1920s

1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Before 1900, Blogging, tweeting and podcasting, Books, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Publications, Tools and methods

A little history of the Scareship Age

A couple of months ago, Alun Salt did a very nice thing for me: he unexpectedly assembled some of the posts I’ve written here about phantom airships into an e-book. Using that as the basis, I’ve had a go at learning how to do e-books myself. (Alun recommended using Jutoh, an e-book project manager, and

1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Australia, Periodicals, Publications

Double trouble

I have an article in the May 2011 issue of Flightpath, an Australian warbirds magazine. It’s on one of my pet interests, the fear of the commercial bomber between the wars. James Kightly, who will be familiar to regular commenters here as JDK, contributes a complementary look at the reality of transport-bomber conversions. There are

1920s, Australia, Books, Periodicals

Happy birthday, RAAF

The Royal Australian Air Force turns 90 today. It was officially formed as an independent service out of the old Australian Flying Corps on 31 March 1921 (making it three years less one day younger than the Royal Air Force). At first it was just the Australian Air Force: it didn’t get the Royal prefix

1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Tools and methods, Words

Airminded: the ngram

Following Ross’ suggestion I’ve plugged airminded itself into the Google Ngram Viewer (for British English over 1920-2000 with a smoothing of 3). The word wasn’t used until c. 1925 and grew in popularity until the end of the Second World War. It then began its long descent. Around 1960 its heyday was definitely over and

1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Before 1900, Books, Periodicals, Plots and tables, Tools and methods, Words

The rise and fall and rise and fall of the autogyro

Finally, something to justify the existence of the Internet. The Google Ngram Viewer takes the corpus of words formed by the Google Books dataset (i.e. books, journals, magazines, but not newspapers) and lets you plot the changes in frequency of selected ones over time. There are all sorts of interesting questions you could (in principle)

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