Note: This map DOES NOT show real air routes, from 1920 or any other year! They are purely imaginary. While writing the post on old maps, I happened upon the following example, which is labelled ‘The world — principal air routes’ and dated to 1920 by the host site, Hipkiss’ Scanned Old Maps: The only […]
L. E. O. Charlton. The Royal Air Force and U.S.A.A.F. from July 1943 to September 1944. London: Hutchinson & Co., n.d. [1944?]. I didn’t know of this book by Charlton. It’s a chronology of the air war, with hundreds of great photos; looks like writing these kept Charlton gainfully employed during the war. Jörg Friedrich.
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
On the night of 23 March 1909, a police constable named Kettle saw a most unusual thing: ‘a strange, cigar-shaped craft passing over the city’1 of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. His friends were sceptical, but his story was corroborated, to an extent, by Mr Banyard and Mrs Day, both of nearby March, who separately saw something similar
Ten years ago today, Carl Sagan died. He had been a hero of mine since childhood, since I first watched Cosmos. I would kick the rest of the family out of the lounge room, close the door, turn off the lights, pull the beanbag up to the TV as close as possible, and let Carl
Forgot to write this yesterday … I blame the pre-Xmas social round! Both of these were bought after being seen elsewhere (at least the author was, in the latter case). Simon Garfield. We Are at War: The Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times. London: Ebury Press, 2006. Drawn from the Mass-Observation archives, covering
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
Anthony Eden at a United Nations Association rally at the Albert Hall, 1 March 1947: Mr. EDEN and M. JAN MASARYK, Czechoslovak Foreign Minister, were the other principal speakers. Of international affairs, Mr. EDEN said: “Our planet has become very small. We are nearer to San Francisco to-day than we were to Paris 100 years
Orac responds to me … sort of: Orac paused, his lights blinking, patterns ever changing. It was almost as though he were thinking, if such a thing were possible by a computer. Then he went on, “Of course, as much as I’ve defended Dawkins before against similarly spurious uses of the Hitler analogy, now that
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] I’ve been reading Joseph Corn’s The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900-1950, a classic study of airminded culture in the United States — which was very different to that in Britain. The “winged gospel” is the term used by Corn to describe an intense complex of hopes and expectations
