JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2078  

 

Superweapons have been used against cities for quite some time in the
new world of speculative fiction, and there had been real-life aerial
bombings from hot-air balloons, but the first time that a bomb was
dropped from a heavier-than-air airplane on anything happened just
months earlier, on 1 November 1911, when Lt. Giulio Cavotti dropped a
hand grenade from his Etrich Taube
on the oasis of Tagiura, in North Africa during the Italo-Turkish War. 
He dropped four parcels of hand grenades on the
not-necessarily-military population at the oasis, injuring no one.  The
attack was one of attempted vengeance, a payback by the Italians against
the Arabs of Tripoli, in general, for having joined forces with the
Turks to fight against them.

Five years later (including two years of World War) advertisers were feeling quite enough at home with the idea of aerial bombing to use it on a growing basis to sell stuff to people.  The idea of bombing people with cigarettes–“munitions of peace”–was another in a developing series of dropping-what-you-want-to-sell-to-people-from-aeroplanes.  Murad is striking, but it is far from the first ad to employ airplane bombing–a good candidate for that occured four years earlier and only a year after the practice of dropping real bombs from planes was established. That would be in this 12 May 1912 ad for Purgen,
“the Ideal Aperient” dropped on military-style tents  of “Ill Health”, “Loss of
Appetite”, Lack of Energy”, and so on, all within the possibility of
cure by this Purgen product. 

Purgen was a laxative; Murad was cigarette bombs.