Links

You are currently browsing the archive for the Links category.

Historical maps online

28 December 2006 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Before 1900, Links, Maps, Tools and methods by Brett Holman | 1 comment

New Popular Edition Maps is an attempt to produce a copyright-free database of British postcodes. It does this by asking people to hunt around on a clickable, zoomable map of the UK for places for which they know the postcode (e.g. their home), and then enter that postcode at that spot. It's a bit like a stripped-down Google Maps; and you can search the map by placename or postcode. But what's interesting about this is that the maps used are out-of-copyright Ordnance Survey maps (1 mile to the inch) from the 1940s and early 1950s, which could be useful for historians or teachers, though these are obviously not the intended audience. Unfortunately Northern Ireland and most of Scotland is missing. (The National Library of Scotland has the OS maps of Scotland from the 1920s.)

Finding this inspired me to do a bit of a search for other online historical maps of Britain which similarly attempt to cover the whole country. (There's a useful list of out-of-copyright maps here.) Old-maps.co.uk has been around a while and uses OS maps from the late 19th century. Vision of Britain (which site has lots of historical statistics which you can slice various ways, and which I must explore more thoroughly one day) is more sophisticated, and has a neat trick of switching between different maps depending upon the zoom level: for example going from a 1921 large-scale map to a 1904 OS one to a NPE map. It also has 19th-century maps and a 1930s land utilisation map. But possibly the most interesting is Old Ordnance Survey Maps, which is based upon OS maps from the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. The coverage is very much incomplete; but it uses the Google Maps API, which means that it has a familiar interface for users, and could be used for mashups. It already overlays the regular Google Maps satellite and street maps. There are also handy links to take you to the same location at old-maps.co.uk and Vision of Britain. I can think of some improvements (for example, printing the publication date on each map) but this approach has tremendous potential.

The air strategist as business guru

14 December 2006 in 1910s, Books, Links by Brett Holman | 14 comments

Frederick Lanchester was a clever British engineer. He was one of the pioneers of the British automotive industry, but his main interest was in aviation, particularly aerodynamic theory. In my opinion, he has a good claim to be the first person to elucidate the knock-out blow concept, in his book Aircraft in Warfare: The Dawn of the Fourth Arm (London: Constable & Co., 1916) -- which also happens to be a very early example of what was later termed operations or operational research. And as I've found out recently, he's also a business guru in Japan!
Read the rest of this entry »

The Avia-Corner

7 July 2006 in Blogging and tweeting, Books, Links by Brett Holman | No comments

Scott W. Palmer, an associate professor at Western Illinois University, has a new book due out this month entitled Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia. In 10 words or less, it's about Russian airmindedness up to the end of 1945. This in itself is a good thing, but what makes it even better is that Scott has set up a website to promote the book (including excerpts in PDF format), as well as a blog, The Avia-Corner. In his first post, he explains that Dictatorship of the Air is not just a book, but

is meant to be the beginning of a conversation about the relationship between culture and technology and how this relationship has contributed to the development of the modern world. The “Avia-Corner” weblog is intended to further the discussion begun by [Dictatorship of the Air].

He also highlights a gallery of Soviet posters promoting airmindedness, which he has put online and plans to expand.

So, I welcome Scott into the tiny fraternity of aviation history bloggers, and look forward to more from him in the future!

Sounds like ... victory?

25 June 2006 in After 1950, Civil defence, Cold War, Links, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Words by Brett Holman | 1 comment

If you were wondering what the biggest and loudest air raid siren of all time is, then wonder no more, because it's the American Chrysler Victory Siren, made in the 1950s. Well, I don't know for sure that it was -- I'd like to see what the Soviets had to offer -- but it was clearly a mighty impressive piece of hardware: 12 feet long; 3 tons in weight; and 138 decibels at a distance of 100 feet! (120 dB is the pain threshold.) These were dotted all over the United States -- 20 in Detroit alone.

You can hear one of the few remaining examples in action here. It certainly sends a chill down my spine, which is perhaps strange as nuclear drills were not a feature of my youth here in Australia, so I only know the sound of such sirens second-hand. But I can't help but imagine what would have been happening to the communities these sirens were meant to warn, as the missiles (or in the 1950s, the bombs) rained down. Which in turn leads one to marvel at the optimistic choice of the name Victory Siren ... though I suppose the Defeat Siren ("If you can hear this, you're already dead") might not have sold so well!

Revise and Dissent and other blogs

29 May 2006 in Blogging and tweeting, Links by Brett Holman | No comments

I was extremely flattered to be asked, along with a number of very fine history bloggers, by Cliopatria's Ralph Luker to participate in a new group blog at the History News Network. We've called it Revise and Dissent and it's been up and running for nearly a week now! Unfortunately, its launch has coincided with a lull in my blogging activity as I madly prepare for my talk on Wednesday, so I haven't posted at R&D yet, but of course the nice thing about a group blog is that nobody will notice :)

Meanwhile, here are a few interesting blogs I've come across recently. I'm Too Sexy for My Master's Thesis is a sentiment that most academic bloggers can relate to, I'm sure; but Rachel's thesis topic sounds pretty sexy too, on the British Army's Jewish Legion in the First World War. It's very much a research blog, which is good to see. Cas Stavert of Only Two Rs is writing a novel set in the First World War, and also reading lots of early twentieth century British novels -- which I'm finding very educational! (Via Great War Fiction.) Finally, Modern Mechanix extracts weird and wonderful articles and advertisements from old science magazines. Sadly they are all American, not British, but there is still much of interest to me. For example, check out this Italian gas mask for typists, or these early German and American radar devices. (Via Boing Boing.)

Air University Press titles online

6 May 2006 in Books, Links by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Air University Press, the publishing arm of the USAF's Air University, has most of its books available in PDF format for free download. As one might expect, the subject matter is mostly American and recent, but some are on-topic for me, including Williamson Murray's Strategy for Defeat: The Luftwaffe, 1933-1945, George K. Williams' Biplanes and Bombsights: British Bombing in World War I, William Edward Fischer's The Development of Military Night Aviation to 1919, and Philip S. Meilinger's The Paths of Heaven: The Evolution of Airpower Theory and Airmen and Air Theory: A Review of the Sources.

Great War Fiction

4 May 2006 in Blogging and tweeting, Links by Brett Holman | No comments

New blog alert! Great War Fiction is the blog of George Simmers, a PhD student at Oxford Brookes. He's working on fiction written during and after the First World War, particularly the representations of soldiers and ex-soldiers therein. He has only been blogging a couple of days, but already has four posts up, including the obligatory introduction. As I am reading a lot of war fiction from the period myself, I will be reading George's blog with interest. (Via Break of Day in the Trenches.)

Me to BBC: you guys rock!

27 April 2006 in Links, Radio, Television by Brett Holman | 5 comments

The BBC has put online a catalogue of recordings held of its radio and television broadcasts since about 1930! Not the recordings themselves, mind you, but details such as broadcast dates, participants, and programme summaries, in many cases. Nor is it a complete record of what was broadcast: if it wasn't recorded (as many early programmes were not), then it's not in there. But still, this is a most excellent resource for researchers. They've done it in a quite sophisticated way, too, all very Web 2.0 with RSS, RDF and tag clouds, and they have also done the right thing by allowing re-use of the data for non-commercial purposes (there must be some interesting possibilities for scraping). My only regret is that there is so little from my period; the archive evidently doesn't start thickening out until the 1950s.

Some notes on getting around: searching could be easier, from an historian's point of view. You can search by description, or contributor, which are useful, but there is no way to search a range of dates, nor is it set up for browsing dates. If you have a specific day in mind, then you can go straight to it by using a URI of the form http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/on_this_day/yyyy/mm/dd. For example to see what the archive has for 30 January 1965, the URI is http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/on_this_day/1965/01/30. To see what the catalogue has for a particular year, the best way would seem to be to go to the advanced search page and enter the desired year in the description field; the vast majority of results will actually be from later programmes, but the older ones will be at the bottom of the page. I'm sure searching will improve in future, after all it is a prototype, in the BBC's very non-Web 2.0 language.

Here's a few random things I've found:

More here and here. Via Boing Boing.

Save the trees

23 March 2006 in Links, Tools and methods by Brett Holman | No comments

A useful site about digitising your trip to the archives: Electronic Researcher. It was mentioned in a H-ALBION thread about which digital cameras are best for use in archives, and which archives allow them (British Library no, National Archives yes). I wish I'd found this earlier, as I have already bought a camera for this purpose, but I think it will be OK.

The Cuzaux effect. Cazaux. Whatever

2 March 2006 in 1930s, Links by Brett Holman | 5 comments

A most interesting query and ensuing discussion over on the H-War mailing list, about the so-called "Cuzaux effect", which I haven't heard of before:

In short, [the Cuzaux effect] is the side ways deviation of
a projectile trajectory when fired from a weapon in motion. In the late 1930's, according to the article, it was discovered that this effect became so strong when a the bomber achieved the speed of 320 km/t and over, that its defensive armaments would have great difficulties when trying to hit an attacking fighter which came in with an angle larger than 30 degrees to the bomber's own course. This was supposed to be one of the major blows to the so-called bomber-paradigm, formulated among others by British politician Stanley Baldwin in his words the bomber will always get through (1932). According to this, the speed, climbing rate and operational ceiling of bomber relative to fighter preformance were developing in favor of the former. Combined with heavy defensive weaponry, the bomber would be virtually invulnerable to fighter attack. In the Spanish civil war, it was discovered that even slower but more maneuverable biplanes were able to down faster bombers, and even fighters.

The above was written by Frode Lindgjerdet, who is writing a thesis on airpower theory in Norway in the interwar period, and came across the Cuzaux effect in an article from 1939 (no reference given).

Erik Lund provided the most informative reply: it's probably spurious (it has to do with conservation of angular momentum, and the gyroscope equations -- that takes me back!). Though I'm not sure about his remark that 'it certainly did not refute the bomber orthodoxy, since it is a myth'. Myths can be influential too, so I don't think it necessarily follows that the putative Cuzaux effect could not have ended the belief that the bomber will always get through. It may have done, for some people, whether erroneously or not, or at least caused them to reconsider the bomber paradigm (the dominance of which anyway can be overstated; see, eg, John Ferris, "Fighter defence before Fighter Command: the rise of strategic air defence in Great Britain, 1917-1934", Journal of Military History 63 (1999), 845-84). It may not have filtered down to the public, though -- a keyword search of The Times yields no hits for "Cuzaux". Something to file away for future reference.

Update: the perils of liveblogging a mailing list. Firstly, it looks like the correct spelling is Cazaux, as there is a French military test airfield with that name, as Jonathan Beard pointed out (there are hits for this spelling in The Times now, though none relating to any Cazaux effect). And two posters (Ed Rudnicki and Will O'Neill) have pretty convincingly argued that the effect was not in fact mythical, but was already known of (it was called "jump", at least by the Americans) and could be corrected for to a large extent by the more sophisticated gunsights.

Update 2: Further informative posts from Will O'Neill and Erik Lund.

« Older entries § Newer entries »