A widespread assumption in 1913 was that the mysterious airships then being seen in British skies were real and German. The vast majority certainly were not: there were just too many of them, in too many places, for no conceivable purpose. But it remains a possibility that a few of them really were German airships. […]
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] An interesting Flickr set of photographs evidently taken in the south of England in the last year of the Second World War was recently posted to a WWII mailing list I’m on. Many show aircraft of various types; others are of people and places. The photographer is unknown
Richard Holmes. Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. London: William Collins, 2013. Though the term wasn’t around then, airmindedness was about balloons for longer than it has been about aeroplanes. But it’s relatively neglected historiographically, certainly in my library, so this will help fill that gap: everyone from Nadar to Babar the Elephant
Roland Garros is today mainly known for having given his name to the home of French tennis. But long before then he was famous as a pioneer aviator in both peace and war. In December 1912, for example, he set a new altitude record of 17,000 feet, while in September 1913 he made the first
‘Everybody’s Doing It’ was the name of a popular revue which opened in the West End in February 1912; the music and lyrics (including a near-eponymous song) were co-written by Irving Berlin. It was also the Manchester Guardian‘s stab at a contemporary pop cultural reference to describe just how widespread the phantom airship scare had
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] Despite appearing in the Times Literary Supplement a month ago, Eric Naiman’s astounding exposure of independent historian A. D. Harvey’s fraudulent scholarship seems to have been little remarked upon by historians. (Naiman’s piece is quite long, but worth the read; for a much shorter version try here.) Admittedly,
The planet Venus normally sticks close to the Sun and so can only be seen very shortly after sunset, to the west (or before sunrise, to the east, when it is a morning star). But every 584 days, when it reaches maximum elongation in its orbit, it is far enough from the Sun in apparent
View Scareships, 1913 in a larger map Here’s where the 1913 phantom airship sightings took place. Actually, there are a few from late 1912 (including the Sheerness incident), the blue ones. Red indicates sightings in January 1913, green February, cyan March, and yellow April. A quick visual inspection shows that the density of sightings was
Peter Bowler. Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2013. I figured I should put my money where my mouth is and at least buy this, and hopefully even read it. Bowler uses a counterfactual approach in an attempt to elucidate how important Darwin was to the development of
