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
[Cross-posted at Airplay.] Australia is a long way from anywhere, even from itself. It nearly always takes a long time to get to where you want to go. Historian Geoffrey Blainey famously popularised the idea that this remoteness has shaped Australian history and culture in the title of his 1966 book, The Tyranny of Distance.
As of the previous post, 1,000,695 is the number of words I’ve written on Airminded (including 1518 posts and 29 pages, but excluding 2342 comments) since the first post back in July 2005. It sounds like a lot, but it’s only 6150 words per month. Okay, that still sounds like a lot! On to the
As part of a discussion about the worldwide syncronisation of time, Yuval Noah Harari writes: During World War Two, BBC News was broadcast to Nazi-occupied Europe. Each news programme opened with a live broadcast of Big Ben tolling the hour — the magical sound of freedom. Ingenious German physicists found a way to determine the
It is sometimes1 claimed that ballooning was an event at the 1900 Paris Olympics. I don’t think it can have been. But it’s genuinely a bit murky, because this was only the second modern Olympics and the planning process evidently was not as formalised as it later became. The Olympics were held that year as
NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 416 is a report from Lieutenant Commander George D. Warren RANR, commanding officer, HMAS Coogee, a civilian coastal steamship requistioned by the Navy for use as a minesweeper. Warren is reporting on the results of his investigation of an aeroplane seen from a naval lookout on the northern end of King
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
My article, ‘The militarisation of aerial theatre: air displays and airmindedness in Britain and Australia between the World Wars’, is available on Contempory British History‘s website. It seems like only yesterday that I uploaded the self-archived version — in fact it was only 5 weeks ago! While the formal and final version of the article
