JF Ptak Science Books  Quick  Post 

It is difficult to appreciate the incredibly quick and adaptable nature of the airplane as it progressed in the 15 years between the first Wright Brothers powered flight in 1903 to the end of WWI. One of the issues that became immediately apparent at the beginning of the war in recognizing the offensive capacity of the airplane were the defenses needed to combat it. Balloons have been shot down since (at least) the U.S. Civil War, but the airplane of course presented an entirely different threat. Part of the big realization in creating ground-based anti-aircraft weapons was that it was necessary to develop something that would be sent skyward and exploded, a wall-of-not-sound-but-metal that could and would rip apart enemy fliers.  And so we find such a thing here in the mass-produced everyman’s technoid magazine, Popular Mechanics, in May 1918.  The illustrator/editor used both the words “curtain” and “wall” though I am sure that curtain is more descriptive. In the illustration (on page 695) we see AA battery emplaced in defense of London firing “bursting shrapnel” that were to act as a kind of fence, keeping the enemy aircraft “in the upper air”–forced into higher elevations by the anti-aircraft fire severely affected the (non-) precision bombing of the day. Lower approaches would leave the aircraft open to other sorts of withering defensive responses.

The legend reads that the high altitude bombing was “ineffective”, though it doesn’t indicate whether the bombing was still attempted, or not.