On page 9 of the London Standard today is a short article entitled ‘ELUSIVE AIRSHIP’. Evidently the story is not quite new, for it begins: The mystery of the elusive airship still continues to attract attention, and the belief is gaining ground that there is some foundation to the various reports. Obviously something has been […]
Starting tomorrow, I’m going to try some more post-blogging. It’s 100 years since the phantom airship wave of 1909, when mysterious aerial visitors appeared in the night skies over Britain. Or at least, stories about mysterious aerial visitors filled the newspapers of Britain. It’s hard to tell from this distance: the only evidence we have
A few articles have been appearing in the British press over the last few days about Harry Grindell Matthews, who (among many other things) claimed in 1924 to have invented a death ray. There’s no actual news attached to these stories, as far as I can tell, other than the fact that a new biography
No. But let me explain … One of the nice things about tutoring is that you’re getting paid to learn things (unless you happen to know everything about whatever it is that you are tutoring already, which I don’t). And one thing I’ve learned recently is that the First World War started because French aircraft
I’ve been reading a curious tome by Robert William Cole, called The Struggle for Empire. It’s curious because the empire of the title is the British Empire, or rather the Anglo-Saxon Empire, and the struggle takes place in interstellar space. And because it was published in 1900! It has a good claim to being the
A while back I wrote a post about Sir Malcolm Campbell, devil-may-care driving fool, and his possible connection with the British Union of Fascists — specifically, the claim that he adorned Blue Bird with BUF insignia. I was sceptical, based on his fairly negative attitude in 1937, but couldn’t rule out that he’d had some
Some more navel-gazingpost-thesis analysis. Above is a plot of the number of primary sources (1908-1941) I cite by date of publication. (Published sources only, excluding newspaper articles — of which there are a lot — and government documents. Also, it’s not just airpower stuff, though it mostly is.) I actually have no idea if it’s
Here’s an explanation for phantom airships which I haven’t come across before: whales! The way in which rumours start and grow is shown by the following incident recorded by the Daily Telegraph correspondent at Harwich:— “It was rumoured in Harwich this evening that a Zeppelin had been seen flying on the North Sea to-day, surrounded
Via Modern Mechanix comes this supposed Japanese suicide bomb. It’s from the April 1933 issue of Modern Mechanix, an American magazine. It’s not an aeroplane but a precision guided munition, with the guidance supplied by the pilot inside the bomb itself. The accompanying article claims that Japan was using such bombs in China. Now, this
Some perfectly ordinary banter, c. 1917: First “Hun”: “Did you see old Cole’s zoom on a quirk this morning?” Second “Hun”: “No, what happened?” First “Hun”: “Oh, nothing to write home about … stalled his ‘bus and pancaked thirty feet … crashed completely … put a vertical gust up me … just as I was
