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 […]
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
