Maps

1910s, Art, Contemporary, Interviews, Maps, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures

15 minutes of relevance

‘In the future, every historian will be relevant for 15 minutes’, as somebody once said. Here’s my 15 minutes, an interview with journalist Connor Echols for Responsible Statecraft on the parallels between the 1913 phantom airship panic and the 2023 spy balloon panic. As I’ve been busy with other things and have had to watch […]

Scareships map, 1913
1910s, Maps, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Post-blogging the 1913 scareships, Tools and methods

Mapping the 1913 phantom airship scare

View Scareships, 1913 in a larger map Here’s where the 1913 phantom airship sightings took place. Actually, there are a few from late 1912 (including the Sheerness incident), the blue ones. Red indicates sightings in January 1913, green February, cyan March, and yellow April. A quick visual inspection shows that the density of sightings was

Manchester Courier, 6 March 1913, 7
1910s, Maps, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Post-blogging the 1913 scareships

Thursday, 6 March 1913

Press coverage of mystery airships hasn’t quite fallen off a cliff, but it is perhaps scrabbling down a rocky slope. Only a handful of newspapers mention them today, and not even yesterday’s startling report from the trawler Othello rates a mention. While there is still considerable (mostly negative) discussion of the new aerial navigation regulations,

Standard, 25 February 1913, 9
1910s, Maps, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Post-blogging the 1913 scareships

Tuesday, 25 February 1913

The phantom airship scare has clearly entered a new phase since the sightings last Friday in Yorkshire and Warwickshire. Several major London dailies — all politically conservative — devote substantial amounts of column space to the mystery; half the main news page, in the case of the Standard. Only it’s not regarded as a mystery

Standard, 24 February 1913, 9
1910s, Maps, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Post-blogging the 1913 scareships

Monday, 24 February 1913

Last week was a relatively quiet one for the phantom airships, but today they receive the most press coverage yet. The main reason for this is a cluster of sightings reported from Yorkshire on Friday, along with another sighting from Warwickshire about 100 miles inland. In fact, there are so many reports that no one

1910s, Maps, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Post-blogging the 1913 scareships

Saturday, 22 February 1913

TO ILLUSTRATE THE SO-CALLED ‘BLACK SHADOW OF THE AIR-SHIP’, A MAP OF JOURNEYS POSSIBLE TO AEROPLANES AND DIRIGIBLES. This week’s issue of the Illustrated London News devotes three whole pages — mostly taken up with illustrations, of course — to an examination of what a headline calls ‘A MENACE THEORY’: ‘IS IT “THE SEA TO

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