View Larger Map It’s Australia Day today, so here’s a map of the land down under, appropriately enough upside down. But the map itself is on a hillside in a land up over — near Compton Chamberlayne in Wiltshire to be precise. It was carved from the chalk downs in 1916 or 1917 by Australian […]
Source: Review of Reviews for Australasia, May 1913, 248 (link; presumably originally from a British publication).
An impression by “J.P.” of the R.A.F. attack by Whitleys on the snow-covered Skoda armament works at Plzen in Czechoslovakia on the night of October 27 [1940]. Source: Flight, 29 December 1940, 536 (link). Perhaps I’m just cynical, but I’m guessing that this night raid on the Skoda works was not nearly as accurate as
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
A bomb plunges through the floors of an office building: its denizens look on in astonishment, cower in terror or fall through the holes left in its wake. This is an illustration from a book published in March 1939 by the Tecton group of architects, Planned A.R.P., which described their plan for bomb-proofing the London
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
THE RAIDERS. A FLIGHT OF SEAPLANES SETTING OFF FOR A NIGHT BOMBING RAID. This one’s got me stumped. It shows a flight of RNAS twin-engined seaplane bombers, but I haven’t been able to find anything with the same profile. Any ideas? Image source: Harry Golding, ed., The Wonder Book of Aircraft for Boys and Girls
A GIANT OF THE AIR. A HANDLEY-PAGE FOUR-ENGINED BIPLANE. A Handley Page V/1500, the Kabul bomber. Below is (I think) a S.E.5a. Image source: Harry Golding, ed., The Wonder Book of Aircraft for Boys and Girls (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1919), frontispiece. Painting by Geoffrey Watson.
