Pictures

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Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

At 8pm AEST/GMT+10 this Sunday, 30 August 2020, I'm co-hosting the Australian version of Historians At The Movies (#HATMAus) along with fellow historians Joel Barnes and Chelsea Barnett as we livetweet the 2004 science fiction film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and dissect it for fun and (alternate) history. With an all-star star cast, a decent budget, ambitious special effects, a lusciously retrofuturistic aesthetic, and more aeroplanes, airships, ornithopters and, oh yes, flying aircraft carriers than is strictly feasible, Sky Captain should have launched dieselpunk cinema as a new artform. Tune in on Sunday night and find out why it didn't!

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Image source: kino.de.

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Western Mail (Perth), 1 March 1951, 10

https://twitter.com/Airminded/status/1288659222431817729?s=20

I've made a new Trove bot to accompany @TroveAirBot and @TroveAirRaidBot: @TroveUFOBot. The name is somewhat misleading, since it doesn't search Trove Newspapers for the keyword 'UFO' at all, which turns out to be a bad keyword. Firstly, it's so short that it frequently turns up whenever the OCR is bad and a random string of u, f, and o appear, and so there were just too many false positives. Secondly, it was only coined in 1953, which is only a couple of years before the Trove copyright wall, so there aren't many good hits to find anyway.

Instead, I've gone with the following:

flying saucer
flying saucer
flying saucer
flying saucer
mystery airship
mystery aeroplane
mystery light

The obvious substitute for 'UFO" is 'flying saucer', which was a very popular term right from the start of the modern UFO era in 1947. This should pick up most of the available articles from the 'classic' UFO era.

However, that restricted the results to a narrow range between 1947 and the mid-1950s. That was a bit boring, and also outside my own period of interest, so I decided to introduce some keywords related to what I see as a related, if distinct, historical phenomenon: mystery aircraft, including mystery aeroplanes and mystery airships. (Helpfully, Trove looks for plural forms, as well as 'mysterious'.) This does come at the cost of another set of false postives, in which aircraft can be mysterious but not that mysterious.

Because those keywords are all very technological, though, I decided to add a more neutral phrase, 'mystery light'. I'm hoping this will find lights-in-the-sky, including natural phenomena like ball lightning and will-o'-the-wisps. But again, there are all sorts of mystery lights that aren't in the sky. So I may end up removing this one.

Finally, in the above list of keywords 'flying saucer' appears three times. That's a crude attempt at weighting, so the bot will select that three times as often as each of the other keywords, which only appear once. That means that those interesting but low-yield keywords don't dominate the results, and about half the tweets will end up relating to what most people would recognise as UFOs. And, as there are going to be relatively few articles in total compared with my other bots (about 19,000) I've turned down the frequency a bit, to one tweet an hour, so it should last a couple of years before recycling.
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Aeroplane, 8 June 1911, 21

A few months back I wrote about alternatives to the (still missing, still missed) FlightGlobal archive of Flight magazine, a key source for aviation history (for me, anyway). I forgot to mention that Flight's great rival, The Aeroplane (founded and edited by the egregious C. G. Grey), is also partially accessible through the Internet Archive. This is thanks to the Smithsonian, which has scanned and uploaded The Aeroplane's first 23 volumes covering 1911-1922 (except for the second half of 1920 1921 [thanks, John]). This is much more limited than the Internet Archive's Flight holdings, which cover 1909-1935; but it does nicely do for the First World War, for example. As with Flight, you can flip from page to page, search for text, or download in a variety of formats (including PDF). But because the scans are labelled somewhat erratically (most of them have the publication date as 1911, for example) they're a bit confusing to navigate. So I've gone through the available volumes and put them in a more usable order:

Enjoy!

Image source: Aeroplane, 8 June 1911, 21.

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Wide World Magazine, April 1909

The 'flight' -- The machine reached the edge of the slope, shot out a few yards into the air with the impetus it had acquired, and then dropped with a crash onto the rocks.1

I am very nearly done with N. R. Gordon, who built at least five completely unsuccessful flying machines over a period of several decades, from well before Kitty Hawk to after the First World War, when how to fly was pretty much a solved problem. But a post at the Aerodrome alerted me to the existence of some further photographs of his first and most ambitious attempt, before a large holiday crowd at Chowder Bay on Boxing Day 1894. The most remarkable is the one above, which shows Gordon's oddly sinuous machine just at the moment of being launched over the precipice. In the background there are many small boats out on the bay, and in the foreground eight or nine people with their backs to the camera, watching the flying machine. All the accounts frame the trial as a failure -- or worse, as I'll come to -- but at this very instant the possibility of success was still there. Did these spectators believe, or hope, that they were witnessing the beginning of the conquest of the air?
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  1. J. S. Boot, 'The Sydney "flying machine"', Wide World Magazine, April 1909, 32-36, at 35. [↩]

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Wreck of the Hindenburg

Alexander Rose. Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men's Epic Duel to Rule the World. New York: Random House, 2020.

The two men of the title both led a great aviation enterprise. Both dreamed of spanning the world with their passenger aircraft. Both struggled at times, and prospered at others. But one was outlived by his company, while the other died knowing that his life's work had been reduced to ashes. The former was Juan Terry Trippe, the head of Pan American Airways (PAA; better known as Pan Am) from 1927 to 1968; the latter, Hugo Eckener, who ran Luftschiffbau Zeppelin and DELAG, the Zeppelin airline, after the death of Count Zeppelin in 1917.1 Both wanted to span the world's continents and oceans by air: Trippe championed aeroplanes as the best way to do this; Eckener, obviously, airships. We all know how that turned out, but well-known stories are often worth revisiting because, well, you don't always know what you thought you did. And so Alexander Rose -- who is perhaps best known as the author of Washington's Spies, which was turned into a successful television series, but wrote his PhD on British air defence policy in the 1930s -- has written a thoroughly researched, fully referenced, hugely informative and compellingly readable account of the struggle for the future of civil aviation.
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  1. Citing a newspaper obituary, Wikipedia claims that Trippe got his first name from 'the Venezuelan wife of his great uncle'. But according to Rose he was actually named after his mother's stepfather, Juan Terry, a Venezuelan millionaire. Trippe hated his name and his non-WASP family connections; the fact that PAA's empire began in Latin America was a coincidence. [↩]

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East Melbourne Historical Society Newsletter, June 2016, 7

When we first met N. R. Gordon, it was in Sydney in 1894 and he was preparing a steam-powered ornithopter for flight. When we last saw him, it was 1900 and he was filing a patent application for a human-powered ornithopter. Here he is again, in May 1907, this time at Footscray in Melbourne's west, attempting another 'experiment with a flying machine':

The body consisted of a small canvas boat on two pneumatic-tyred wheels, and had four great white canvas wings, each 17ft 6in in length. The flying machine was hitched on by a rope to a motor car, which, when all was ready, set off at full speed. The flying machine, which carried no passengers, of any kind, rose gradually about a foot from the ground, but when apparently about to soar off to the sky the wings carried away, being too fragile to stand the strain.1

I think that is the machine pictured above, which has the tires though maybe not a 'boat'2 It seems quite different to the Chowder Bay machine, chunky rather than spindly.
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  1. Singleton Argus, 14 May 1907, 3. [↩]
  2. From Sylvia Black, 'Dreaming the impossible dream', East Melbourne Historical Society Newsletter, June 2016, 7; she doesn't refer to the photograph and it doesn't appear in any of the sources she cites. [↩]

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Duprée and Ashley, Britannia Must Rule the Air

This stirring scene is the cover for the sheet music for a song published in 1913, Britannia Must Rule the Air, written by Frank Duprée and composed by Charles Ashley. It shows a reasonable (if stubby) approximation of a Zeppelin in the process of being destroyed by gunfire from two aeroplanes, a Farman-type biplane and a monoplane.

The lyrics are a little more subtle:

When wooden walls and straining sails bore Britain's flag afar,
The Nation prospered well in peace and feared no foe in war,
For Britain's might was ev'rywhere and ruled the endless waves,
Proclaiming to the world at large 'we never shall be slaves.'

And when the ironclad replaced the ships that caught the breeze
Britannia still retained her throne up on the charted seas,
For frowning fleets and giant guns outnumbered two to one
The navies of all other lands beneath the sov'reign sun.

And now that ev'ry cloud conceals a lurking bird of prey,
Which threatens our supremacy in peace and war today,
Britainnia must be equal to the peril and prepare
To hold our Empire sacred from these dreadnaughts of the air.

CHORUS

Britannia must rule the air
As still she rules the sea,
To guard this realm beyond compare
And keep her people free.
Britannia, Britannia must like the eagle be;
Britannia, Britannia must rule both air and sea!
Britannia, Britannia must rule both air and sea.1

The message is clear enough: just as Britain's naval superiority has kept it safe from the Napoleonic Wars through the ironclad era to now, so must it have a superiory aerial superiority to safeguard its freedom in the new century. This was exactly the comparison and the message of the Navy League in response to German aerial superiority, as supposedly revealed by the phantom airships supposedly seen flying all over Britain.2
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  1. Frank Duprée and Charles Ashley, Britannia Must Rule the Air (London: Laurence Wright Music Co., 1913). [↩]
  2. Brett Holman, 'The phantom airship panic of 1913: imagining aerial warfare in Britain before the Great War', Journal of British Studies 55, no. 1 (2016): 99–119 (free). [↩]

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On Wednesday, 27 May 2020, I was privileged to give a seminar to the Contemporary Histories Research Group at Deakin University on my aerial theatre research -- via Zoom, as is the current fashion. I really enjoyed giving it, and I think it was a great success (and thanks to everyone who listened in and especially those to took the time to ask questions). Because the seminar pulls together some of the different things I've been working on in some kind of coherent way, I wanted to make it available to a wider audience, and so yesterday I post-tweeted my own seminar. And to make it less (?) ephemeral, now I'm embedding the entire 51-tweet thread here in a blog post. It is of course very much a condensed version of what I said, but it's always surprising how much of the essence gets through in tweet form. (Well, I understand what I'm trying to say, but then I would, wouldn't I?)

The seminar title is 'History from below, looking up: aerial theatre, emotion and modernity'. The abstract is:

In the early 20th century, the aeroplane was the symbol of modernity par excellence. Technological change is an essential part of this sense of modernity, and few technological changes have been as dramatic or as unmistakable as the conquest of the air. For the first few decades of the twentieth century, flying was the object of intense popular fascination, and yet few people actually flew themselves, even as passengers, before the tremendous expansion of aviation during and after the Second World War. Even so, their experience of flight was often intensely exciting, since one of the most common ways to encounter flight was through seeing it, as an aviation spectacle in the form of aerial theatre such as air displays and air races. People flocked to aerodromes in their cumulative millions to watch aircraft in flight, performing aerobatics or fighting mock battles. This was a mass form of popular culture, which explicitly and implicitly made claims about the present and -- even more so -- future ability of technology to change the world, for better or for worse. In this talk I will sketch out an emotional history of aerial theatre, focusing on how it helped to construct popular ideas about modernity, primarily in Britain and Australia.

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Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 2 October 1894, 3

So, who was behind the Chowder Bay flying machine? In November 1894, the month before the ill-fated flight attempt, stories appeared in the Sydney press about what sounds like a very similar 'flying machine' being exhibited in a vacant lot behind the Lyceum Theatre. Given the reported plans for a launch over Sydney Harbour, it's clearly the same machine:

The object of the exhibition is to raise funds for laying a tramline for the trial, which will be mode on an elevated line across the waters of Sydney harbor. The machine is constructed of large sails, four in number, wnich are in appearance much like the mould boards of a plough, only much more flat. These are secured to stays, which have in the centre an elliptical shaped affair in which is a small boiler, and attached to the outside of which are thin strips of canvas, which are to revolve when the machine is in motion.1

Importantly, this article identifies the flying machine as being 'Mr Gordon's'.2
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  1. Australian Star (Sydney), 12 November 1894, 3. [↩]
  2. Ibid. [↩]