1900s

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MYSTERY OF THE SKY. AIRSHIP SEEN AT CARDIFF TO-DAY / Globe, 19 May 1909, 4

Only the Globe carries (p. 4) phantom airship stories today (out of my sample, at least), but it has two, and they head the column rather being buried down the page. The first is from Cardiff in Wales, where a number of dock workers saw an airship in the early hours of this morning, and were willing to have their names included in this 'official' statement by signalman Robert Westlake:

At 1.15 this morning (19 May), while attending to my duty signalling trains at the King's Junction, Queen Alexandra Dock, I was startled by a weird object flying in the air. In appearance it represented a boat of cigar shape, making a whizzing noise. It was lit up by two lights, which could be plainly seen. It was travelling at a great rate, and was elevated at a distance of half a mile, making for the eastward. There were many men working at the time loading the s.s. Arndale, and the airship was seen by most of them. Messrs. W. Morrison (pointsman), C. Harwood (traffic foreman), W. John, C. Hayman, J. Rogers, and C. Bray (coal tippers), and the third mate of the Arndale all testified to the facts recorded above.

The airship came from the direction of Newport, took a curve over the docks, and passed over the Channel towards Weston, being clearly in view for a minute or two. It could, it is stated, have been seen longer, but that the lights on board were suddenly extinguished.

Other workmen confirmed Westlake's account. One said that 'The night was clear, though there was no moon, and the airship could be distinctly seen, and the whizzing of its motor was heard by us all'.

The second story is not from Britain at all, but from Norway. The Norwegian Shipping Gazette has published an account by Captain Egenes of the steamer St. Olaf. On the night of 14 May, in the eastern part of the North Sea (i.e. not close to Britain), 'an airship, sailing at low altitude, approached his vessel and directed a searchlight upon the decks'. It then moved off and did the same to another, unnamed steamer. The Shipping Gazette suggests that the airship is carried by day on board one of the German warships conducting maneuvers in the North Sea.

So yesterday's trend of sightings outside the original focus in East Anglia has continued. Both of these new incidents seem very well attested; both are widely separated geographically (although, of course, widely separated in time, too). A searchlight shone onto a ship's deck seems fairly unambiguous; the number of witnesses at Cardiff is impressive. Do Norwegian sea captains worry about the Zeppelin menace? Do Welsh dock workers often have collective delusions?
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The phantom airship stories are starting to spread politically and geographically. So far only conservative newspapers have taken much interest in the 'fly-by-night', and so far it has only been seen in Norfolk and nearby areas. Both of these limitations make some sense: national defence is a particular concern of conservatives, and a single airship might conceivably have been the cause of all the sightings in the course of a few weeks' worth of test flights from a nearby secret base. But now the Liberal Manchester Guardian has its first report (p. 7) on the mystery airship, and it's from Belfast! The full text of the telegram from Belfast is as follows:

Wonderment but feebly expressed the feelings of over a score of Belfast people residing in different districts, who just after dusk last night witnessed the manœuvring of a strange aerial visitor as it passed over the southern suburbs of the Irish commercial capital, and which, high in the heavens, sped swiftly in a north-easterly direction towards the Irish Sea. The accounts of those whose attention was attracted to the strange visitant substantially agree as regards the main incidents of the mysterious occurrence.

Probably between two and three thousand feet high, a brilliant moving light was first observed about ten o'clock in the direction of Collin Mountain. It moved speedily onwards, occasionally dipping towards the ground, but always keeping at a high altitude. As the remarkable visitor came more directly over Belfast it was just possible in the gloom to distinguish a cigar-shaped object leaving no doubt in the minds of the observer that the strange spectre was an airship. That someone was on board the occasional flashing of a red light conclusively proved. All the spectators are agreed as to the brilliant headlight of the visitor.

When fairly off the residential parks off Malone Road, it slackened speed, sailing slowly but steadily. Then, rising majestically, it disappeared in the darkened eastern sky.

So what are we to make of this? Belfast is a long way from East Anglia; it's stretching credulity that the same airship could have flown from one place to the other without being seen. (Nobody has even flown the English Channel yet, let alone the Irish Sea.) So are two separate inventors making test flights? Two separate German warships launching airships on reconnaissance flights? One of each? Something else entirely?

The Manchester Guardian's London correspondent also discusses (p. 6) the mystery (though was evidently unaware of the Belfast sighting at the time of writing). They think that, although there has been some hoaxing going on ('One or two messages have been crude impostures' -- I'm not sure what this refers to, unless it is the strange object found at Clacton), the whole affair is 'too stupid to be only a hoax when it is done so woodenly'. And 'so many quite uncomical people like doctors and lawyers and so forth' have seen or heard something strange that there is a feeling that 'flight must be going on'. But the correspondent doubts the popular theory that some inventor is testing their airship at night to avoid detection. Not that secretive inventors are improbable -- the Wright brothers, who visited London recently, prove otherwise -- but that it is 'incredible that any man can be successfully using an airship by night'. (Again, no aviator has successfully carried out a night flight.) 'No, it really will not do as an explanation' -- but no alternative is offered.

There was also some parliamentary scareship activity yesterday. After the War Minister, Richard Haldane, was questioned by a Conservative MP on German funding for airships and whether Britain intends to follow suit, a Liberal backbencher, Horatio Myer (Lambeth North), asked Haldane the following:

Will the right hon. Gentleman, in any Report he may circulate, tell us about a certain dirigible supposed to be hovering about our coast?

That's from the online Hansard. According to the report in The Times today (p. 7), Myer's question was followed by laughter. Haldane gave no answer, which means that even though Haldane and Myer are from the same party, this is not a Dorothy Dixer (to use an Australian anachronism). Perhaps it was intended to make the preceding questions on airship funding look ridiculous by association?

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AERIAL MYSTERY. FLIGHTS OF MIDNIGHT AIRSHIP / Standard, 17 May 1909, 9.

For the first time, the Standard heads a column with the 'midnight airship' story today (p. 9). The story contains a brief summary of the sightings to date, along with a map of their locations. The first sighting was back on 23 March, made by a Peterborough police constable named Kettle. He saw a 'strange, cigar-shaped craft passing over the city' at about 5am. His friends were sceptical, but two nights later Mr Banyard and Mrs Day both independently saw something similar over the nearby town of March. Since then 'scores' of people in East Anglia have seen the 'mysterious visitant'. Here's the map:
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The Standard again has an article (p. 8) on the 'mysterious airship', though this time the information is taken from today's Daily Express. The Berlin correspondent of that paper has been making inquiries there, and reports that

German expert opinion is unanimous in believing that the airship ascends from some German warship in the North Sea, upon which it lands again after each of its flights.

The German navy is, as it happens, conducting exercises in the North Sea, and relatively small airships of the Gross or Parseval types could possibly be inflated and launched from a warship. But although the German navy is known to have ordered these smaller airships, it's unclear whether it actually has any yet.

The Norfolk News has a report on the activity of the phantom airship, or as the headline on page 15 has it, the 'phanton airship'. Disappointingly, although the Norfolk News is bang in the middle of scareship territory, it seems to be relying on the reports of London newspapers (again, the Daily Express). Accounts from three eyewitnesses are given. The first is the brother-in-law of Herbert Neaverson, a 'prominent Peterborough tradesman', who has made a statement to the War Office in London. He heard 'a swishing sound overhead and the throbbing of a motor' early in the morning at his home in Peakirk. He looked up and saw a 'peculiar light' coming from the direction of the sea. At Kingscliff, Great Clacton, one Mr Egerton Free saw 'an oblong machine hovering quite near my home' at dusk, ten days ago. It was 'stationary' for a few minutes and then disappeared in the direction of Frinton. Finally, Miss H. M. Bonville of Southend-on-Sea saw the 'fly by night' last Sunday, at about 11.20pm. Her description is similar to that of Free: it was 'a large, black object, oblong in shape'. Initially stationary, it suddenly rose in the air and headed in the direction of London, briefly showing 'a couple of very brilliant lights'.

The Norfolk News also adds that

A search for the airship's home is being undertaken by motorists and others in all parts of East Anglia.

If the warship theory is correct, then they won't find anything, of course. But this amateur sleuthing connects the phantom airship scare with the spy mania also prevalent at this time. Indeed, The Times carries several letters relating to the Legion of Frontiersmen, an unofficial patriotic organisation which at times indulges in the sport of spyhunting. More intriguingly, immediately following its 'mysterious airship' article, the Standard has a report of 'several suspicious movements of strangers' near an Admiralty telegraph station at Humberstone, near Grimsby (and so also on the east coast), leading to 'elaborate precautions'.

One of the staff of the station, it is stated [by a correspondent], was recently attacked and rendered unconscious by two men who sprang on him from behind and afterwards escaped [...] locally there appears to be the impression that the outrage was the work of foreign spies bent on obtaining an entrance to the room where the code-book is kept.

The current success of Major Guy du Maurier's play An Englishman's Home, about an invasion of England by 'Nearland', probably doesn't do much to sooth fears. Today's Southampton Times and Hampshire Express has a puff piece (p. 9) about its upcoming Southampton run ('It should be seen by all -- men and women -- not only for the great and valuable lesson it teaches, but also because it is a powerful, real, and interesting play'): on the first night's performance recruiting officers will be present for the Territorial Army. The Norfolk News also mentions (p. 8) the play: a speaker at a Norwich meeting of the Peace Society objecting to the military's use of 'every means to entrap the young fellows of our country' notes that:

Even whilst we are at this meeting a play is being introduced at our local theatre, the object of which is to show by a very much overdrawn production how needful it is to be prepared against an enemy that does not exist.

On the other hand, the Globe relates (p. 2) an amusing anecdote given by Major Baden Baden-Powell (brother of B-P, and an expert in military ballooning, as it happens) at the annual dinner of the Iron and Steel Institute. Baden-Powell referred to the 'stories of certain nations being ready to invade these shores, how they had plans laid down, and spies swarming in this country watching details'. He himself asked an officer from a 'certain army' [i.e. Germany's] whether this was true:

The officer told him that that was so, and that they had details of the Eastern counties, every village was marked, the principal landowners and officials were known, and even the postmasters of the villages were recorded. "How did you get it?" he asked, and the officer replied, "We spent 10s. 6d. and bought a Kelly's County Directory" (loud laughter). So much for spies (hear, hear, and laughter).

This shows that not everyone bought into the spy scare. But that the anecdote was worthy of telling and got such a big reaction also suggests that there were plenty who did.

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On page 9 of the London Standard today is a short article entitled 'ELUSIVE AIRSHIP'. Evidently the story is not quite new, for it begins:

The mystery of the elusive airship still continues to attract attention, and the belief is gaining ground that there is some foundation to the various reports. Obviously something has been seen and heard at night in the sky, usually at places in East Anglia, Clacton, Southend, Peterborough, Lincoln, Ipswich, to quote only a few instances.

But this is the first time that the Standard has made mention of this mystery (at least in May), so the writer appears to assume that the reader will be aware of the story from other newspapers. There is a new sighting (or rather hearing) to report, however, at Windsor made by Patrick Alexander, 'the well-known expert on aeronautics, who is not likely to make a mistake'. One night recently -- the date is not given -- he 'heard at night sounds apparently of an airship in motion'. Alexander thought it was the Army airship but this is not thought capable of such a 'bold exploit'. Which is probably true: Baby, the only airship possessed by the government at this time, was not a very robust craft and was not flown much until rebuilt as Beta in 1910. The Standard has another idea:

One "explanation" is that some one owns an airship, and is trying it at night. It is known that there are one or two under secret construction in the country, but the difficulty is, given the relatively short period of darkness, to see how it avoids being detected in the early dawn.

This is not implausible. 1909 was at the dawn of the air age, and many people were trying to build aeroplanes and airships. One of the most successful of the latter were the Willows airships, designed and built by E. T. Willows of Cardiff. He was between airships at this time, however: Willows No. 2 was not to fly until November, and besides Wales is a long way from East Anglia. But who knows, maybe some hardy inventor was testing their contraption over Windsor a few nights ago.

That's the only phantom airship story in today's papers, or rather in the sample of papers I've examined. Although it's only a small article, it is on page 9, in the middle of the paper, which more or less took the place the front page in today's newspapers. So it's not unimportant, either.

What else is going on today? Just below the 'elusive airship' story is another brief article reporting that the Wright brothers have sold 14 of their aeroplanes (first publicly demonstrated in 1908) in Europe: 10 in France, 2 to Austria, 1 to Germany and 1 to Britain. But the Standard is clearly more interested in the lengthy report of its special correspondent in Germany, who has toured shipyards in an effort to ascertain just how many dreadnoughts are under construction there (nine, it looks like). This, of course, is an echo of the great dreadnought panic which took place in March, when there was a violent political and press frenzy over claims that Germany was accelerating its naval construction and so might, conceivably, overtake the Royal Navy at some point. This then raised the prospect of a German invasion of Britain -- or at least it did for Conservative papers like the Standard.

Other newspapers -- again, at least the Conservative ones -- have a similar mix of reports on defence and aviation issues. The London Globe, for example, has articles on the global naval balance (Britain has 53 battleships to Germany's 32), a successful flight by the (singular) Army aeroplane (it flew as far as 1200 feet in one hop, reaching a height of 50 feet), the upcoming Frankfurt aeronautic exhibition (where various German cities will offer prizes to encourage progress), and a statement by Wilbur Wright on the future of aviation (of little use for military purposes at the moment). There's clearly already a discourse going on about the role aircraft will play in war. But so far, however, the 'elusive airship' is not being framed as any sort of threat to the nation; it's merely a curiosity.

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Starting tomorrow, I'm going to try some more post-blogging. It's 100 years since the phantom airship wave of 1909, when mysterious aerial visitors appeared in the night skies over Britain. Or at least, stories about mysterious aerial visitors filled the newspapers of Britain. It's hard to tell from this distance: the only evidence we have about the scareships are the press reports, which could be a problem if you are interested in a possible underlying reality. But then again, since the number of (alleged) phantom airship witnesses is relatively small, the press was the only way most people would have learned that their sky was being invaded by Zeppelins every night. So for them as for us, the stories are the event itself. (The phantom airship scare did not take place, perhaps?)

My sources are a variety of print periodicals: The Times, the Liberal Manchester Guardian (much more Radical than it was later), the Globe and Traveller and the Standard (both from London and both Conservative, or Unionist if you prefer), Saturday Review (Conservative, but not as reactionary as under Lady Houston), Fortnightly Review, Punch, the local weeklies Norfolk News, Eastern Counties Journal, and Norwich, Yarmouth, and Lynn Commercial Gazette (which I'll refer to as the Norfolk News!) and Southampton Times and Hampshire Express, and the specialist weekly Flight. At this time there was no radio and film was a novelty.

Compared with the Sudeten crisis twenty-nine years later, the 1909 airship scare was not as intense nor was it as protracted. It was not a major defence or political crisis. But it was about the first time that the possibility of an aerial threat to Britain was given an extended run in the press, even if that threat was not yet the knock-out blow ...

Further reading: Alfred Gollin, The Impact of Air Power on the British People and their Government, 1909-14 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); David Clarke, 'Scareships over Britain: the airship wave of 1909', Fortean Studies 6 (1999), 39-63; Nigel Watson, 'Airships and invaders. Background to a social panic', Magonia 3 (Spring 1980).

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

A random thought while sitting in a lecture today: if there is (or can be) such a thing as total war, does that imply that total peace is a meaningful concept?

Firstly, what is total war? One definition, drawn from the ubiquitous set of conference proceedings edited by Stig Förster et al (and more directly, from today's lecture notes), goes something like this. Total war consists of:

  1. total aims: e.g. the destruction of an enemy nation
  2. total methods: e.g. bombing cities
  3. total mobilisation: e.g. conscription for both the armed forces and for labour
  4. total control: e.g. censorship, dictatorship

More briefly, total war is the subordination of every other consideration (law, custom, morality, etc) to the prosecution of war. Total war is an ideal form of warfare, something which can be approached more or less closely, but which can never actually be fully attained. Well, hopefully not, because that would be bad.

So what would total peace look like? I don't think it can simply be the absence of total war; that's just peace generically. Total peace must be total in some sense.
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I've been reading a curious tome by Robert William Cole, called The Struggle for Empire. It's curious because the empire of the title is the British Empire, or rather the Anglo-Saxon Empire, and the struggle takes place in interstellar space. And because it was published in 1900! It has a good claim to being the first space opera ever written.

The basic plot is as follows. It is the year 2236. The Anglo-Saxon Empire rules, not just the Earth, but the entire Solar System and many stars beyond. Its only rival is Kairet, a planet orbiting Sirius which has a vast empire of its own. The two empires have co-existed uneasily until now, but Sirian settlers on a distant planet called Iosia clash with the Anglo-Saxons who nominally control it. The Anglo-Saxon Empire sees its chance and declares war. It assembles a huge fleet of warships and dispatches it towards Sirius. But deep in interstellar space, it encounters an even bigger Sirian fleet. The Earth forces are shattered, and fall back on the Solar System. Neptune is besieged. A titanic battle at Jupiter leads to the destruction of two of its moons and the scorching of its sky. Anglo-Saxon warships entrenched on the Moon ambush the approaching Sirian fleet, causing severe losses, but cannot prevent the bombardment and destruction of the imperial capital, London. But now an English scientist unveils a new weapon which makes Sirian warships fall from the sky. This decisively alters the course of the war: the Sirian fleet is destroyed, and Earth forces penetrate to Kairet and destroy its capital. The Sirians agree to pay a huge indemnity, and their ships are prohibited from leaving their system. The interstellar war has lasted for five years, and the struggle for empire has turned decisively in favour of the Anglo-Saxons ...
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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Mars map (1962)

Via Bad Astronomy comes news of an update to the Mars component of Google Earth. Most interesting to me are the overlays of historical maps of Mars from the 19th and 20th centuries, including those made by Giovanni Schiaparelli (1890), Percival Lowell (1896) and E. M. Antoniadi (1909). Schiaparelli and Lowell's maps showed the infamous canals of Mars; Antoniadi's more detailed map did not, and is supposed to have finished off the canals as a scientific controversy, at least according to according to Steven J. Dick's brilliant history The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). But from some of my own work I've seen evidence that the canals and the associated question of intelligent life on Mars survived into the 1920s. And now Google Earth shows me this beautiful map made by the US Air Force in 1962. This Mars was festooned with canals, half a century after they had largely been discarded by the scientific community.

A little digging shows why. The map, known as the MEC-1 prototype, was prepared to assist with the upcoming Mariner missions to Mars. E. C. Slipher, late director of the Lowell Observatory (a major centre for planetary research), helped make it. Slipher had got his start under Lowell himself in the late 1900s, and used his mentor's old observations to compile MEC-1. So it's no surprise it has canals, then. Slipher seems to have remained an advocate of the canals right up until his death in 1964. Perhaps fortunately for him, he didn't live to witness Mariner 4's flyby of Mars in 1965, which revealed an apparently dead planet. But if it had not, the USAF would have been well placed to explore the Martian megascale hydraulic system.

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Primary sources

Some more navel-gazingpost-thesis analysis. Above is a plot of the number of primary sources (1908-1941) I cite by date of publication. (Published sources only, excluding newspaper articles -- of which there are a lot -- and government documents. Also, it's not just airpower stuff, though it mostly is.) I actually have no idea if it's a lot or not, and I'm sure there are some selection effects in there. But, although I've certainly not attempted any sort of statistical analysis (nor will I!), I think some features of the plot reflect real features of the airpower literature of period, at least as it relates to the bombing of civilians.

Firstly, there's a substantial increase in the number of sources in the 1930s, particularly from 1934 when there is a big peak. I argue in the thesis that this was only partly and indirectly due to the obvious reason (the arrival of Hitler in 1933). The more important reason was the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva, which ran between 1932 and 1934 (actually it went longer, but was dead in the water when Germany walked out). This roused airpower writers -- whether pro- or anti-disarmament -- to action, and gave them a reason to explain to the public the effects of bombing on cities. The slight rise from the late 1920s is also due to the conference, I think, or rather the optimistic Locarno-era preparations for it. The big peak in 1927 is a bit odd, though. Let's call that an outlier.

The other two noticeable peaks are in 1909 and 1938. The first was very early in the public's awareness of flight. That really started in 1908, but the possible defence implications came to the fore in 1909 -- the founding of the Aerial League of the British Empire, the first phantom airship panic, the publication of the first serious books on the topic. And of course the dreadnought panic -- it was a peak year for Anglo-German rivalry. The 1938 peak was the culmination of the building concern over the previous decade. What the plot doesn't show is that, unlike previous years, it was largely sceptical, based on evidence from the Spanish Civil War. The Sudeten crisis that September showed that the fear of the knock-out blow still had a strong grip on the public and the press. But afterwards there's a sharp decline in interest, which I maintain is real.

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