Before 1900

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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) answer with this tool, so let's give it a whirl.

aeroplane, airplane, 1890-2000

Here's a pretty basic one. Blue is aeroplane, red is airplane, the period is 1890-2000. (The smoothing in all these plots is 3 years.) Aeroplane was initially the more popular term, but airplane has predominated since about 1925. Note the peaks during the world wars -- airplane was 5 times more likely to be used in the Second World War than in the 1990s.

But we don't have to use the English corpus: there's also American English and British English. Here's the American version.
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Aeronautical Exhibition, Crystal Palace, 1868

What was probably the world's first aviation exhibition was held at the Crystal Palace, London, between 25 June and 4 July 1868. The 'Aeronautical Exhibition' was organised by the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, which itself had only been set up two years earlier (and was renamed the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1918). Here's what was on show, according to an advertisement on the first page of the Morning Post, 25 June 1868:

The objects for Exhibition comprise Light Engines and Machinery, complete working Aërial Apparatus, Kites for use in Shipwreck, &c., for which large money prizes have been offered by the Shipwrecked Fishermen's Society, the Duke of Sutherland, the Crystal Palace Company, and the Society.

Monsieur de la Marne's great Ballon Captif (from the Paris Exposition) will ascend at intervals daily for the purposes of meteorological observations by Mr. Glaisher, and for affording opportunity to visitors desirous of making ascents. When it is stated that the diameter of the balloon is nearly one hundred and fifty feet, and that the car will carry 14 passengers, some idea of its vastness may be obtained.

Trials of the various aërial machines will be made throughout each day. By these and other arrangements great interest will be excited beyond scientific circles.

There was no charge, beyond the price of admission to the grounds of the Palace itself, where the exhibition had to compete with other entertainments such as an archery meet, a royal gala concert and a farewell acrobatic performance by the Imperial Japanese Troupe, featuring Hamiraiki Sadikichi and Little All Right.
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In late August 1940, as the aerial battle over Britain intensified, the Manchester Guardian published a short, light-hearted account of how the war was affecting a cathedral town in the provinces. For example, a dogfight takes place overhead, and shelterers scatter outside to pick up bullet casings for souvenirs; four of the enemy raiders are shot down within view of the firewatchers on the cathedral roof. The odd thing about this is that the town didn't exist: it was Barchester, the setting of a famous series of novels by Anthony Trollope.

The article's author, B., sketches the part played by Barchester in the last war and the present one:

In the past Barchester has always fought its wars by proxy. The dignitaries of its historic past, the Proudies, the Arabins, and the Grantleys, followed the fortunes of the Army in the newspapers with a highly vociferous but none the less detached regard. Their successors of 1914 have not yet found a chronicler, but they too, though they wrought manfully in the work of caring for the thousands of troops round about and though most of them suffered the loss of a son, regarded wars as highly distressing events which happened somewhere else. The serene security of Barchester itself remained unquestioned and undisturbed even through that ordeal.

To-day it is undisturbed no longer, and if Bishop Proudie and his redoubtable wife and chaplain were living now they would hardly believe themselves to be in the same world. The Bishop would be required to take himself to shelter on an average twice a day. His wife would make his life even more of a burden, for her temper, never very equable, would not survive the strain of continually interrupted meals. Mr. Slope, like his successor of to-day, would be drafted firmly into the A.F.S., be forced to put on a scratchy uniform at a most undignified speed, and then to work under the firm and fluent direction of one of the cathedral vergers. 1

It's very dryly done, and I doubt I would have picked it up except that I've read Framley Parsonage. I'm sure that many more people were familiar with Trollope then than now, but even so some Guardian readers were probably left wondering why they should care about this town they'd never heard of where, which seemed no different than any other, and where nothing much was happening. Perhaps that was the point, that as a nowhere it stood for everywhere:

That is the limit of our excitement so far. [Barchester] is an oasis in a desert of alarm signals which have become so frequent and so uneventful that most of us now carry a book about us to read during the next raid.2

I can't help but wonder what happened to other non-existent British places during the war. Was 221B Baker Street blitzed? Did Totleigh Towers get taken over as a rehabilitation hospital for wounded airmen? Was Avalon tilled by the Women's Land Army? Much research remains to be done.

  1. Manchester Guardian, 28 August 1940, 3. [↩]
  2. Ibid. [↩]

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I was pleasantly surprised when A Fortean in the Archives linked (also here) to my recent post on Boer War airpower for several reasons. Firstly, because it's always nice to be linked to. Secondly, because I've been following A Fortean in the Archives for a while now: the Fortean in question is Mike Dash, a former contributing editor of Fortean Times who has a PhD in British naval history and has written a fine call-to-arms for Fortean historians called Borderlands, which deserves to be more widely read. And thirdly, because of the post itself, which is about the curious episode of Walter Powell, a Conservative MP who disappeared in 1881 when his balloon was swept out from Dorset over the English Channel. This was highly publicised in the press, and for the next week or so reports came in of sightings of Powell's balloon. Many were from fairly plausible locations (Dartmouth, Alderney, northern Spain), but a couple were from Scotland nearly a week later, which is not plausible at all. So in at least some cases, whatever they did see, it wasn't Powell in his balloon. This suggests that expectations were playing a role: having been told by the press that a balloon was lost at sea, people were apt to interpret anything aerial they didn't recognise (a planet, a Reticulan scoutship) as Powell in his balloon.

This is a useful reminder that phantom airship 'scares' were only incidentally due to fear; the real cause was expectation. An even clearer example comes from Canada in 1896. The context was the attempt by S. A. Andrée, a Swedish engineer, to reach the North Pole by air. His plan was to launch in a balloon from Danskøya, an island near Spitsbergen, and drift north with the wind. After reaching the pole, the balloon would eventually land in Canada or Russia. The Swedish and international press covered the preparations for the voyage in some detail. On 30 June, the balloon was inflated, and Andrée and his two companions announced their intention to start for the pole when the wind was favourable.

The very next day, some people in Winnipeg saw a balloon they identified as Andrée's, far off in the distance, which excited some comment in the press. More interestingly, on 3 July, the chief of the Kispiox people and a group of trappers saw something balloon-like, brightly-lit and travelling north while at Blackwater Lake in British Columbia. Not far away, on the Skeena river, an Aboriginal boy saw something very similar on the same date. Both of these reports were relayed through a local Indian Affairs agent, who had warned the locals that they were 'liable' to see Andrée's balloon travelling north over the next month, and presumably accepted the sightings as being reliable.

And so they did, or rather 'did', because Andrée's balloon never left the ground. The wind at Danskøya kept blowing steadily south, and the expedition was put off until the following year. Free ballooning was not at all common in the 1890s, and it's unlikely that anyone would have tried it over the wilds of British Columbia. So there was nothing to see along the Skeena, yet something was seen, precisely because something was expected.

The Andrée expedition did set off in 1897, on 11 July, but the balloon crashed into pack ice after only two days and 300 miles. Andrée and his companions tried to return on foot, but perished before reaching safety. Their fate was unknown until 1930. It will come as no surprise that more phantom sightings of Andrée's balloon were reported from Canada: this time from Rivers Inlet, Kamlooms [edit: more likely Kamloops], Victoria, Goldstream, Douglas, Winnipeg, Rossland, Souris and Honora. Most spectacularly, thousands of people in Vancouver saw 'a very bright red star surrounded by a luminous halo' to the south for a quarter of hour on 13 August, which again was identified with the now-wrecked Andrée balloon. With mystery aircraft, expectation is everything.

Source: Robert E. Bartholomew and George S. Howard, UFOs & Alien Contact: Two Centuries of Mystery (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998), chapter 3.

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Roberts' men crossing the Zand

The Boer War of 1899-1902 doesn't often appear in airpower history. This may have something to do with the fact that it took place before the invention of the aeroplane, which I suppose is reasonable. But there are still interesting and even important connections and influences to be traced. Here are a baker's half-dozen.
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Military History Carnival #23 has been posted at The Edge of the American West and H-War. My eye was immediately drawn to a post (more of an article, really) on the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom at Sparta: Journal of Ancient Spartan and Greek History. This was a remnant of Alexander the Great's conquests in central Asia in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, which was mostly Hellenistic in culture but also incorporated local influences. I've always found the Greco-Bactrians fascinating; one day I'll have to learn more about them.

I neglected to take note of last month's Military History Carnival 22 at Thompson-Werk. I recommend The Edge of the American West's own post on the wit and wisdom of Richard M. Nixon (though for genuine wit and and perhaps wisdom, he's not a patch on Australia's own Paul J. Keating).

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

A couple of interesting posts at The Russian Front suggest that the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 should be thought of as a World War Zero, or alternatively that the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 should be. It's often useful to play around with the names we give to historical events and phenomena, because it reminds us that they are just names. And this is an old game for historians (as Dave Stone notes) -- the Seven Years' War is sometimes considered to be the first world war (if not the First World War). But I'm not sure in what sense the Russo-Japanese and Russo-Turkish wars qualify as world wars. Shouldn't the primary determinant of this be that they were fought on a world scale? Even the epic, doomed voyage of the Baltic fleet to Tsushima isn't enough to make the Russo-Japanese War a world war, as all the actual fighting was localised to a relatively small region in Manchuria (if you set aside a few potshots at British trawlers).

But in his post, John Steinberg does give a list of reasons for his argument regarding the Russo-Japanese War (which comes out of research for a two-volume work he co-edited entitled The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero). It seems to me that most of them are not actually about geographical extent but rather other sorts of scale -- of battles, of casualties, of finance, and so on. That is, in Steinberg's formulation the Russo-Japanese War sounds something like an approach towards total war, not a world war. If that's the case then I find this statement surprising:

As for the concept of World War Zero, most western military historians continue to view the Russo-Japanese War as a regional conflict rooted in the age of imperialism. Historians in Asia, appear much more respective.

I thought the Russo-Japanese War was well-known among western military historians (if not among contemporary western military staffs) for its bloodiness. Hew Strachan, for example, refers to it quite often (well, on 30 pages out of 1139) in volume I of The First World War. It's also a common element in diplomatic histories of the war's origins, for Russia's defeat had a tremendous impact on the strategic calculations of all the other Great Powers. So it seems to me that western historians are quite comfortable in seeing the Russo-Japanese War as a step along the road to total war and/or to the First World War in several respects. I think I must be missing something here.

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On 22 August 1849, the Republic of San Marco surrendered to Austria. The Republic was formed after a revolt in Venice against Austrian rule in March 1848. The Austrians eventually besieged Venice, leading to starvation and outbreaks of cholera in the city. During this siege, they launched the first air raids in history, by unmanned balloons which floated over Venice carrying bombs. The British press didn't take any notice of this at the time, but the following account appeared in the Morning Chronicle a week after the surrender:

The Soldaten Freund publishes a letter from the artillery officer Uchatius, who first proposed to subdue Venice by ballooning. From this it appears that the operations were suspended for want of a proper vessel exclusively adapted for this mode of warfare, as it became evident, after a few experiments had been made, that, as the wind blows nine times out of ten from the sea, the balloon inflation must be conducted on board ship; and this was the case on July the 15th, the occasion alluded to in a former letter, when two balloons armed with shrapnels ascended from the deck of the Volcano war steamer, and attained a distance of 3,500 fathoms in the direction of Venice; and exactly at the moment calculated upon, i. e., at the expiration of twenty-three minutes, the explosion took place. The captain of the English brig Frolic, and other persons then at Venice, testify to the extreme terror and the morale effect produced on the inhabitants.

A stop was put to further exhibitions of this kind by the necessity of the Vulcan going into docks to undergo repairs, which the writer regrets the more, as the currents of wind were for a long time favourable to his schemes. One thing is established beyond all doubt (he adds), viz., that bombs and other projectiles can be thrown from balloons at a distance of 5,000 fathoms, always provided the wind be favourable. 1

Some comments. It's hard to find reliable information on these attacks. The best account I've seen is by Lee Kennett and he's not sure how many balloons were released, saying that the largest number he has seen is two hundred.2 This doesn't fit well with the Morning Chronicle article, which seems to suggest that only two balloon bombs were ever launched. This is supposedly based on a letter written by the inventor of the balloon bombs, Franz von Uchatius, so if it's accurate should be preferred over secondary sources.3

But whether the number was two or two hundred, it doesn't seem like the balloon bombs had much effect on the course of the siege, which went on for another five weeks -- despite the reference made in the Morning Chronicle to 'the extreme terror and the morale effect produced on the inhabitants'. That was clearly what was intended, as the bombs were released (or maybe detonated) by a timer, and couldn't possibly hit specified targets from a balloon drifting above the city.4 More importantly, the bombs used were filled with shrapnel, which isn't much use for anything but killing and maiming people. So there were few qualms on the part of the Austrians about targeting and killing civilians. Which they went on to do with presumably much greater efficiency when they later bombarded the city with more conventional artillery, averaging a thousand shells a day.5

Finally, the air raids of 1849 seem to have had as little impact on the wider world (at least the English-speaking part of it) as they did on Venice. As noted above, there was very little notice taken in the British press, and I've come across only one meager reference to Venice in books published before 1914 (and that in a book translated from the German, written by the German military balloonist Hermann Moedebeck). So it doesn't seem like they inspired anyone to find a better way to bomb cities from the air; that was an idea which had to be invented all over again. Which it was, of course, and Venice's next air raid was on 24 May 1915.

  1. Morning Chronicle, 29 August 1849, 5. [↩]
  2. Lee Kennett, A History of Strategic Bombing (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1982), 6. [↩]
  3. Kennett does state that two bombs were used in the first armed test, but that this was carried out on 12 July, with another 'series' of tests on 15 July. [↩]
  4. Which is not to say they were just released at random; the balloon-bombardiers had to take windspeed into account when calculating how long to set the timer for, so that it would go off over Venice -- though the wind could then change direction after launch, of course. [↩]
  5. Lawrence Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 1815-1914 (London: Routledge, 2001), 47. [↩]

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The Battle of Copenhagen, 1801

The first bombers didn't fly but sailed: they were warships known as bomb vessels, which mounted heavy mortars firing explosive shells. These could be used in naval battles, but weren't very accurate and so were usually used to attack targets on land, including cities. The French navy used bomb vessels to bombard Genoa in 1684, which according to N. A. M. Rodger was 'a demonstration of terrorism which had horrified Europe and gone far to isolate France'.1 The Royal Navy developed the idea further (putting the mortars on turntables to make them easier to aim, sometimes replacing the mortars with rocket launchers) and used them against Copenhagen in 1807.

Mats Fridlund is doing some very interesting work tying together the bombing of cities across the ages and the technologies used in their defence, from Copenhagen to 9/11 and after, water buckets gas masks, bomb shelters and bollards. He sees these as aspects of something he calls terrormindedness, the way that 'terror becomes incorporated into citizens' everyday lives', precisely by way of those defensive technologies. There's definitely something in that, though I would add that processes such as evacuation were also important.

Image: The Battle of Copenhagen, 2 April 1801 by Nicholas Pocock (Wikipedia) -- the British only threatened to bombard that time, but I suspect it looked much the same in 1807.

  1. N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815 (London: Penguin, 2004), 155. [↩]

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Perhaps the first mass outbreak of mystery aircraft sightings took place in 1892 in Russian-occupied Poland, near the German border. The Manchester Guardian reported on 26 March that a 'large balloon coming from the German frontier appeared about the fortress of Kovno'. The Russian defenders fired at it, but it returned safely over the border.1 On 7 March, something similar had been seen near Dombrowa:

The balloon was coming from the south-west, and following a north-easterly direction along the Ivangorod-Dombrowa Railway, and this in spite of the fact that a north-east wind was blowing. The balloon disappeared behind the clouds, but reappeared about forty-five minutes later with a light burning (it was then half-past six in the evening), and following a course directly opposed to the former one. It is presumed that the balloon must have been provided with a highly perfected steering apparatus.2

A few days later came further reports: sightings 'German balloons' are now said to be 'becoming frequent'. On 22 March a balloon was seen over a railway station at Pronshk[ol?], near Warsaw; the fortress of Novogeorgievsk; and the town of Kelets. The following day, people in Warsaw saw 'a balloon over the city casting rays of light from an electric apparatus'. It stayed visible in the same place until 1am, when it moved to the west. A balloon 'projecting powerful electric search lights over a large extent of country' was seen in areas (presumably) near the Silesian border, towards evening or at night, apparently remaining motionless at a 'great height for as long as forty minutes'.3

Clearly the Russians believed they were seeing German balloons. The Russian military fired upon one; and the New York Times reported that the Russian government intended to make a formal protest to Germany about the supposed overflights, citing 'a breach of the military laws'.4 The Manchester Guardian suggested (on what basis, I don't know) that 'both the French and German military authorities are in possession of some sort of apparatus for steering balloons'.1 But we know now that this was not true. All anybody had were the usual static observation balloons, which were certainly not capable of the movement seen over Russian Poland.

So what was going on here? This was early on in the Russo-German antagonism. The Reinsurance Treaty between the two empires lapsed in 1890, and Russia was drawing closer to France. (The Franco-Russian treaty was drafted in August 1892.) Russian troops were pouring into Poland, whether for the annual exercises or some other reason was not clear. (Germans reportedly feared an attack; the Russian foreign minister had to assure the German ambassador that the mobilisation was only precautionary.) Russia itself was still suffering from a terrible famine after a crop failure in 1891, which had claimed the lives of several hundred thousand people over the winter.

So the situation in Russia was unsettled. The phantom balloons were thought to be piloted by German spies, and there is evidence that Russian authorities were worried about espionage, just as in Britain in 1909. For example, a Russian commander is reported to have to demanded permission to expel civilians from the border areas, 90% of whom were Jews, 'who are regarded by the Russian authorities as certain to be friendly to an invading force, and as already acting as spies for the Germans'.3 This while Jews were being ejected from St Petersburg for the Pale of Settlement. Russians felt threatened by enemies within and without.

So in my usual way I'm suggesting that fears of war, of a technologically advanced enemy and a treacherous civilian minority combined to cause a phantom balloon panic, an early episode in the Scareship Age. Russians projected their fears onto the night sky. As for what actually triggered the sightings, Venus seems a likely candidate, as it was very bright and highly visible low in the western sky after sunset at this time. That can't explain all the sightings (it had set long before 1am, for example), but it's undoubtedly responsible for some of them.

  1. Manchester Guardian, 26 March 1892, p. 8. [↩] [↩]
  2. Ibid. [↩]
  3. Ibid., 31 March 1892, p. 8. [↩] [↩]
  4. New York Times, 30 March 1892, p. 5. See also ibid., 26 March 1892, p. 3. [↩]