A question about the phantom airship scares which has bothered me for a while is, how accurate are the press reports of people seeing something strange in the sky? That is, did people actually see something strange in the sky, or were the press reports made up or otherwise distorted? There is some evidence from […]
XVIII Military History Carnival is up at Chronologi Cogitationes. This month I’m picking a post from a new blog, Wacht Am Tyne, on the centenary of the first flight (powered, controlled, heavier-than-air) in Britain, which was achieved by Samuel Franklin Cody on 16 October 1908. (I had a photo of British Army Aeroplane No. 1a
Last year I gave a lecture where I said that Things to Come, the 1936 Alexander Korda production of H. G. Wells’ novel The Shape of Things to Come, was not a very popular film, that not many people would have seen it. I had to retract that, but I then said that I stand
The short answer is, almost certainly not, but more of that in a moment. One of the nice things about blogging is that people send me emails on topics which they think may interest me. Recently I received scans of a photograph from Peter Edwards, who has the original glass plates. They’re from a box
1908 was the year that aviation, and its possible consequences, burst into British consciousness. In July, the British press reported on a long-duration flight over Germany of the Zeppelin LZ4, which proved that controlled lighter than air flight was practical, and in August, on the flights in France of Wilbur Wright, which very publicly proved
This is the talk I gave at Earth Sciences back in May. It’s long and picture heavy and much of it will be be familiar to regular readers, but some people expressed some interest in it so here it is. I’ve lightly edited it, mainly to correct typos in my written copy. I’ve put in
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Nick at Mercurius Politicus has an excellent post up on the The Mowing-devil, an English pamphlet from 1678 which is famous among forteans because it contains an illustration of something that looks a lot like a crop circle, three centuries before the term was coined. If it is an account
A poster from the 1935 general election, showing, quite literally, the shadow of the bomber. The National Government was a coalition comprising the Conservatives and two splinter parties, National Labour and the Liberal Nationals. With Stanley Baldwin at its head, the National Government went to the people on a platform of peace and prosperity. The
I was remiss in not mentioning the 12th Military History Carnival at Thoughts on Military History when it took place last month. My eye was drawn to ExecutedToday.com’s post about Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant and Peter Handcock, the Australian soldiers executed in 1902 for killing Boer prisoners-of-war. There’s still a debate about whether Kitchener issued an
I’ve finally gotten around to adding Montagu of Beaulieu (pronounced ‘Bewley’, apparently) to my irregular series of biographies of airpower propagandists. He’s an important, but somewhat neglected figure, some of whose papers I’ve examined (those held at King’s College London). He helped found the Air League of the British Empire in 1909, and devised the
