In the previous post I looked at the possible origins of the phrase ‘big bang’ — as in ‘Big Bang’ — in Operation Big Bang, the partial destruction in 1947 of Heligoland, a German island in the North Sea. I also suggested that there was longer history to the phrase ‘big bang’, which I’ll also […]
There have been many big bangs. One particularly important one is the ‘Big Bang’ in which the Universe began, according to current cosmological understanding, approximately 13.8 billion years ago. This was not a bang at all, in the sense of an explosion, because there was nothing to explode into — rather it was space itself
A cloud of smoke billows up from a building during a low level bombing attack carried out by biplanes. The First World War? Air control in the Middle East? Fascist bombers over Spain, or Japanese bombers over China? No, it’s an air raid carried out by the RAF against Nottingham on 15 May 1938. Of
After its early showing in the 1909 mystery airship wave, Australia was rarely visited by phantom airships proper. Maybe that’s because real airships were even rarer, with none that I know of between 1914 and the late twentieth century: they just weren’t a very plausible thing to think you saw. But they did turn up
The time has finally come to address the claim I’ve made in the title of this series of posts, that the air raid somehow vanished. Why did I say that, and what does it mean? Well, look at the plot above. Previously I looked at how often ‘air raid’ (and related phrases) appeared per issue
In my previous post I looked at the first appearances of the phrase ‘air raid’ and related words in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA). Of course, just because these phrases had been coined by somebody, or even used in a newspaper, it doesn’t mean they were widely understood — they might have taken a long
The term ‘air raid’ has been around a long time. Not since the first air raid, or even the first air raid of the twentieth century, but from not long after that. The first definite use in the British Newspaper Archive is in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, during the 1913 phantom airship panic, as it
To mark May Day, the Fleet Air Arm Museum, @FleetAirArmMus, tweeted about the Royal Navy’s first rigid airship, which was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness in 1911 in an attempt to match Germany’s Zeppelins: I was surprised by the comment about the airship’s name. Probably because of its brief, non-flying existence, it’s known by a
The previous post ended with this photo, and another very similar one, which Getty Images dates to 17 October 1917 with the caption ‘Moses Shackman, centre, with members of the Jewish East End Shelter Corps. Their hats are labelled in Yiddish and English’: As I noted, the hatbands actually say (in English, at least), ‘RAID
Recently, Alexandra Churchill tweeted a photo of an air raid shelter in London in 1917: She’s absolutely right, and I’ll eventually come back to this, sort of; but Rob Langham made a slightly different point which I want to follow up first: That’s an incredible photo for many reasons. @IanCastleRaids @ZeppRaider and @StowAero will likely
