In the previous post I looked at the possible origins of the phrase 'big bang' -- as in 'Big Bang' -- in Operation Big Bang, the partial destruction in 1947 of Heligoland, a German island in the North Sea. I also suggested that there was longer history to the phrase 'big bang', which I'll also dig into here -- partly for its own sake, partly to illustrate how easy it is track a term's popularity over time in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA). And partly because I love the headline above, over 70 years before the other Big Bang was 'photographed' by COBE.
There have been many big bangs. One particularly important one is the 'Big Bang' in which the Universe began, according to current cosmological understanding, approximately 13.8 billion years ago. This was not a bang at all, in the sense of an explosion, because there was nothing to explode into -- rather it was space itself which was expanding, as it has continued to do for 13.8 billion years. Why, then, do we use this evocative but misleading name for what is arguably the most important event to have ever taken place? It was famously coined by cosmologist Fred Hoyle in a BBC Third Programme broadcast on 28 March 1949 to describe the expanding universe concept, then the main competing theory to one he helped develop, the (now-discredited) steady-state (or continuous creation) theory (emphasis added):
We now come to the question of applying the observational tests to earlier theories. These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past. It now turns out that in some respect or other all such theories are in conflict with the observational requirements.1
The term 'big bang' stuck -- or it least it did from the 1970s -- and it now stands for the entire cosmological theory of which it is just one part.2
But why did Hoyle choose that particular phrase, 'big bang'? On one level it is simply catchy, evocative and onomatopoeic. Hoyle himself said later that 'I was constantly striving over the radio -- where I had no visual aids, nothing except the spoken word -- for visual images [...] And that seemed to be one way of distinguishing between the steady-state and the explosive big bang'.3
[Edited version of an oral summary of 'Mutual aid in an air-raid? Community civil defence in Britain, 1914-18’, International Society for First World War Studies Virtual Conference 2021: Technology, online, 16-18 September 2021.]
The first thing to note is that the German air raids on Britain of the First World War were much smaller in scale than those of the Second World War: they killed 1100 peoplecompared with 43000. They are significant, however, precisely because they were the British people’s first war from the air, and so informed expectations, and preparations, for the next one. And in terms of civil defence, nearly every major aspect of the air raids on Britain in the Second World War was first encountered in the First World War.
But the air raids of the First World War are also important because of their emotional effects, the way that people responded to the entirely novel experiences, and spectacles, of air raids: fear, terror, even panic, but also anger, calm, excitement, boredom, curiosity, complacency. Again these emotions informed behaviour in air raids. These emotional responses could themselves, it was thought, be dangerous. Panic could be contagious. Curiosity might lead people to endanger themselves. Anger might result in the diversion of military resources from the front or even endanger the government politically. So these air raid emotions had to be managed.
It was largely left up to the press and other moral actors to define 'corrrect' emotional behaviour during air raids. An emotional regime centred on the idea of ‘British pluck’ or stoicism valorised the mastery of emotions during air raids as a particularly British trait. This prefiguring of the 'Blitz spirit' was opposed, of course, to the Germans, who were thought to be cowardly, both as bombers and bombed. Fear and panic, when it did occur in Britain, was at first excused, but increasingly as the war went on, excised from 'Britishness' altogether, through transference onto the Jewish or 'alien' minority.
Of course it wasn't a real air raid: it was a mock one, something I wrote about recently in the collection edited by Michael McCluskey and Luke Seaber, Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain. The photos above and below were published in the British and Australian press, and I wish I'd known about them earlier because they're great illustrations of the topic and I might have been able to include them in my chapter.
After its early showing in the 1909 mystery airship wave, Australia was rarely visited by phantom airships proper. Maybe that's because real airships were even rarer, with none that I know of between 1914 and the late twentieth century: they just weren't a very plausible thing to think you saw. But they did turn up sometimes.
There was one in Western Australia in 1910, another in 1918, and a relatively famous one on 10 June 1931 between Lord Howe Island to Jervis Bay. That last one was seen by Sir Francis Chichester while making the first east-west solo flight from New Zealand to Australia -- though he seems to have only reported it decades later, and even then stopped of short of claiming it actually was an airship. In 1925, another phantom airship was seen, more definitely but equally incongruously, at Myall, near the Murray River in northern Victoria.
I'm a bit of a podcast sceptic, meaning not that I don't believe in their existence but rather that I don't really get the appeal (which probably puts me in a similar position to a blog sceptic about 15 years ago). Since they aren't actually going away any time soon, I guess it was bound to happen eventually that I would be asked to speak on one...
The podcast in question is Big If True, which is for kids and is about big things -- in my case, airships. It's hosted by Maggie and her mom, Abby Mullen (a naval historian and one of the people behind Tropy, an excellent tool for organising and annotating archival photos). And, of course, despite my scepticism I had a great time talking about airships with Maggie and Abby, who had some great questions. And yes, we did get to phantom airships! So please have a listen if you have a spare 20 minutes or so, and then maybe check out some of Maggie and Abby's other episodes too (such as aircraft carriers, with Carlton McClain, and World War II, with Kim Guise).
Recently I've been playing around with AI-generated images. This is far less impressive than it may sound: there's a small community on Twitter and elsewhere doing this stuff already, many using scripts and tutorials which mean you don't need any more skill than the ability to log in to Google Colab, type in some keywords and hit execute. The particular AI model I'm using is VQGAN+CLIP. The AI doesn't 'know' anything about anything, to begin with, but (as I understand it) it trains from a huge image dataset drawn from the internet (imagenet_16384 seems to work best for me) and uses the associated text metadata to iteratively generate images which could be described by your keywords. You can also try starting from (or aiming towards) a selected image (which I haven't tried yet). I let them run for 500 iterations which seems to be enough to converge to something stable.
The results are usually almost, but not quite entirely, unlike whatever it is that you have in mind: not so much an uncanny valley as a whole uncanny landscape with uncanny hills, uncanny trees, uncanny streams, and uncanny clouds. (Actually it does very well with clouds.) I've got a thread going on Twitter of mostly aviation-related images; here are some that I find interesting.
The first prompt I tried was 'a phantom airship'. And it's pretty good! Like any good phantom airship, meaning is in the eye of the beholder, but to me that looks something like an airship floating over an impressionistic grand house with trees, mountains and clouds.
The time has finally come to address the claim I've made in the title of this series of posts, that the air raid somehow vanished. Why did I say that, and what does it mean? Well, look at the plot above. Previously I looked at how often 'air raid' (and related phrases) appeared per issue in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) in each month across the First World War. The above plot, now, is how often 'air raid' appeared per issue in each year from the start of the First World War (when 'air raid' was first used) until the end of the Second. Now you can see that the first peak in 'air raid''s popularity came in 1917, at an average of 0.8 mentions in every newspaper issue in BNA; and that this was followed by a second, much bigger peak in 1940 of 5.2 mentions in every newspaper issue in BNA. All of which makes sense.
What's more surprising is what happened in between. From 1921 to 1934, the phrase 'air raid' almost completely disappears from BNA. At the lowest point, 1929, the average number of mentions per issue was just 0.026, or one in about 38. In other words, if you read 38 issues you might expect to read the phrase 'air raid' once, which is more than six weeks of reading a daily. If you want some absolute figures, 'air raid' appears 609 times in the 23054 issues contained in BNA for 1929. So 'air raid' was not a phrase you were at all likely to see in a newspaper in the 1920s and early 1930s.
In my previous post I looked at the first appearances of the phrase 'air raid' and related words in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA). Of course, just because these phrases had been coined by somebody, or even used in a newspaper, it doesn't mean they were widely understood -- they might have taken a long time to catch on, or even be reinvented independently. So, in order to get a truer sense of how widespread these phrases were, we need to look at some n-grams.
The War Office were about to offer a substantial prize for the best aeroplane engine. They had already obtained an anti-airship gun of wonderful efficiency, and progress had been made in solving the problem of defending this country against foreign air raids.1
It was still vanishingly rare, though, and only became popular during the First World War. This happened very quickly. The Dundee Courier (quoting the Daily Express) used 'air raid' on 12 August 1914, though clearly more with a sense of reconnaissance rather than bombing:
Daring air raids have revealed all the German positions and movements.2
More obviously in the familiar sense is the next appearance in BNA, in a Western Gazette headline on 28 August 1914 for an attempted Zeppelin attack on Antwerp:
ANOTHER AIR RAID ON ANTWERP ZEPPELIN REPULSED. August 26th. IT is officially stated that the Zeppelin airship attempted last night to repeat its raid upon the city. Measures were taken to defeat the attempt, which the Zeppelin then abandoned.3
After this point 'air raid' began to be used very widely. (The image above is from the Sphere and shows 'Shells bursting round a Zeppelin during the air raid on Paris on March 20'.)4
