The Dublin Irish Times has a report (p. 9; above) of a ‘mysterious airship’ seen on last Wednesday, 8 January 1913, at Newport, Co. Mayo, on the northwest coast of Ireland. It was first seen at 6.40pm to the southwest, and looked ‘at first’ like ‘a very large, bright star’. It shortly ‘was seen to […]
A number of newspapers print articles of varying length about the Dover airship mystery today, including the Yeovil Western Gazette, the Exeter Western Times, and the Lichfield Mercury. None of these add any new information about this incident, one being a reprint of an article already published in another newspaper and the other two simply
Alluding to the airship supposedly seen at Dover (assuming Saturday is meant, rather than Sunday as written), the Devon and Exeter Gazette notes (p. 4; above) that ‘similar lights have been seen on the Somerset coast line of the Bristol Channel during the last three or four weeks’ (so going back to mid-December 1912, at
The Times (p. 6; above) has two paragraphs about the reported visit of an unknown flying machine to Dover at about 5am on Saturday morning, 4 January 1913, evidently coming from the direction of the Continent and heading north-east. It was seen by John Hobbs, a corporation employee (i.e. a council worker), though he heard
Starting tomorrow, I will be be post-blogging the 1913 British phantom airship scare as it appeared in the press, one hundred years earlier to the day. This scare was much longer than the 1909 one: that lasted for less than three weeks, but the 1913 took over three months to run its course. (Longer, if
I’ve updated my list of online British newspaper archives. This time, the new titles are: Aberdeen Journal AJR Information Catholic Herald Connacht Sentinel Cork Examiner Jewish Chronicle Irish Press Irish Times Kilkenny People Louth and North Lincolnshire Advertiser Nenagh News Northants Evening Telegraph The Post/Sunday Post (Dundee) Sligo Champion Sowerby Bridge News Many of these
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] (Or, ‘Trenchard at sea’.) Jamel Ostwald’s recent post on urban bombardment in the early modern period, itself partly a response to my post on Trenchardism, prompted me to wonder how straight the line was between aerial bombardment and earlier naval and land bombardments? Was the naval precedent more
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
