1920s

Bystander, 17 August 1938, 277
1920s, 1930s, Aerial theatre, Pictures, Publications

Self-archive: ‘Spectre and spectacle’

After thirty-six (!) months, ‘Spectre and spectacle: mock air raids as aerial theatre in interwar Britain’, my chapter in Michael McCluskey and Luke Seaber, eds., Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, is now available for a free download under green open access (in this case, pre-copy editing). Here’s the abstract: You can […]

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

Queenslander, 8 March 1928, cover
1910s, 1920s, Australia, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics

A miscellany of Australian mystery aircraft, 1903-1940 — II

Continuing this miscellany, on 23 August 1913 the Maitland Daily Mercury published a letter from the Reverend G. W. Payne reporting that he, his wife, and a Mr and Mrs Preston had seen ‘an aeroplane with searchlight hovering fairly high over Newcastle and the Hunter Valley‘.1 This was just before 4am on 22 August 1913,

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