…nerve centre’ theory, which argued that the destruction of critical infrastructure would be one of the chief dangers of aerial bombardment in the next war: an attempt would certainly be made to paralyse the heart of the nation by attacking certain nerve centres in London, the destruction of which would impede or entirely destroy the means of communication by telephone, telegraph, rail, and road.1 Later, in 1916, he stumped across the country givin…
…e, with staff coming from and going to there, and the results of observing runs being sent off to their plate library. Today, the City Observatory is run by the Astronomical Society of Edinburgh, which holds observing nights there every month. Edinburgh’s Disgrace, AKA the National Monument. Monument to what? Well, apparently to the Scotsmen who served in the Napoleonic Wars, though I can’t find it in the UKNIWM (though the Nelson Monument is). It…
…a previous war? I’m thinking of things like the nuclear bomb effects slide rules that I’ve seen in civil defence books – I vaguely recall someone has even built a webpage that lets you enter details and survey the destruction… As for cost-effective, that shelter looks huge – I can see the one-off capital outlay needed for one of those being off-putting to government compared with the slow trickle needed to dig trenches and reinforce cellars, but…
…top, from Wiltshire County Council, may well be a composite, and from the design of the aeroplane dates to well before the construction of the aerodrome.) One snippet I found on the web suggests that the RFC may have thought Stonehenge was a flight hazard, since it supposedly recommended that it be demolished. I find that very hard to believe, even aside from the fact that the source for this is a desk calendar by way of a blog, but if it is true…
…ree with the points made about aircraft wreck recovery being relatively unfruitful for archaeologists, since the aircraft themselves are fairly well documented, and we often have complete surviving examples for study. So any new information is going to be second-order at best. That’s would be less true when it comes to fortifications and civil defence sites, I think, because there would have been much more scope for variation, probably less docume…
…S’ ‘On Demand’ online replay – for the next seven days: “Presented by Dan Cruickshank and Charlie Luxton, this series brings back to life some of Britain’s most historic buildings which no longer exist. In this episode, Dan and Charlie follow the reconstruction of one of Britain’s earliest aviation buildings: Claude Grahame-White’s watchtower. Graham-White was a heroic pioneer of early aviation and his watchtower was the nerve centre of the vast a…
…less, telegraphic, and telephonic facilities’. Air War came out in late February 1916, but evidently it was composed of articles previously published in the Daily Mail, the Referee and Reynolds. (It definitely has a ‘cut-and-paste’ feel to it.) At this time, authorities were still grasping for an effective response to the Zeppelins, which is why PB published his book and, indeed, why he was in between by-election campaigns in which he ran as indep…
…or Alain Resnais include — at times harrowing — documentary footage of the ruined city and the victims of the atomic bomb? (Starting from 7.53, continued in the second clip.) Is this not a description of horror by horror? It’s true that the rest of the film does away with this literalness, but it seems like the concrete needs to exist before the abstract, which I find some consolation. Something else strikes me about this sequence. It’s not just a…
…that. Scott and Black did win, but in second place was the Dutch-owned, US-designed Uiver, flown by K. D. Parmentier and J. J. Moll. True, it took 19 hours longer to fly the race route (albeit with an emergency stop at Albury, on the NSW-Victoria border). But that’s pretty impressive when you consider that Uiver was a Douglas DC-2 — an airliner, not designed for speed but for economy and payload. It even carried passengers for most of the race, an…
…rning (p. 7), with some extra details: “ENEMY GAS” Harmless Balloons Start Rumours Extraordinary rumours in Eastern English and Scottish coastal districts followed the discovery yesterday of a number of small balloons. These were harmless British meteorological balloons but stories which had spread in various parts of the country had suggested that they were of enemy origin and that they contained dangerous gas. At King’s Lynn (Norfolk) these stor…
