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. […]
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
The ‘flight’ — The machine reached the edge of the slope, shot out a few yards into the air with the impetus it had acquired, and then dropped with a crash onto the rocks.1 I am very nearly done with N. R. Gordon, who built at least five completely unsuccessful flying machines over a period
Alexander Rose. Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men’s Epic Duel to Rule the World. New York: Random House, 2020. The two men of the title both led a great aviation enterprise. Both dreamed of spanning the world with their passenger aircraft. Both struggled at times, and prospered at others. But one was
N. R. Gordon was behind the Chowder Bay flying machine, but who was N. R. Gordon? His full name was Newton Roberts Gordon, and he emigrated from Britain in 1882.1 Although he described himself on a 1900 patent application as an ‘engineer’, and worked at one point as a mining engineer, it’s not clear if
On Wednesday, 27 May 2020, I was privileged to give a seminar to the Contemporary Histories Research Group at Deakin University on my aerial theatre research — via Zoom, as is the current fashion. I really enjoyed giving it, and I think it was a great success (and thanks to everyone who listened in and
So, who was behind the Chowder Bay flying machine? In November 1894, the month before the ill-fated flight attempt, stories appeared in the Sydney press about what sounds like a very similar ‘flying machine’ being exhibited in a vacant lot behind the Lyceum Theatre. Given the reported plans for a launch over Sydney Harbour, it’s
This photograph shows a steam-powered ‘flying machine’ which was to make the world’s first heavier-than-air flight from the cliffs at Chowder Bay, Sydney Harbour, Boxing Day (26 December), 1894. Spoiler: it didn’t. The attempt was widely advertised, even in the other colonies: the Brisbane Week reported that
This is the story of the world’s first aerial combat. It is not a true story. It is 30 September, 1870. Revolutionary Paris is under siege by Prussian forces. But it has a secret weapon: Nadar. Nadar is famed as a photographer, a writer, and—more importantly here—an aeronaut. He has taken the lead in organising
Critical Survey has just published an early access version of my peer-reviewed article ‘William Le Queux, the Zeppelin menace and the Invisible Hand’ — that’s right, no subtitle! — here. Here’s the abstract: In contrast to William Le Queux’s pre-1914 novels about German spies and invasion, his wartime writing is much less well known. Analysis
