To mark May Day, the Fleet Air Arm Museum, @FleetAirArmMus, tweeted about the Royal Navy’s first rigid airship, which was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness in 1911 in an attempt to match Germany’s Zeppelins: I was surprised by the comment about the airship’s name. Probably because of its brief, non-flying existence, it’s known by a […]
Last year I tried to run to ground the phrase ‘England is no longer an island’, usually said to be uttered by Lord Northcliffe in 1906 after hearing of an early Santos-Dumont flight.1 But the earliest source I could find which claimed that Northcliffe said it dated to 1922, it only became common in an
I recently came across a few more examples from 1920s and 1930s newspapers of the ‘Red Baron’ being used in reference to Manfred von Richthofen, which I suggested undermined my argument that, in essence, we call him that because of Snoopy. But instead of shrugging my shoulders I decided to get my data on and
Since this thread received absolutely no love over on Twitter, some lazyblogging of a 1944 article entitled ‘Jargon of the skies’ by James E. Wellard on RAF and US Army slang, published in the Toronto Star Weekly (via the Perth Sunday Times): — Brett Holman (@Airminded) April 30, 2019
A quick followup to my previous posts about the origins of the phrase ‘England is no longer an island’, supposedly uttered by Lord Northcliffe in 1906 in reference to Alberto Santos-Dumont taking to the air (above). I’ve tried to run down a primary source for this, but haven’t quite managed it. Here’s what I have
In my previous post I looked at the phrase ‘England is no longer an island’ in the British press as an indication of anxiety about the implications of technological progress — first steam in the 1840s, then the Channel tunnel in the 1880s, and finally aviation in the late 1900s — for the defence of
A long time ago I wrote about the idea that the advance of technology had annihilated Britain’s traditional maritime defences. This claim was famously — supposedly — made by Lord Northcliffe, founder and owner of the Daily Mail, after seeing Alberto Santos-Dumont fly in France in 1906: ‘England is no longer an island’.1 It’s so
John Ptak asks of this cover from the October 1922 issue Popular Mechanics: ‘why?’ It’s a good question. The accompanying article doesn’t really help: Consider yourself aboard a giant airplane whose whirring propellers rapidly drive from view faint objects on the earth far below. As towns and hamlets recede in the distance you realize that
The lost Gotha of New Farm Park is lost in two senses. Firstly, because I’m fairly sure that it no longer exists. Secondly, because I’m quite sure that it never existed. Chris O’Regan pointed out on Twitter that ‘there used to be a captured German plane in New Farm Park’ in Brisbane. This was easy
Manfred von Richthofen is undoubtedly the most famous aviator of the First World War, possibly of all time. But he’s not famous by name, so much as by nickname: he is the Red Baron, a reference to his red aircraft and his aristocratic birth. It instantly evokes images of knights of the sky, grappling together
