1910s

1910s, 1930s, 1940s, Words

A tiny revelation

This post is about a revelation I had a while back, which those of you with a firmer grasp of the English language than I will think is nothing at all new (and you’re right!) The thing is that I’d always been puzzled by the word barrage. This gets used a lot by journalists: ‘the […]

1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Books, Periodicals

The Douhet dilemma

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] I haven’t written much about General Giulio Douhet, the Italian prophet of airpower whose name is — almost — synonymous with strategic bombing. His 1921 (revised edition, 1927) book Il dominio dell’aria (usually translated as The Command of the Air) is one of the most definitive expressions of airpower extremism

1910s, Maps, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Words

Air-port ’13

The earliest cite for the word ‘airport’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1919: 1919 Aerial Age Weekly 14 Apr. 235/1 There is being established at Atlantic City the first ‘air port’ ever established, the purposes of which are..to provide a municipal aviation field,..to supply an air port for trans-Atlantic liners, whether of the

1910s, 1930s, 1940s, Australia, Family history

Sons of empire

This week, I was looking at the service records of some other family members who served in the world wars — those that have been digitised anyway — and as today is ‘Straya Day,1 it seems appropriate to write a little about them. Tags: bonza; strewth; grouse; sorry, ocker, the Fokker’s chocker. [↩]

1900s, 1910s, Before 1900, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Rumours

The Scareship Age

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

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