This photograph purportedly shows a squadron of Italian Savoia-Marchetti S.55X flying boats over the Alps on 1 July 1933, during the second and last of the long-distance formation flights led by the Fascist air minister, Italo Balbo (hence ‘balbo‘, briefly in vogue to describe a large formation of aircraft), Rome to Chicago and back. These […]
A few years ago I argued that ‘the Few’ in Winston Churchill’s famous speech of 20 August 1940 didn’t refer to the pilots of Fighter Command, as is almost universally assumed, but instead referred to all British airmen, or even perhaps specifically the airmen of Bomber Command, since he spends about two paragraphs talking about
This cartoon appeared in Flight in 1913.1 It’s entitled ‘In 1950’ with the caption ‘Flitting — by the light of the Easter moon’. Now, ‘flitting’ is a term used in Scotland and the north of England to mean moving house. It is, or at least was, a practice which happened much more often there than
I often toss the nouns scare and panic around. One of my articles is titled ‘The air panic of 1935’, another is subtitled ‘airmindedness and the Australian mystery aeroplane scare of 1918’. Sometimes I use them to mean the same thing: in the former article, about the press agitation for RAF expansion in response to
Quite some time ago I promised to write more about J. M. Spaight’s Volcano Island (published in 1943 but written late in 1942). I probably should do that at some point. Such as now. Here I want to look at what he has to say about area bombing. He quite unapologetically uses this phrase, even
Judging from the report in the Western Gazette, Captain Faber, Conservative MP for Andover, evidently is not convinced by the letter he received from the Prime Minister downplaying the mystery airship visits, for in a speech to his constituents at Weyhill in Hampshire he invoked them as a counterargument to the War Minister’s downplaying of
So, to wrap up this accidental series. To check whether professional astronomical journals displayed the same patterns in discussing ‘Mars’ and ‘canals’ as the more popular/amateur ones I again looked at the peak decade 1891-1900, this time selecting only the more serious, respected journals. However, because of the French problem I had to exclude L’Astronomie
In my post about the lingering scientific interest in the Martian canals hypothesis after 1909, I said that there was a problem with journal coverage. What do I mean by this? Have a look: This is a repeat of the first plot in the previous post, showing the number of articles published in peer-reviewed astronomical
In a recent, hmm, let’s call it a discussion resulting from an old post I wrote about the US Air Force’s one-time interesting in mapping Mars, I tried to assess how scientific interest in the Martian canals hypothesis lingered after the early 20th century, and said I would run up some figures to illustrate the
One factlet I’ve enjoyed dropping on the heads of students is the origin of the word ‘blockbuster’. Now it is widely understood to mean a hugely successful movie (as well as a once-highly successful video rental chain — remember those?). It has even been claimed that this is the original sense of the word: supposedly,
