Since this thread received absolutely no love over on Twitter, some lazyblogging of a 1944 article entitled ‘Jargon of the skies’ by James E. Wellard on RAF and US Army slang, published in the Toronto Star Weekly (via the Perth Sunday Times): — Brett Holman (@Airminded) April 30, 2019
According to David Oliver’s Hendon Aerodrome, International tension remained high during the Whitsun weekend [30-31 May] of 1914, when the country was plunged into a Zeppelin scare that resulted in severe civil flying restrictions.1 As I’ve never come across this mystery aircraft panic before — a not unknown occurrence! — I naturally got very excited,
Proselytisers are famously early adopters of communications technology (see: the Gutenberg Bible). It shouldn’t be surprising that missionaries were intrigued by the development of aviation: a Baptist minister, Reverend F. W. Boreham, even claimed that It was with a view to winging the Gospel to the uttermost ends of the eaxth that the first airman
In my previous post I looked at the phrase ‘England is no longer an island’ in the British press as an indication of anxiety about the implications of technological progress — first steam in the 1840s, then the Channel tunnel in the 1880s, and finally aviation in the late 1900s — for the defence of
A long time ago I wrote about the idea that the advance of technology had annihilated Britain’s traditional maritime defences. This claim was famously — supposedly — made by Lord Northcliffe, founder and owner of the Daily Mail, after seeing Alberto Santos-Dumont fly in France in 1906: ‘England is no longer an island’.1 It’s so
John Ptak asks of this cover from the October 1922 issue Popular Mechanics: ‘why?’ It’s a good question. The accompanying article doesn’t really help: Consider yourself aboard a giant airplane whose whirring propellers rapidly drive from view faint objects on the earth far below. As towns and hamlets recede in the distance you realize that
As part of a discussion about the worldwide syncronisation of time, Yuval Noah Harari writes: During World War Two, BBC News was broadcast to Nazi-occupied Europe. Each news programme opened with a live broadcast of Big Ben tolling the hour — the magical sound of freedom. Ingenious German physicists found a way to determine the
It is sometimes1 claimed that ballooning was an event at the 1900 Paris Olympics. I don’t think it can have been. But it’s genuinely a bit murky, because this was only the second modern Olympics and the planning process evidently was not as formalised as it later became. The Olympics were held that year as
The lost Gotha of New Farm Park is lost in two senses. Firstly, because I’m fairly sure that it no longer exists. Secondly, because I’m quite sure that it never existed. Chris O’Regan pointed out on Twitter that ‘there used to be a captured German plane in New Farm Park’ in Brisbane. This was easy
The first real air raid on Australia was against Darwin on 19 February 1942. I don’t know when the first fake air raid on Australia was, but there was one against Melbourne on 14 October 1929: An aerial attack was made on Melbourne to-day by a group of seagull [sic] machines, which had been sent
