I recently had the somewhat guilty pleasure of watching Flood, a film (from a novel) about the sudden devastation of London by a massive storm surge — predicted by a scientist who had long been dismissed as a crank — which swamps the Thames Barrier, submerges most of the city’s landmarks, kills a couple of […]
Here’s a treat for (some of) you: the very first aerial warfare movie ever made, in its entirety! Most commonly known as The Airship Destroyer (but sometimes called Battle in the Clouds or The Aerial Torpedo), it’s less than 10 minutes long and was produced in 1909 by Charles Urban, an American pioneer of cinematic
And marble, and granite, and wood … I wrote recently that every town in Australia seems to have a war memorial. Here are some examples, photos I took over a three day period without going too far out of my way. This post is image-heavy, but everyone has broadband now don’t they?
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
[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
A. Just about all the time, it seems, if it’s Britain: Lord Palmerston in 1845, on the coming of the steam ship: … the Channel is no longer a barrier. Steam navigation has rendered that which was before impassable by a military force nothing more than a river passable by a steam bridge.Quoted in I.
In his comment on my previous post, Alex mentions the “bolt from the blue” strategy as possibly related to the knock-out blow that is my current obsession (and he’s right, in my opinion). My reply started to get long, so I decided to turn it into a post instead … In Edwardian debates about the
A flying machine is an aeroplane (qv). A dirigible balloon (or just dirigible) is an airship (qv). An aeroplane is the wing of a flying machine (qv). Airship collectively describes both flying machines and dirigible balloons (qqv). Get it? (Got it.) Good! Seriously, I’m glad the meanings of these words were rationalised within a few
Can any better sport or amusement be imagined that could be obtained with an airship of the Zodiac type, endowed with a speed of 40 miles an hour for four hours, or 20 miles an hour for eight times this period, and so on in cubic proportion? Always able to reach a desired goal, but
