take this as prima facie evidence for Campbell's interest in fascism, in 1935 if no later (or earlier).