Walter Sickert, Miss Earhart’s Arrival (1932). A fascinating image. The occasion is Amelia Earhart’s arrival at Hanworth aerodrome on 22 May 1932, after her solo flight across the Atlantic, the first by a woman and in record time. She was already well-known as an aviator, but this feat made her a celebrity. You can see […]
So if there were no mystery aeroplanes over Berlin on 23 June 1933, and nobody who even saw any mystery aeroplanes, why did the German government and press say otherwise? There are three-ish reasons, that I can see. The first is the most obvious. It was strongly implied in the original English-language reports that the
On the evening of 23 June 1933, Berlin was raided by mysterious aeroplanes of unknown origin: A number of aeroplanes, which were described as being of unidentified foreign origin, are reported to have flown over the working-class areas of the city yesterday evening, and dropped leaflets and pamphlets, in which the Government was attacked. Upon
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
