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 […]
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.
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
With Twitter’s future looking increasingly nasty, brutish and/or short, I’ve made alternative arrangements for my array of Airminded social media accounts at Mastodon. My main account is: This instance, hcommons.social, is run by Humanities Commons, an open-access scholarship repository (where I already have a presence).
After 1903, 1911, 1913 and 1928, it’s time to round off this miscellany of Australian mystery aircraft with 1939 and 1940 — separated by little over a year in time, but quite far apart in place and circumstance.
Continuing this miscellany, on 23 August 1913 the Maitland Daily Mercury published a letter from the Reverend G. W. Payne reporting that he, his wife, and a Mr and Mrs Preston had seen ‘an aeroplane with searchlight hovering fairly high over Newcastle and the Hunter Valley‘.1 This was just before 4am on 22 August 1913,
It’s been a while since I’ve done a mystery aircraft post, so here are a few Australian ones I’ve been saving up for a rainy day (or days):
A few years back, my article ‘William Le Queux, the Zeppelin menace and the Invisible Hand’ was published in Critical Survey, with the following abstract: In contrast to William Le Queux’s pre-1914 novels about German spies and invasion, his wartime writing is much less well known. Analysis of a number of his works, predominantly non-fictional,
It seems like only last week that I was spruiking a podcast appearance — actually, it was last month, which is also not very long ago! This time it was on the History of the Second World War podcast with Wesley Livesay, chatting about the German air raids on Britain of the First World War
In September 1909, rather late in Invasion‘s run, an article appeared in Pearson’s Weekly explaining not only some of the pyrotechnical mechanics behind the spectacle, but also the underlying airpower theory. Because it was not merely an popular entertainment and a commercial one at that, but a response to the question ‘Invasion by aeroplane, is
