For nearly four years from May 1937, Modern Wonder (Modern World from March 1940) was a British weekly magazine, priced at 2d. and aimed at, presumably, boys and young men who were interested in high technology, big machines and vehicles that go really, really fast — sometimes fantastical, but mostly real, if on or near […]
In the previous post I looked at Nigel Biggar’s use of the Berlin Airlift and Richard Hillary in his paean to the RAF. Now I will look at his other argument in Providence, that ‘In the past 100 years then, the Royal Air Force has made a vital contribution to the military defense of the
Kim Wagner pointed out an article in Providence (‘A journal of Christianity & American foreign policy’) by Nigel Biggar, entitled ‘Thank God for the Royal Air Force!’. Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford University, has attained some notoriety for his ‘Ethics and Empire’ research project, which seeks to trawl the history
This is the story of the world’s first aerial combat. It is not a true story. It is 30 September, 1870. Revolutionary Paris is under siege by Prussian forces. But it has a secret weapon: Nadar. Nadar is famed as a photographer, a writer, and—more importantly here—an aeronaut. He has taken the lead in organising
Since last I posted, COVID-19 has continued its spread: the Guardian is currently reporting 378,000 cases worldwide, 16,500 deaths, and 101,000 recoveries. (I post these figures not so much for the information of anyone reading at the present time, but more as context for future readers.) Like most people, I think, I’m coping: healthy, but
[With apologies to Gabriel García Márquez and Ben Wilkie.] It’s not that long ago that I was posting about the Australian bushfires; now it’s the turn of the coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s worldwide. Social media is an essential tool in such times of crisis, but it also can be a misleading one. Here’s
Since 2007, the FlightGlobal Archive (AKA the ‘Flight archive’) has been an incredibly useful resource for me, many other aviation historians, and Wikimedia Commons, as it provides online access to high-resolution PDFs (with OCR) of nearly every page of the key British aviation trade magazine Flight (from 1962 Flight International), from the first issue in
This must be one of the first ever photographs ever taken of an air raid, simply because it was one of the first ever air raids, during the Italian invasion of Ottoman Tripolitania of 1911-12. It appeared in the Illustrated London News on 31 August 1912 with the following caption: PHOTOGRAPHED FROM THE DIRIGIBLE WHICH
Heavy rains are finally starting to extinguish the distastrous bushfires that covered a last part of eastern Australia during the last couple of months (and of course, bringing floods). Back while they were still burning, James Raynes tweeted a series of images he adapted from Australian recruitment posters from the First World War, which I
The default explanation for the Australian mystery aeroplane panic of 1918 was a conspiracy theory: they were enemy aircraft, deployed by German merchant raiders operating off the Australian coast, or perhaps flying from secret aerodromes deep in the bush. Either way they were thought to be collaborating with German spies on shore, as evidenced by
