Here’s a treat for (some of) you: the very first aerial warfare movie ever made, in its entirety! Most commonly known as The Airship Destroyer (but sometimes called Battle in the Clouds or The Aerial Torpedo), it’s less than 10 minutes long and was produced in 1909 by Charles Urban, an American pioneer of cinematic […]
The earliest cite for the word ‘airport’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1919: 1919 Aerial Age Weekly 14 Apr. 235/1 There is being established at Atlantic City the first ‘air port’ ever established, the purposes of which are..to provide a municipal aviation field,..to supply an air port for trans-Atlantic liners, whether of the
I haven’t written for a while on where I’m up to in terms of the PhD thesis (you know — the reason why, ultimately, this blog exists!) I’m nearly at the (nominal) half-way point, and I think it’s coming along ok. Last month I finally completed a draft of chapter 2 (the evolution of the
On the night of 23 March 1909, a police constable named Kettle saw a most unusual thing: ‘a strange, cigar-shaped craft passing over the city’1 of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. His friends were sceptical, but his story was corroborated, to an extent, by Mr Banyard and Mrs Day, both of nearby March, who separately saw something similar
There’s an interesting article on the rise of radio news in the United States in the late 1930s, in the February 2006 issue of History Today: “On the right wavelength” by David Culbert. One thing I learned from this article was that it was the Munich crisis in September 1938 which made radio news reporting
On this day in 1922, Andrew Bonar Law, the “unknown Prime Minister”, began his premiership – the shortest of the twentieth century. Here’s a minor footnote to Bonar Law’s career. Some time before the end of March 1913, while leader of the Unionist Party (as the Conservatives were then called), he told Charles à Court
While browsing through some nice pictures at Werkost of the Shuttleworth Collection, I found this photo of part of a downed Gotha. It looks like the inside of a wing, but it’s the accompanying text that is interesting. The fragment itself is inscribed GOTHA BLANC NEZ 1917, and the label says: PIECE OF GOTHA BOMBER
I’ve (mostly) finished a big update to my other site, scareships, which is about the British phantom airship scares of 1909 and 1912-3 – essentially, Edwardian UFO waves. To my mind, the fact that people (including, for a time, newspaper editors) believed that German zeppelins were buzzing their country – when in fact they weren’t
