Before 1900

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AIRSHIP MYSTERY. FLIGHT BY NIGHT OVER CARDIFF / Manchester Guardian, 20 May 1909, 7

The Globe has a slew of new reports from last night (p. 7), from Norwich, Wroxham, Sprowston, Catton and Tesburgh in East Anglia, Pontypool in Wales (by workers at a forge, an architect and two postal workers), and Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) in Ireland. Some saw searchlights, some heard a 'whizzing' sound, some saw a cigar shape. But yesterday's story of the airship seen at Cardiff, is today the main scareship story in both the Standard and the Manchester Guardian, as well as (again) the Globe. It's clear that the mystery airships have moved from a minor curiosity to, if not big news, exactly, then at least middling news. The Globe has nearly a whole column on them, the Standard has another column, and the Manchester Guardian -- which has mostly ignored the story up until now -- has two full columns (see headlines above), a comment from its London correspondent and a leading article on 'The mysterious airship'. The only holdout in my sample is the stuffy old Times.

The Cardiff docks story is the lead. The statement of the signalman Charles Westlake is repeated, and further supporting statements from the other dock workers given. The Manchester Guardian's correspondent reports a rumour (p. 7) that residents of the Cathays district of Cardiff saw an airship on Tuesday night (i.e. the evening before the dock incident) but has not been able to verify this. It is also pointed out that locals are familiar with the appearance of airships, because one was built and flown nearby several years ago. This would be Willows No. 1; but it seems that Willows is not responsible for the mystery airship. At least, 'a Cardiff man, who has made a study of aerial navigation for many years past, and whose son is at present in London exhibiting a dirigible airship' is interviewed as well, without any connection being made between the two. But this must be Joseph Thompson Willows and his son Ernest Thompson Willows, who worked together on airships, though it is the son who is mostly remembered for this nowadays. In the opinion of Willows père, the airship at Cardiff was most likely launched from a ship in the Bristol Channel or off the south coast. He doesn't say anything about who would be doing this, or why, but other locals seem to have their suspicions:

Naturally enough, tremendous interest has been manifested throughout the district, and in some quarters a feeling of unrest has been created, because it is generally recognised that in the event of invasion the Welsh coal ports would represent a vital spot of enormous strategical importance.

But there's an even more sensational airship story from Cardiff. In fact, it is 'of so strange a character as to be difficult of credence', according to the Standard (p. 10). On the same night as the dockyard sighting, a travelling Punch-and-Judy salesman by the name of Lethbridge was walking back home from Senghenydd to Cardiff over Caerphilly Mountain. At about 11pm he saw an airship which had landed on the mountain, and its crew. At least, that seems to be the implication of the interview he gave to the Cardiff Evening Express yesterday.
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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Mars map (1962)

Via Bad Astronomy comes news of an update to the Mars component of Google Earth. Most interesting to me are the overlays of historical maps of Mars from the 19th and 20th centuries, including those made by Giovanni Schiaparelli (1890), Percival Lowell (1896) and E. M. Antoniadi (1909). Schiaparelli and Lowell's maps showed the infamous canals of Mars; Antoniadi's more detailed map did not, and is supposed to have finished off the canals as a scientific controversy, at least according to according to Steven J. Dick's brilliant history The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). But from some of my own work I've seen evidence that the canals and the associated question of intelligent life on Mars survived into the 1920s. And now Google Earth shows me this beautiful map made by the US Air Force in 1962. This Mars was festooned with canals, half a century after they had largely been discarded by the scientific community.

A little digging shows why. The map, known as the MEC-1 prototype, was prepared to assist with the upcoming Mariner missions to Mars. E. C. Slipher, late director of the Lowell Observatory (a major centre for planetary research), helped make it. Slipher had got his start under Lowell himself in the late 1900s, and used his mentor's old observations to compile MEC-1. So it's no surprise it has canals, then. Slipher seems to have remained an advocate of the canals right up until his death in 1964. Perhaps fortunately for him, he didn't live to witness Mariner 4's flyby of Mars in 1965, which revealed an apparently dead planet. But if it had not, the USAF would have been well placed to explore the Martian megascale hydraulic system.

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Venus

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 of the mysterious appearance of a circle in a farmer's field, then it is evidence that crop circles long preceded the activities of circlemakers Doug and Dave, and so are presumably a real, and as yet unexplained, phenomenon.

But Nick's analysis suggests that the anonymous writer of the The Mowing-devil was not presenting an account of a strange but true event, but rather a cautionary tale about class relations in rural England. He concludes that

In short, The Mowing-Devil is probably not the representation of an early crop-circle that enthusiasts want it to be. In focusing on the woodcut, they’ve missed a much more interesting side to the text that tells us something about late seventeenth-century popular politics and religion.

Deleriad, a folklorist, made an interesting comment:

Although your analysis of the narrative is pretty reasonable I think it’s also worthwhile applying Hufford’s notion of the experiential source hypothesis. Put simply, it works on the basis that people explain anomalous experiences within the pre-existing worldview of a particular culture. So for example, encounters which might once have been explained in terms of fairies are nowadays explained in terms of aliens, lights in the sky which were explained as zepplins at the dawn of the 20th century are now explained as UFOs and so on.

Now, I'm aware of David Hufford's work, though mainly by reputation: The Terror That Comes in the Night (1982), a study of old hag folklore in Newfoundland, is a book I've heard much about. Hufford's experiential source hypothesis (ESH) was put forward as an alternative to the prevailing cultural source hypothesis (CSH), which would explain supernatural claims almost entirely in terms of pre-existing beliefs, or else misperceptions, hoaxes or hallucinations.1 According to the CSH line of thinking, as I understand it, The Mowing-devil is probably best explained by something like Nick's suggestion, or maybe there was an early modern Doug and Dave having a laugh, or something like that. The ESH, by contrast, would posit that that something odd happened in Hertfordshire -- for example, a circle appearing overnight in a field of crops -- and that the writer of The Mowing-devil described it in terms that he and his audience could understand -- for example, a devil with a flaming scythe who appears after a farmer's ill-tempered rejection of a workman's offer to mow the field. To simplify grossly, a CSHer would say there's no reason to believe that anything freaky is going on here, so let's look for a mundane explanation; an ESHer would respond that this attitude risks throwing the extraordinary baby out with the ordinary bathwater.

So what should historians make of all this? I don't think we can make much at all.
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  1. In other words, a sceptical viewpoint. David J. Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centred Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 13-4. [↩]

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On the night of 16 February 1873, the Russian ironclad Kaskowiski slipped into Waitemata Harbour, off Auckland, the largest city in the British colony of New Zealand. She found a British warship at anchor, and sent a 'submarine pinnace' to disable its crew by means of a 'mephitic water-gas' so that their ship could be taken. Having done this, the guns of both ships were trained on the city. The Russian captain began to land his marines on shore, with orders to occupy the armoury and all telegraph stations within 40 miles, as well the banks at Grahamstown, which serviced the nearby goldfields. The Russians began rounding up prominent citizens and colonial officials, holding them at gunpoint in the Provincial Council Chamber. Vice-Admiral Herodskoff demanded from them a ransom of £250,000, or else he would give orders to burn Auckland to the ground. Eventually, a bit over half that sum was handed over. The Kaskowiski sailed away, leaving the provincial capital under the guns of the captured ship. The Daily Southern Cross, which reported this shocking news the morning after, was in despair: 'WHERE IS THE BRITISH NAVY?' But the British had problems of their own, for (unknown to the remote colony) war with Russia had already broken out over central Asia and Persia ...

Of course, this never happened. It was a hoax, perpetrated by the editor of the Southern Cross, David Luckie. His aim was to draw attention to Auckland's complete lack of defences, Battle of Dorking-style. But the effects were more War of the Worlds. Despite the clues ("Cask of whisky" and a supposed publication date three months in the future), some people prepared to flee the city, saddling horses and prying their gold from under the floorboards. Pupils skipped school (not that they needed much of an excuse, surely) to look out for the Kaskowisky, while others kept a suspicious eye on the British warship in the harbour. With crowds besieging his newspaper, he wrote a follow-up explaining what, in his opinion, needed to be done to guard against privateers and Russians: a chain of fortifications built to protect Auckland, armed with torpedoes, and a strong Royal Navy squadron for the Australian station.

The idea of a Russian attack on New Zealand wasn't quite as silly as it might sound today. In 1865, a Confederate warship, Shenandoah, had visited Melbourne en route to plundering the American whalers off Alaska, so there was a precedent for privateering. The Great Game between Britain and Russia did indeed have the potential to turn into a Great War, and was causing concern in New Zealand as early as 1855. News of tension between the two empires led to war fever in early 1871, and in April that year, a Russian clipper called the Gaidamak had left Melbourne, and was last seen heading west for New Zealand ... maybe it was scouting out sheltered harbours for use in wartime? (It wasn't the first or the last Russian ship to visit Australia either.) The Australian colonies were starting to provide for their own defence -- Victoria's powerful monitor Cerberus arrived in the colony in 1871 -- so why shouldn't New Zealand do the same? It was so remote from mother England, after all, a long way for help to come.

But not much was accomplished. Some work was started on coastal defences in 1877; in 1885, there was another Russian scare, another hoax, and a number of forts were constructed. By 1909, the Russians had been replaced in the New Zealand imagination by Germans, and the commerce raiders were supplemented by airships. Finally, in the Second World War, some Germans and Japanese submarines did come to New Zealand, but didn't actually do much. And there my knowledge of New Zealand's defence panics ends, but I doubt there was anything else as curious as the Kaskowiski affair ...

Sources: Glynn Barratt, Russophobia in New Zealand 1838-1908 (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1981), 48-53. Impressively, all of the Southern Cross has been scanned and is freely available online: the relevant articles would seem to be this, this, this, and this.

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A comment from Melissa got me thinking about gender and the knock-out blow, which is admittedly not something I do very often. There are certainly a number of ways into this subject. The most obvious would be to look at the fact that airpower would bring war onto British soil for the first time since at least Culloden (ok, or since the Great War, if you want to be pedantic), thus threatening British women (and children) directly and on a large scale. Pointing this out was a powerful argument in favour of taking the threat of bombing seriously, and was widely deployed. So one could look at that construction. Or there's the gendered language which was occasionally used to describe aerial warfare, such as Trenchard's analogy of a football match, with victory going to the side which struck hardest and in their manly way made the defenders 'squeal' first. Very playing-fields-of-Eton.

Another way would be the simple one of looking at what men and women wrote about the knock-out blow, and how it might have differed in style, content and reception. Certainly most of the writers on the subject were men, which is to be expected since only men had experience of air combat and so could plausibly present themselves as experts. But, particularly from the 1930s, a number of women writers did venture their opinions on the coming era of air war, generally from the pacifist viewpoint: H. M. Swanwick, Barbra Donington (with her husband, Robert), Sarah Campion, and of course Vera Brittain. (A notable non-pacifist, was the famous aviatrix Amy Johnson who wrote for the bellicose Daily Mail in the mid-1930s.) However, male writers could be dismissive of their arguments in highly gendered terms, when they bothered to note them at all. For example, W. Horsfall Carter wrote a pamphlet entitled Peace Through Police to rebut Swanwick's works Frankenstein and his Monster: Aviation for World Service and New Wars for Old (both 1934). He thought that her attack on the idea of an international air force had 'all the misdirected fervour of a militant suffragette' and referred to her as a 'sentimentalist'.1

All honour to the pacifists whose consuming idealism and "conscience" impels them to denounce war and all its works. But when the heart is stronger than the head the result is a peace babel totally ineffective for the realistic business of peacemaking.2

Read: don't you worry your pretty little head about it, let us hard-headed menfolk sort things out!

But there was one woman who was not so easily dismissed, for she wrote the most influential attack upon the very idea of the overwhelming superiority of the bomber to be written in the interwar period. The Great Delusion: A Study of Aircraft in Peace and War was published in 1927, inspired at least one book-length rebuttal (Murray F. Sueter's Airmen or Noahs: Fair Play for our Airmen; The Great "Neon" Air Myth Exposed, 1928), and was still being cited as a prime example of airpower scepticism over a decade later. Its author was pseudonymous. Who was Neon?3
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  1. W. Horsfall Carter, Peace Through Police (London: New Commonwealth, 1934), 6. [↩]
  2. Ibid., 3. [↩]
  3. She also wrote at least one article: Neon, "The future of aerial transport", Atlantic Monthly, January 1928, also in a sceptical vein. [↩]

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Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, speech to the Lord Mayor's banquet, 9 November 1897:

Remember this -- that the federation of Europe is the only possible structure of Europe which can save civilisation from the desolating effects of a disastrous war. You notice that on all sides the instruments of destruction, the piling up of arms are becoming larger and larger, the powers of concentration are becoming greater, the instruments of death more active and more numerous and are improved with every year, and each nation is bound for its own safety's sake to take part in this competition. These are the things which are done, so to speak, on the side of war. The one hope that we have to prevent this competition from ending in a terrible effort of mutual destruction which will be fatal to Christian civilisation, the one hope we have is that the Powers may be gradually brought together to act together in a friendly spirit on all questions of difference which may arise until at last they shall be welded in some international constitution which shall give to the world as a result of their great strength a long spell of unfettered and prosperous trade and continued peace.

Source: Lord Lytton, BBC Empire Service broadcast, 18 August 1938; quoted in Listener, 1 September 1938, 430. Emphasis added.

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A curious snippet from Margaret MacMillan's account of the Paris Peace Conference, Peacemakers (2002):

Why not give it to Hughes of Australia, suggested Clemenceau.1

The 'it' was Heligoland, a small island in the North Sea, off the north-western coast of Germany. For most of the 19th century it had belonged to Britain, which swapped it for Zanzibar to Germany in 1890 -- when relations between the two countries were still friendly. But then the naval arms race started up, and Heligoland became a handy place from any attempt by the Royal Navy to approach the German coast could be interfered with. Which is why, in Paris in 1919, the question arose of what to do about it.

The Admiralty naturally wanted the island back, but presumed that the Americans would object. In the end, the compromise solution adopted was to destroy all of its fortifications. Presumably Clemenceau's suggestion was that Australia, as a nation almost as far away from Heligoland as possible, be given a Mandate over Heligoland (to add to New Guinea and Nauru), so that neither Britain nor Germany would have control over the disputed territory. I don't know how seriously he meant it, or whether it ever had a chance of getting up. But in my mind's eye I could see Australia dominating the North Sea from its Heligoland base with our single battlecruiser ... well, no. But what would have happened if Australia had been given a Mandate over Heligoland?

Well, for a start, I don't think Australia would have been exactly regarded as a disinterested party by Germany: British Empire and all that. In practice, there probably wouldn't have been much difference between Australia governing Heligoland and Britain governing it: precisely because we were so far away from Europe, we had nothing to gain from it and nothing to lose, except perhaps in terms of our international reputation. I don't see any reason why we wouldn't use it to benefit our friend (and protecting power), Britain, in whatever way they wished.

What use would it have been to Britain? MacMillan notes that the coming of the aeroplane was another reason why Heligoland seemed newly valuable. She doesn't explain, but seems to imply that this is because of their potential use as airbases for offensive action. I doubt that it would have been of much use for Britain in this way -- it was too small to have a really big airbase (only 1 sq. km!) to be very powerful, and too close to Germany (only 70 km away) to survive for long.

But what Heligoland might have been very useful for was as a RDF (radar) station, to give Britain early warning of an incoming knock-out blow. It was actually ideally placed for this purpose.

Distances from the frontiers of heavily-armed air powers to the British coast
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  1. Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2002), 187. [↩]

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Military History Carnival #10 has been posted over at Walking the Berkshires. This month, the post I enjoyed the most was at Boston 1775, about various improvised weapon systems which ragtag insurgents hoped would turn the tide against the overwhelmingly superior forces of a colonial power. Ok, it's a stretch to call these first submarines 'improvised weapon systems', as they were pioneering attempts at an entirely new mode of transportation. (The post is more about other proposed weapons, such as 'Row-Gallies'. I want to talk about submarines though :) But they were also weapons of desperation, of the weak against the strong. The British didn't need to invent submarines because they already ruled the waves. Why bother with such frail contraptions, more of a danger to their own crew than anyone else? Submarines have come a long way since then. They are integral parts of big navies, though for very different purposes than the Turtle (platforms for SLBMs, for example). Middle powers such as Australia like to have a few around to lurk about and deter any potential aggressors, and to add some heft to their offensive capabilities. It's in small, coastal defence navies that submarines retain something like their original purpose, as force equalisers. It's in the North Korean navy and its like that the true heirs of the Turtle are to be found today.

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Nanotechnology is now starting to move out of science fiction and into the real world, though currently it's more advanced chemistry than the molecular-scale engineering foretold by K. Eric Drexler more than two decades ago. So no Strossian cornucopia machines yet, no swarms of nanobots swimming in our blood to clean out the cholesterol. But some people are already trying to think through the implications of what might lie over the technological horizon.

The November/December 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists contains a review, by Mike Tredar of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (blog here), of Jürgen Altmann's Military Nanotechnology: Potential Applications and Preventive Arms Control (Routledge, 2006). The 'potential applications' of the book's title are both direct, for example 'specially designed warfare molecules'; and indirect, with the application of nanotech manufacturing techniques to the production of weapon systems of all types.

Thus, he [Altmann] warns, "MNT [molecular nanotechnology] production of nearly unlimited numbers of armaments at little cost would contradict the very idea of quantitative arms control," and would culminate in a technological arms race beyond control.

This is because anyone could -- with access to a nanofactory and the requisite blueprints -- construct vast quantities of very lethal weapons in very little time. Rogue states, terrorist groups, Rotary clubs. Anyone. There would be no way to police this. No hope for the future. Unless ...
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