1900s

A peaceful riverside scene with a palm tree in the foreground and a steamship on the river.
1900s, 1910s, Australia, Contemporary, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures

Looking for the mothership

The current drone panic on the eastern US seaboard – which started out in New Jersey about a month ago, but has spread to Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, and even US bases in the UK and Germany – is, of course, hardly unprecedented. Not only does it bear obvious similarities to the 2019

Black and white photo of a biplane stuck 300 feet up a 350 foot tall radio mast
1900s, Pictures

A bad day at the office

While looking for something else, I came across this rather incredible photo in the Imperial War Museum collection. That’s a seaplane stuck 300 feet up a 350ft tall radio mast! If that’s not amazing enough, the pilot was rescued by three men who climbed up to retrieve him. And he survived.

Postcard showing Zeppelin LVI bombing Leige, 6 August 1914
1900s, 1910s, 1940s, Australia, Blogging, tweeting and podcasting, Interviews, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Sounds

Phantom airship tales from Rat City

I’m featured in the latest episode of the podcast Tales from Rat City, which is focused on unusual and sometimes bizarre aspects of the history of Ballarat, Victoria’s third largest city (if you’ve heard of the Eureka Stockade, well, that’s where that was). It’s run by David Waldron (a historian at Federation University who co-authored

1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Australia, Before 1900, Periodicals, Pictures, Plots and tables, Tools and methods

Breaking the tyranny of distance revisited — II

One thing we were curious to try with hota-time is to see whether the idea and the code could be applied beyond looking at London-Sydney travel times. And it can! Here is the output for Melbourne-Sydney travel times, in hours rather than days: Lots of data points, roughly the same as for the London-Sydney plot.

1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Before 1900, Civil aviation, Grants, Periodicals, Pictures, Plots and tables, Tools and methods

Breaking the tyranny of distance revisited — I

Nearly four years ago, I wrote a post about a software project Tim Sherratt and I were working on for Heritage of the Air called hota-time. Briefly, the idea was that hota-time would extract and then plot travel times between London and Sydney mentioned in Trove Newspaper headlines, as a quantitative way to gauge the

William Le Queux, The Zeppelin Destroyer (1916)
1900s, 1910s, Books, Periodicals, Pictures, Publications

Self-archive: ‘William Le Queux, the Zeppelin menace and the Invisible Hand’

A few years back, my article ‘William Le Queux, the Zeppelin menace and the Invisible Hand’ was published in Critical Survey, with the following abstract: In contrast to William Le Queux’s pre-1914 novels about German spies and invasion, his wartime writing is much less well known. Analysis of a number of his works, predominantly non-fictional,

Pearson's Weekly (London), 28 January 1909, 615
1900s, Aerial theatre, Air defence, Art, Periodicals, Pictures

The Invasion of 1909 — II

In September 1909, rather late in Invasion‘s run, an article appeared in Pearson’s Weekly explaining not only some of the pyrotechnical mechanics behind the spectacle, but also the underlying airpower theory. Because it was not merely an popular entertainment and a commercial one at that, but a response to the question ‘Invasion by aeroplane, is

Illustrated London News, 12 June 1909, 7
1900s, Aerial theatre, Periodicals, Pictures

The Invasion of 1909 — I

This photo, according to the Illustrated London News, shows ‘THE FIRST SHELL DISCHARGED FROM AN AEROPLANE OVER ENGLAND’.((Illustrated London News, 12 June 1909, 7. Another version of the same photo appears in Daily Mirror (London), 5 June 1909, 4.)) But it doesn’t really, because the ‘aeroplane’ almost certaintly wasn’t real but a non-flying mock-up strung

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