A follow-on of sorts to a recent post. Imperial Airways was Britain’s main international airline between 1924 and 1939. It enjoyed semi-official status, as it was subsidised by the British government, and had the contract to deliver air mail throughout the Empire. Another international airline was formed in 1935, British Airways,1 which serviced European routes […]
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] [Image removed at the request of the copyright holder.] The minute hand of the famous Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just moved closer to apocalypse: it is now set at five minutes to midnight. This is the most dangerous level it has been since 1988.
This is my third post about maps out of the last four, so I’ve given in and made a Maps category. It’s not just me: there are another three posts about maps at Breathing History, and also at Philobiblon and My London Your London about an exhibition at the British Library about maps of London.
Note: This map DOES NOT show real air routes, from 1920 or any other year! They are purely imaginary. While writing the post on old maps, I happened upon the following example, which is labelled ‘The world — principal air routes’ and dated to 1920 by the host site, Hipkiss’ Scanned Old Maps: The only
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
Ten years ago today, Carl Sagan died. He had been a hero of mine since childhood, since I first watched Cosmos. I would kick the rest of the family out of the lounge room, close the door, turn off the lights, pull the beanbag up to the TV as close as possible, and let Carl
Orac responds to me … sort of: Orac paused, his lights blinking, patterns ever changing. It was almost as though he were thinking, if such a thing were possible by a computer. Then he went on, “Of course, as much as I’ve defended Dawkins before against similarly spurious uses of the Hitler analogy, now that
Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.81 bomber over Spain, c. 1936, with Fiat CR.32 fighter escorts. Image source: Wikipedia. Exactly seventy years ago, in late November and early December 1936, Madrid was being bombed. The way Antony Beevor describes it, it was the first attempt at something like a knock-out blow: The nationialists’ failure to break through on
This sticker is in the back of a book published in 1940, originally part of the collection of the Public Lending Library of Victoria (itself a part of the Public Library of Victoria, as the SLV was then known). I was struck particularly by no. 4. Were books considered possible vectors for infectious disease —
Bluebird at Daytona Beach, 1935. Image source: Florida Photographic Collection. Well, the title of this post is a lie — there’s only two mysteries that concern me here, and one isn’t particularly mysterious … Sir Malcolm Campbell was a world-famous British speed maniac (there’s no other word for it), setting many records on land and
