The year of reading airmindedly — V
Object history, aircrew history, history for children.
Books, Pictures, Reviews
1900s, 1910s, 1940s, Australia, Blogging, tweeting and podcasting, Interviews, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Sounds
Phantom airship tales from Rat City
I’m featured in the latest episode of the podcast Tales from Rat City, which is focused on unusual and sometimes bizarre aspects of the history of Ballarat, Victoria’s third largest city (if you’ve heard of the Eureka Stockade, well, that’s where that was). It’s run by David Waldron (a historian at Federation University who co-authored
Books, Pictures, Reviews
The year of reading airmindedly — IV
Bombs, ‘Bomber’, and bombers (among other aircraft).
1930s, Civil aviation, Periodicals, Pictures
You wouldn’t read about it
Would you? It’s the summer of 1935.((Late July or early August 1935, judging from the August Popular Flying on display. I can’t quite make out the newspaper headlines but the themes (British troops? American naval policy?) could fit late July.)) You’re at Croydon Airport, waiting to board an Imperial Airways flight to Paris. But you
Books, Pictures, Reviews
The year of reading airmindedly — III
Group biography, airport architecture, and a campaign history. (If it wasn’t obvious by now, I’m selecting these books completely at random!)
Books, Pictures, Reviews
The year of reading airmindedly — II
A definite Australian flavour this time, from the Empire Air Training Scheme (as the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan usually isn’t known as) to whatever happened after the Empire Air Training Scheme. Plus the book of a certain aviation history blog (remember blogs? Me neither).
1910s, Art, Contemporary, Interviews, Maps, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures
15 minutes of relevance
‘In the future, every historian will be relevant for 15 minutes’, as somebody once said. Here’s my 15 minutes, an interview with journalist Connor Echols for Responsible Statecraft on the parallels between the 1913 phantom airship panic and the 2023 spy balloon panic. As I’ve been busy with other things and have had to watch
Books, Pictures, Reviews
The year of reading airmindedly — I
2023 will mark 120 years since the first controlled heavier than air flight, and 240 years since the first more or less controlled lighter than air flight. Much more importantly, it’s also the year in which I am going to get my ever-growing stack of to-be-read aviation history books under control! I can’t promise that
1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Australia, Before 1900, Periodicals, Pictures, Plots and tables, Tools and methods
Breaking the tyranny of distance revisited — II
One thing we were curious to try with hota-time is to see whether the idea and the code could be applied beyond looking at London-Sydney travel times. And it can! Here is the output for Melbourne-Sydney travel times, in hours rather than days: Lots of data points, roughly the same as for the London-Sydney plot.
1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Before 1900, Civil aviation, Grants, Periodicals, Pictures, Plots and tables, Tools and methods
Breaking the tyranny of distance revisited — I
Nearly four years ago, I wrote a post about a software project Tim Sherratt and I were working on for Heritage of the Air called hota-time. Briefly, the idea was that hota-time would extract and then plot travel times between London and Sydney mentioned in Trove Newspaper headlines, as a quantitative way to gauge the