Alluding to the airship supposedly seen at Dover (assuming Saturday is meant, rather than Sunday as written), the Devon and Exeter Gazette notes (p. 4; above) that ‘similar lights have been seen on the Somerset coast line of the Bristol Channel during the last three or four weeks’ (so going back to mid-December 1912, at […]
The Times (p. 6; above) has two paragraphs about the reported visit of an unknown flying machine to Dover at about 5am on Saturday morning, 4 January 1913, evidently coming from the direction of the Continent and heading north-east. It was seen by John Hobbs, a corporation employee (i.e. a council worker), though he heard
Starting tomorrow, I will be be post-blogging the 1913 British phantom airship scare as it appeared in the press, one hundred years earlier to the day. This scare was much longer than the 1909 one: that lasted for less than three weeks, but the 1913 took over three months to run its course. (Longer, if
I’ve updated my list of online British newspaper archives. This time, the new titles are: Aberdeen Journal AJR Information Catholic Herald Connacht Sentinel Cork Examiner Jewish Chronicle Irish Press Irish Times Kilkenny People Louth and North Lincolnshire Advertiser Nenagh News Northants Evening Telegraph The Post/Sunday Post (Dundee) Sligo Champion Sowerby Bridge News Many of these
So, to wrap up this accidental series. To check whether professional astronomical journals displayed the same patterns in discussing ‘Mars’ and ‘canals’ as the more popular/amateur ones I again looked at the peak decade 1891-1900, this time selecting only the more serious, respected journals. However, because of the French problem I had to exclude L’Astronomie
In my post about the lingering scientific interest in the Martian canals hypothesis after 1909, I said that there was a problem with journal coverage. What do I mean by this? Have a look: This is a repeat of the first plot in the previous post, showing the number of articles published in peer-reviewed astronomical
In a recent, hmm, let’s call it a discussion resulting from an old post I wrote about the US Air Force’s one-time interesting in mapping Mars, I tried to assess how scientific interest in the Martian canals hypothesis lingered after the early 20th century, and said I would run up some figures to illustrate the
It was less than two months ago that my peer-reviewed article ‘The shadow of the airliner: commercial bombers and the rhetorical destruction of Britain, 1917-1935’ was accepted by Twentieth Century British History, but it’s already available online, thanks to the journal’s advance access policy. (So while the article has been typeset, the page numbers are
[The views stated here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Society for Military History or the Journal of Military History. Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] While they only apply to journals published in the UK, the recommendations of the recent Finch Report on open access
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] The current conflict in Gaza has attracted much media attention for the so-called Twitter war being fought between the IDF and Hamas, or, more precisely, between the @IDFSpokesperson and @AlqassamBrigade accounts and their respective followers. Insults are traded back and forth, photos and videos of rocket attacks and
