Pictures

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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. [↩]

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Town and Country (Sydney), 12 January 1895, 31

This photograph shows a steam-powered 'flying machine' which was to make the world's first heavier-than-air flight from the cliffs at Chowder Bay, Sydney Harbour, Boxing Day (26 December), 1894. Spoiler: it didn't.

The attempt was widely advertised, even in the other colonies: the Brisbane Week reported that
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Last year I looked at a couple of fantastic photographs from the State Library of South Australia's collection, taken at Harry Butler's 'Aviation Day' display at Unley on 23 August 1919. They're fantastic because they focus not on the flying but on the crowds watching it. Now I've found two more photos taken on the same day. PRG 280/1/24/250, wonderfully dynamic with the Red Devil (inserted in the lower left) evidently right overhead as the spectators twist and turn to keep it in view:

Spectators watching an aircraft's arrival
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Newcastle Morning Herald, 17 March 1943, 1

I've remixed Trove Air Bot 2 into a new bot: Trove Air Raid Bot. As the name suggests, this is picking up a different subset of Trove Newspapers articles to @troveairbot, namely those relating to air raids, which it then tweets, one every 30 minutes. In fact, that's the only key word, or rather phrase, it searches on: 'air raid'. And it's clearly picking up a coherent population of articles. There are Zeppelin raids:

https://twitter.com/TroveAirRaidBot/status/1257792258063114240

(Unfortunately I forgot to update the greeting text to reflect the new topic, so the first tweets say 'aviation' instead of 'air raids'.)
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Resuming from where I left off with Modern Wonder -- here are some rather fantastic French and British 'battle planes' from the cover of the 23 April 1938 issue. I've never seen these designs before and I'm sure they never got off the drawing board -- if, that is, there was even any drawing board at all and it's not just massive artistic license. [Update: of course I was wrong! Jakob quickly identified both aircraft in the comments. The French one is an Arsenal-Delanne 10, which did in fact fly (though not until 1941); the British one is an Airspeed AS.31, which did not. On Twitter, Francois Soyer and AusterityAirliners also got one apiece.]

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For nearly four years from May 1937, Modern Wonder (Modern World from March 1940) was a British weekly magazine, priced at 2d. and aimed at, presumably, boys and young men who were interested in high technology, big machines and vehicles that go really, really fast -- sometimes fantastical, but mostly real, if on or near the bleeding edge. There don't seem to be any full issues online, but you can get a feel for the content at Blimey!, and from the issue indices (and the covers!) at Galactic Central. Every issue seems to have been filled with battleships, spaceships, airships, etc. So, something like the American Popular Mechanics or Modern Mechanics , etc, or a more down-to-Earth Electrical Experimenter. Which is interesting, because this publishing niche wasn't filled to anything like the same extent as in the United States.

The covers, which I'm looking at here, are similarly both quite vivid but not quite as over-the-top as their American equivalents. Of course, a significant number (though not the majority) were aviation-themed. The above, from the 19 May 1938 issue, showing an unmarked Armstrong Whitworth Whitley tangling with a balloon barrage, is reminiscent of Dare-Devil Aces, but unfortunately (for me, anyway) is the only battle scene I can find. Here are the other covers featuring aviation prominently, along with the title of what seems to be the relevant story (which doesn't always exist). Feel free to jump in and tell me where I'm wrong!
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Post balloon, Paris, 1870

This is the story of the world's first aerial combat. It is not a true story.

It is 30 September, 1870. Revolutionary Paris is under siege by Prussian forces. But it has a secret weapon: Nadar. Nadar is famed as a photographer, a writer, and—more importantly here—an aeronaut. He has taken the lead in organising communication with the outside world by balloon; the first left a week earlier and sailed defiantly over the heads of the beseigers, landing safely 60 miles away with 125kg of letters from the beseiged. Three more balloons escaped within the week.
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COVID 1944

Since last I posted, COVID-19 has continued its spread: the Guardian is currently reporting 378,000 cases worldwide, 16,500 deaths, and 101,000 recoveries. (I post these figures not so much for the information of anyone reading at the present time, but more as context for future readers.) Like most people, I think, I'm coping: healthy, but anxious. Reading and writing history can be a distraction, but not always. In fact, given my historical line, it's hard not to draw comparisons between the present crisis and the world wars.
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Flight, 16 January 1909, 31

Since 2007, the FlightGlobal Archive (AKA the 'Flight archive') has been an incredibly useful resource for me, many other aviation historians, and Wikimedia Commons, as it provides online access to high-resolution PDFs (with OCR) of nearly every page of the key British aviation trade magazine Flight (from 1962 Flight International), from the first issue in 1909 up to 2004 -- all for free!1 Or rather it was incredibly useful, because since a FlightGlobal upgrade in late 2019 it has been unavailable, with the following message splashed on the landing page:

As part of the flightglobal.com relaunch, the Flight magazine archive is undergoing maintenance to transition to our new web platform. It will be back online as soon as possible.
Thanks for your patience.
In the meantime, why not subscribe to Flight International and get access to the past editions from 2012 through the digital library.

As the Archive been down for over three months, that patience is starting to turn into anxiety, and I think some people have tried contacting FlightGlobal to find out what the story is, but with no luck, as far as I know. My uninformed (but not uneducated) guess is that the original archive depended on a bespoke and probably very spaghetti environment written by some long-gone sysadmin, which was broken by the site upgrade. And precisely because it's free and presumably generating no revenue, there would understandably be little incentive for FlightGlobal to fix it quickly, even with the best of intentions. If that's the case, then considerably more patience may be required. But there's good news, and bad news; and more good news and more bad news.
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  1. '100% FREE ACCESS -- forever. In fact we’re positively encouraging you to link to, copy and paste from, and contribute to the development of this unique record of aerospace and aviation history.' [↩]

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Illustrated London News, 31 August 1912, 20

This must be one of the first ever photographs ever taken of an air raid, simply because it was one of the first ever air raids, during the Italian invasion of Ottoman Tripolitania of 1911-12. It appeared in the Illustrated London News on 31 August 1912 with the following caption:

PHOTOGRAPHED FROM THE DIRIGIBLE WHICH CAUSED IT BY DROPPING BOMBS: THE FIRE ON THE OASIS OF GHARIUNES

The 'fire' is presumably the white smoke in the centre of the photograph. (In fact I've posted posted a version of this image before, but this one is clearer and earlier.) A short article below explains further:

At the time of the Battle of March 12 [1912] near Benghazi, two Italian dirigibles made a flight from Tripoli beyond Zanzur and over the Turkish encampment at Zavia. When at a height of 1500 metres, they dropped twenty-five bombs on to the enemy's camp, causing great loss of life and confusion.

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