JF Ptak Science Books

Death from Above--the Fear of Aerial Bombing and Gas Attacks, 1932

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1209

Aerial bombing from heavier-than-aircraft comes to a big anniversary soon, on 1 November 2011, a century after the Italian Lt. Giulio Cavotti dropped the first bomb from a plane on oasis-encamped Libyan troops at Tripoli.   Of course things rapidly in the few years following that, so that by the end of WWI people got a good taste of what it meant to controlling pieces of property without actually occupying them, raining chaos and destruction from

    

above.  20+ years later, in the early 1930's bombing became more sophisticated, including a new arsenal of poison gas weapons.  The threat from this weapon was agonizing and palpable–the results of gas attacks upon armed combatants in WWI and  the gassing of civilians in the 1920's and early 1930's  made a hard strike into the social fabric, an enormous gapping new hole to be filled in the heart of fear. [And of course this fear was felt everywhere, from London to New York to Leipzig to Moscow to Milan, as we can see in these few examples below. ALSO: these images may be purchased rfom our blog bookstore, here.]

And this interesting image of a mock (or "mimic" as it was called in the report) attack on Milan in August, 1931:

There were a number of interwar aerial bombings that took place that kept the issue of mass destruction alive and well.  For example,  Britain used its air arm  very convincingly in Iraq, bombing many places including Bagdhad  in 1923; the Spanish bombed civilians into submission in Morocco, near Tetuan, in 1925, and the French crippled and destroyed  their opponents--both military and civilian, it made no difference--in Damascus, Syria, also in 1925.


Fiction also harnessed the possibilities of air war, not the least of which included Armageddon-like scenarios for the semi-End of Days through the use of poison gas and “atomic” weapons.  For example, deadly gas used in Anderson Graham’s The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923) and Neil Bell’s Valiant Clay (where the poison gas kills 1.5 billion) and Dalton’s Black Death (1934), while Reginald Glossop’s The Orphan of Space (1926) created an alien atomic spaceship which delivered holocaustal death to Soviets and Chinese and Communists in general.  There were many more stories like this, not the least of which were the non-fiction strategy works, like Giulio Douhet, author of Dominion of the Skies (1921), legitimizer of the “strategic” bombing of civilian populations (in spite of the Hague Conference of 1907*), and  JFC Fuller’s The Reformation of War (1923) which emphsized the new importance of air war and power and which also allocated the use of gas, justifying that morality  because it could cause less harm than a conventional attack.

[Image below from :Mr Baldwin on Aerial Warfare", The Illustrated London News for 19 November 1932, illustrating the sort of aerial bombs that could threaten the population of London.]

The fear was real, and the capacity to cause mass death (espcially from poison gas) was substantial, even if in a still-developing form.  Eight years hence, though, it would almost all come true (except for the poison gas part, at least for WWII), and in ways that weren't quite imaginable in 1932--500 B-29s flying criss-cross over Tokyo would've seemed more fiction than science to the 1932-person, even though that technology was only a dozen or so years away. 

Notes

* This is where the bombing of civilian areas was specifically outlawed; what wasn’t defined, however, was what “civilian” meant–turns out that it was pretty loosely defined in the 20's and '30's.

Airwar over Gallipoli--New, Massive Aeroplane-delivered Bombs, 1915

JF Ptak Science Books

War Images “Almost as Tall as a Man!  Great Bomb Used by the Allies Airmen at Gallipoli”, as seen on the front cover of The Illustrated London News for 27 November 1915. The campaign at Gallipoli was more than half done, more than half-way closer to the finish, which found the Allies retreating in the midst of high misery, gallant action, and broad death and destruction, with more than 390,000 soldiers from both sides being killed or wounded during the 10 months of the campaign. It was a miserable experience–hot in the summer, cold in the winter, with frostbite, rotting corpses, dysentery, bad food, poor sanitation, supply difficulty, and ultimately a costly stalemate which was supposed to have ended up in an Allied route to Russia. 


The use of bombs by airborne craft was still in its infancy at this point, the idea coming into use just a few years before the beginning of the war in 1914–the practice was quickly adapted after 1915.  (The first use of bombs dropped from airplanes is widely seen as having taken place by the Italians in 1911 and then in Mexico during the revoultion in 1912.) This image shows the development of an enormous bomb, though its details and destruction force “are left to the imagination of the reader”; I'm pretty sure that the bomb (if it was real and if it wasn't just a piece of propaganda) would'ev been hauled aloft and dropped from a dirigible rather than an airplane. 
See: Airwar over Gallipoli/Dardenelles   and here for a general look at aviation udring the early part of WWI.

[We offer the weekly issue of the Illustrated London News for sale here.]

WWII Aircraft Cross Sections--Spitfire, Hurricane, Beaufighter, Lancaster (!) and Stirling.

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1165

Here are some fabulous examples of technological cross sections from the collection here--this part concenrtrating on some of the British WWII aricraft.  The drawings are just superb, and you can easily get lost in them, following the geogrpahy of engineering detail from one logical place to the next. All of these images were published in The Illustrated London News and appeared 1940-1943.

And the detail (sorry for that--the originals are much larger than the scanning bed would allow...)

The Speed of History--a Note on Change in Aviation, 1905-1915

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1163

Being at the airport yesterday to watch the glorious EAA B-17f take off and land (and to see our 7- year-old climb through it and the Blackhawk that suddenly appeared) put me in mind of the extraordinary advances in flying in the earliest history of heavier-than-air flight.  I picked up a volume of The Illustrated London News for 1909 to check out the popular reporting of the aeroplane and as usual got a very sharp reminder of how fast everything happened in the 1905-1915 period.


In the earliest stages of the development of heavier-than-air flight (powered and not, 1848-1906) there were major innovations and essential experiments from a dozen countries:  England, the U.S., Poland, France, South Africa, Russia, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Romania, Sweden, Norway and  Denmark.  Even with all o f this directed work, the methods weren’t necessarily made public or when so were not well distributed, with many of the aviation/engineers working in obscurity and without contact with their peers.  (Examples of the major players in the history of heavier-than-air early flight include John Stringfellow, England, 1848; George Cayley, England, 1853;  Matias Perez, Cuba, 1856; Jean-Marie Le Bris, France, 1856; Jan Wnek, Poland, 1866; Goodman Household, South Africa, 1871;  Félix du Temple de la Croix, France, 1874; Victor Tatin, France, 1874; John Joseph Montgomery, US, 1883; Alexander Feodorovich Mozhaiski, Russia, 1884; Clément Ader, France,1890;  Otto Lilienthal, Germany, 1891; Lawrence Hargrave, Australia, 1894;  Hiram Stevens Maxim, United Kingdom, 1894; Shivkar Bapuji Talpade, India, 1895; Samuel Pierpont Langley, US, 1896; Octave Chanute, US, 1896; Carl Rickard Nyberg, Sweden, 1897; Gustave Whitehead, US, 1899; Percy Pilcher, U.K. 1899;  Augustus Moore Herring, US, 1899; Wilhelm Kress, 1901; Orville & Wilbur Wright, US, 1902;  Richard Pearse, New Zealand, 1903;  Karl Jatho, Germany, 1903;  Orville & Wilbur Wright, US, December 17, 1903 (finally for the first recorded controlled, powered, sustained heavier than air flight);  Orville & Wilbur Wright, US, 1904 (in the Wright II, making the first turn, and then later in September making the first circle); Horatio Phillips, UK, 1904; John Joseph Montgomery and Daniel Maloney, US 1905; Wilbur Wright, US, October 5, 1905 (circular flight of 24 miles in 39 minutes); Traian Vuia, Romania, 1906; Alberto Santos-Dumont, Brazil, 1906.)

By 1909 there were many dozens of different aircraft flying around, just about but not quite getting to the sophisticated stage.  In just a few short years, by 1915, there would be an enormous increase in the capacity and numbers of airplanes –pushed along of course by the needs of war. Which is a little odd as some of te earliest fliers’ ideas and planes  were rejected by the military establishment.  The Wright fliers for example were not at first a welcomed idea to the U.S. Army (for numerous reasons, the Army saying “no” in 1905 but renewing their interest in 1907 and finally buying the plane in 1909) ; nor were the Brits interested in continuing funding for Samuel Cody (from Birdville, Texas) , pulling support for him just a few months after he had succeeded in flying the first British-built airplane in Great Britain (the British Army Aeroplane 1B).  That of course would all change in just a few years with the guns of August.

Seeing this plan (above) for Samuel Cody’s flight from London to Manchester would’ve been a breathtaking achievement, had he made it.  The event had the trappings of An Enormous Situation, with smoke bombs and 450'-long white cloths to show him the way.  As particularly thrilling as this event was in 1909 it would be overshadowed in short order. In perspective, it was only six years earlier that the Wrights engaged in the first powered heavier than air flight.

In 1903 the Wrights flew 121 feet; in just six years, Louis Bleriot would fly across the English Channel (on 25 July 1909); six years later Alcock and Brown would make the first transatlantic flight.  In  1911 Cal Rodger (11 De3cember1911) made the first American transconteintal flight (completed over the course of 50 days, with 3 days 10 hours in actual flying time).  11 Years later Jimmy Doolittle flew from Florida to California in just 21 (with one stop for refueling); the next year would see the record for transcontinental flight broken with a nonstop effort of 26 hours; in 1930 the time would go down to 12 hours and by 1945 the time was an extraordinary 5 hours 17 minutes.  (The retiring Blackbird flew the length of the country in 1990 in 64 minutes.)
               
The next image showing the altitude records for aviation in 1909 is just as phenomenal. The record at this point still stood with the Wrights at 585 feet, less than double the height of St. Paul’s.  It was a huge achievement, the other contenders coming to within hundreds of feet of their accomplishment but not quite doing enough to become the new world record holders,.  Ion just the next year improvements in the quality of aircraft and engines and control made it possible fo r Louis Paulhan to achieve 3,018 feet in January 1910,   Walter Brookins top climb to  a record of 4,603 feet (7 July 1910), and Ralph Johnsonte to 8,471 on 20 October 1910.  .  It must have bene a shocking development to have seen aeronautics to advance so quickly, breaking the old altitude record by a more than an order of magnitude in one year.  The speed record is a more difficult matter, but after recording speed records in the 30/40mp range in the 1903-1909 period, it broke to 66 mph 1910, 134 mph in 1914 and over 300 mph by 1928.  The difference in aviation in those 25 years is similar to that between the computing now and that of 1985 (and certainly 1979).


I’m just saying that it is good to remember the enormity of change that took place in that early period of 1906-1919 or thereabouts–they were simply revolutionary developments that must’ve appeared  to the folks of those times.   


Notes:

Cody was one of the most colorful figures in the history of early aviation in the U.K.  Born in 1867 and self-styled after Colonel William F. Cody, he was an inate adventurer and experiential bon vivant, who loved what he did and made sure that everyone else knew it, if nothing else. All that aside, he was a significant figure, important in the development of flight in England, and he died young for his pursuit. He appeared in the LA Times of 14 September 1907 (page 14) saying that the future of war would be in the air, and that the airship would “effect commerce as well as war”.  

Strange Things in the Sky Department: Tetrahedra, Horse & Steamship Balloons, Swimming Pools & Exploding Moons.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1120

Rounding out the image dump from yesterday are these additions to the developing category "Strange Things in the Sky".  The odd things in today's issue include floating tetrahedra, an exploding Moon, a hovering anti-gravity Dr. Seuss pool, a Russian rocket pioneer's enormous apartment building-like dirigible, and a steamship balloon.

The first, without any explanation and offered as a pure art form, is this illustration by Frank R. Paul for Wonder Stories of November 1931.

Next, another Paul cover for Science Fiction Plus for August 1953, illustrating a story where the Moon explodes

Other strangeness in the sky is  Dr. Seuss’ swimming balloon pool from his Oh, the Thinks you can Think. .  I’ve seen some interesting images of balloons and dirigibles taken as serious efforts that reminded me of that double-page spread by the good Doctor.

  

 

This may have been the Omega end of bad ideas in the career of Zilkowsky, who is better known by the other spelling of his name, Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1835), a Russian misanthrope and space pioneering genius who wrote more than 500 works on rocketry and exploration including what is arguably the first tech word ever done in the field (in 1903, The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices). Tsiolkovsky somehow lasted through purges and Stalinist tirades, while few of his colleagues did—many mysteriously disappeared, while others went to prison and disappeared there.  (Stalin’s crude and insatiable blood lust, perhaps the worst of the century, knew no bounds, not even to the scientists who could conceivably hand him reigns of rocket/missile-propelled power.)  Anyway, Tsiolkovsky’s dirigible was composed of a collapsible metal so that the aircraft could form its own hangar when “docked”.  I don’t know where to begin with this one…

The next entry is the ship-balloon of Thaddeus Lowe (1832-1913) One of Lowe’s great contributions in the history of ballooning was providing aerial reconnaissance via (panoramic) photographs to the Union army on Confederate army positions—particularly the Rebel positions at Richmond (1864) and Fredericksburg (1862). (He had a wide span of professional interests and wound up living the high life in L.A. in a half-acre home.)  This 130-foot diameter monster with a steam-ship escape pod (named The City of New York and then renamed The Great Western after the city couldn’t supply enough gas to get the thing inflated) was intended to be a transatlantic traveler.  Ready to try this fantastic adventure in 1860, ready to take charge, ready to begin a very problematic trip across the Atlantic in a balloon, Lowe, seemingly ready, had his balloon ripped apart while waiting for launching by a chance and not-horrible wind.  Lucky for Lowe and the Union Army, this didn’t happen over the ocean somewhere out of reach, and the North’s important info-gatherer did not sink like a stone in the cold dark sea.  (I’m very cynical that the 100-foot-long, bulbously heavy steam-powered “life boat” would’ve landed right-side-up and softly enough to have been of any use save for providing some floaty bits that survivors from the balloon could’ve clung to for a while before being consumed by King Neptune.  

Lastly for today is this lovely history of balloon and aeroplane flight published in The Illustrated London News for 3 July 1909, called "The Evolution of the Great War-ships of the Air:  Balloons, Non-Dirigible and Dirigible, and Aeroplanes, from the Seventeenth Century to the Twentieth Century".  It is more fully explained here in an earlier post I made to this blog, laboring the point that 8% of the 60 air vehicles involved a horse. 

Strange Things in the Sky Department: Floating Airports

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1119

I've written several posts here about floating an airport in the NYC narrows, as well as airports constructed over hundreds of acres of Midtown rooftops, hundreds of small landing strips crossing the Atlantic, innumerable planes and dirigibles with lad fields on/in them, and covering the Thames at Big Ben. (See here for some of these stories.) But I've not seen a floating or hovering anti-gravity airport until now. 

The question for me would be--why, if you have somehow mastered gravity enough to float a large piece of concrete tonnage like an airport in the sky, why, oh why, are you still using airplanes? 

The answer doesn't matter, here, only the art does.Actually, the writing doesn't matter, either; just check out the excerpt below.)   This again a piece of delicious imagination by Frank R. Pauil created  for the July 1929 issue of Air Wonder Stories.   The drawing below must be among the first of its kind to depict a collision between two anti-gravity floating/hovering airports. (!)

Notes:

The excerpt:

"The Professor stared blankly a moment, then rushed away to the office. We followed breathlessly.

The outer door had been forced, its lock being broken, but beyond this no damage had been done so far as we could discover. Anxiously we ran over the papers--not a print was missing...."

It might have been more interesting if the thief had stolen all of the "e's" from those papers.  There are 9,500 more words in this story, but I can't make ir any further than this...

And also this:

Elevated, Rooftop Inner-City Circular Airports, 1919

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1102

The presumption of this Illustrated London News article ("On the Impulse to Fly Commercially", 18 October 1919) on the growing popularity of commercial flying for business and pleasure was correct, but the placement of the airports to service the growing community of flyers was, well, not.  

This is a prototype, of sorts, for many dozens of proposals that would appear in magazines like  Science and Popular Science and Popular Mechanics and so on, suggesting inner-city airports that could be easily accommodated by the city bustle by placing the airport on top of buildings (as above), and these other closely-related ideas (below):

[Picture source: Paleofuture.com]

and this:

[Picture source, again, from Paleofutue.com]

These terrible ideas were also seen in building enormous platforms over entire sections of the city (like Zecendorf's massively bad 1946 idea)

or massive flyovers on rivers (which I also wrote about here),

or enormous floating airport islands (like that proposed by Norman Bel Geddes at the tip of Manhattan,  

 

and of course a series of airports that stretched across the Atlantic.

But they all had to start somewhere, and perhaps this Illustrated London News entry for 1919 was among the first wave of these proposals. 

Airport in the Sky, Airborne Zeppelin Airfield, 1925

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1101

This interesting image comes from the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig) for July 1925 ("Zeppelinsche Riesenluftschiffe" by Dr. Hildebrandt), and shows a British proposal for a dirigible outfitted as a sea-going airborne airport for military planes. 

The aircraft would land aft, and then proceed forward to an elevator that would lower it belowdecks to a hangar (looking as though it could accommodate 11 or 12 aircraft).  Once refueled and re-outfitted, the planes could be lowered from the body of the dirigible and launched into space. 

 

And of course some cross sections:

 

Wings Taking over Prayers: Human Flight in 1714

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1090

The esteemed Michael Bernhard Valentini (1657 - 1729), professor of  medicine and of physics at Giessen, Germany and natural history collector, produced one of the century’s   most important works on the state of museums and natural history collections.  Actually, his Museum Museorum¹ was much  more than that, its three volumes presenting more descriptions and illustrations of all manner of scientific things than just about anything else of the pre-encyclopedist 17th century. There are many “firsts” to be found in this work, including numerous first-time description of fossils, tropical plants, American botanical specimens, techno items, shells, and on and on, not to mention sections on monsters, dragons and mythical creatures. 

One image that caught my attention appears in volume two, and seems to me to be a flying machine, though I can’t recover how it is being kept aloft, or what is providing its power.  The pilot is keeping a sharp eye on things with a  telescope, and is reckoning position with a compass² and two globes.  The canopy of the aircraft seems to be just that, some sort of cloth held in place by pulleys and ropes, though I don;’t know what is providing lift, if anything.  Perhaps the whole thing finds its lift and propulsion with the many feathers on the craft’s keel.  I’m not sure.  But I can say that I don’t recall any other earlier image of a pilot using a telescope and compass.   

Valentini also assembled an enormous natural history collection of his own, and in addition to his spectacular collection of the state of scientific and technical knowledge at the begininng of the 18th century, he also included in his book a  list of 100+ museums/collections of natural history objects--an extraordinary document for the time and unfortunately one that can't be reproduced here.

The History of Rartity: Helium, Nutmeg, Breadfruit and Pepper

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1089

I guess we don’t think much of the rarity of some things.  Pepper and other spices were at one point quite rare, and the source of invention and exploration, and war.  Nutmeg, for example, a sought-after spice originating from the Banda Island group of Indonesia, once figured in a trade between Holland and England (the Treaty of Breda in 1667) that landed the Dutch the island of Run and control of the nutmeg trade, while the Brits got Manhattan.

 Another great example is helium. When these images were produced for The Illustrated London News of 15 March 1919, rigid airships were filled with hydrogen, an explosive, not-happy gas that was the fuel of all manner of aerostatic accidents, everywhere.  Helium was still quite rare at this point, a year after the end of WWI and only 54 years after it was first observed¹, and replacing hydrogen with helium was still yet a dream–basically because there wasn’t any, yet, to supply a dirigible².

The first helium-filled airship was still two years away at this point–the U.S. Navy’s great C-7, which made its maiden flight on 1 December 1921.  When the USS Shenandoah flew in 1923, it flew with most of the world’s entire supply of the noble gas helium. Its difficult today to think of pepper, nutmeg, sugar, helium and so on in terms of fabulousness and rarity, but it was so.  Remember, when Capt Bligh was jettisoned from the HMS Bounty, the ship’s precious cargo was also thrown overboard.  And the great treasure that sparked the Tahitian adventure that sparked the mutiny?  Breadfruit. 

Notes
1.  Observed for the first time by astronomer and early astrophysicist Pierre Janssen, in the spectrum of    the chromosphere of the sun, in 1868; separated for the first time on Earth in1895 by the British chemist Sir William Ramsay.   

2.  By the way, “dirigible” is from the French, “diriger” (or “to direct “), meaning steerable, pilotable.  This differentiates the dirigible from the balloon, which was not by and large steerable. 

Beautiful Title Pages: the Flight of the House of the Virgin Mary, 1524

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1086

This is an interesting, almost (?)-revolutionary and curious woodcut depicting the flight of Santa Maria di Loreto, and was printed in 1524.  At the bass of it all the print depicts the first of a series of moves of the house of the Virgin Mary (mother of Jesus) to safe harbors, away from the Moslem/Turkish army that invaded Nazareth in 1291.  The myth states that the structure was picked up and moved by angels from Nazareth to the Dalmatian town of Tersatto (near Fiume, which is today's Rijeka, Croatia).  It then made its way to its final resting place at Loretto, Italy via the two other Italian towns (identified at the bottom corners of the print) of Recanati and Ancona.

One of the most interesting aspects of the print to my eye though is its attempt to display an oblique perspective of the town of Loretto, the house being lowered by angels on the other side of the town's fortifications.

 (In 1854 Pius IX consecrated the house as a miracle in his Bull "Inter Omnia" of 26 August 1852, declaring "Of all the shrines consecrated to the Mother of God, Immaculate Virgin, one is in first place and Shines incomparable radiance: the venerable and most August House of Loreto ... (...) In Loreto, in fact, it venerates the House of Nazareth, so dear to the Heart of God, and that manufactured in the Galilee, was later (moved) from foundations, and for the divine power, was transported far beyond the seas, first in Dalmatia and then to Italy. " And it was for this enormous feat of air travel that Pope Benedict XV declared St. Mary the patron saint of aviators, on 24 March 1920.)

Human Bombs, part II: the Ohka and Jinrai Butai, 1944/5

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1080

My favorite mid-century illustrator–G.H. Davis of the Illustrated London News–has provided yet another remarkably clear and well-designed series of images on a difficult topic for a main-line popular audience.  This time (appearing as a two-page spread on 28 July 1945 in the ILN) showed the structure, strategy and deployment of one of the late war’s

most feared weapons–the jet-powered human bomb of the Japanese naval air force. (In practice though the weapon didn’t produce that must damage though it did produce the fear: “the operational record  includes three ships sunk or damaged beyond repair and three other ships with significant damage; seven US ships were damaged or sunk by Ohkas throughout the war”¹).  The Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka was a purposefully designed and built rocket powered suicide rocket whose sole purpose was to attack and destroy ships. They were first produced in 1944 as unpowered glider aircraft, and then later in November 1944 the rocket propulsion system was added.  All tolled, the Yokosuka and the Kasumigaura Naval Air Arsenal together built about 850 of them–fewer than 3 dozen survived.

It was a relatively simple construction and was easily deployed: dropped from a bomber it would glide until near it target and then the rockets would be ignited, powering the thing to a near-unstoppable 500+mph, sending it, its pilot and the 2,300 lb ammonal warhead (an explosive made up of ammonium nitrate, trinitrotoluene (TNT), and aluminum  powder) into its target, detonating on impact.
                                   

Gliders, Flight & Photography in the 1850's & 1860's

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1075

The field of "photographic firsts" has always been interesting to me--the first photograph of the Moon, the first of a person the first portrait, the first color photo, the first engraving of a photographic image, and so on--and so I came to wonder about the first photograph of an airplane, or aircraft.  What I found was this monster, built by Jean-Marie le Bris, evidently the first image ever made via photography of a fixed-wing aircraft:

The photograph (made in 1857, 18 years after the invention of photography) looks very reworked and strains the imagination some, but it shows the glider of Jean-Marie le Bris, who actually achieved gliding flight in the aircraft.  I am sure that the glider used those enormous wheels for land transportation and were not an integral part of the craft. 

It was in that same year that Felix du Temple and his brother constructed and flew a small, steam-powered monoplane aircraft model (schematics above), which looked like a bird from the plan perspective and a beetle from the elevation.  The view of the model head-on seems remarkable to me, showing very little in the way of profile.  

Ferdinand d'Esterno produced a lovely design of a possible aircraft in his 1867 pamphlet, Du Vol de Oiseaux ("Onthe Flight of Birds") , a glider that looked manageable and full of possibility, all based on his relentless study of the flight of birds.  Esterno reasoned that all of the heavier birds excelled in soaring flight, and since this was the case, there was hope for man to fly as well. 

Esterno's glider was interestingly outfitted with a movable seat for the pilot--something that would be able to change the center of gravity, the flier's chair connected to the very broad tail section--controlling a rather elegant, rather light-for-its-era (330 pounds) craft with 215 square feet of wing surface.  (See Flymachines.org for a nice description of this and other early aircraft.)  I think what I like most about the Esterno machine--an idea that never progressed beyond the drawing stage--is its compactness and lovely lines, especially as we can see in the cross-section below:

As the author(s) of Flymachine.org and other sites and books have pointed out, though Esterno's plans never got out beyond the pages of his pamphlet, he did have an influence on other later fliers, most notably Gustave Whitehead (1874-1927) and the Wright Brothers.  It was whitehead's work which from my perspective most closely resembles Esterno's as we can see below in this ca. 1901 photograph, the greatest difference of course being the two engine-driven propellers.

But it was Otto Lilienthal who was one of the most important figures in the development of flight in the nineteenth century, making the first heavier than air gliding flights in what looked quite a bit like bird wings.  (Wilbur Wright said of him; “Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. ... It is true that attempts at gliding had been made hundreds of years before him, and that in the nineteenth century, Cayley, Spencer, Wenham, Mouillard, and many others were reported to have made feeble attempts to glide, but their failures were so complete that nothing of value resulted" as found in  The Aero Club of America Bulletin, September 1912, and also in the article on Lilenthal in Wiki.)   )  He would die in 1896 in a gliding accident, falling to a crumpled death.  We see him in a more successful moment in this fantastic photo:

Lilienthal also influenced the English aviator Percy Pilcher (1866-1899) whose four interesting gliders ( named theBat, the Beetle, the Gull, and the Hawk) led to his engine powered glider--a design left not completed due to Pilcher's own fatal gliding accident in 1899.

But getting back to photographic "firsts" and aviation, the earliest surviving aerial photograph was made by James Wallace Black (1825–1896) whose tethered balloon image of Boston (below) is a splendid 160-year-old image of the city; the first first in this category actually belongs to Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (more popularly known as "Nadar") but that work hasn't survived.

Visualizing Data: 4890 B-17s, 1944

JF Ptak Science Books 

At point point in 1944, there were 4,890 American B-17s in service (as part of an overall artime production of 350,000 aircraft).  This is what 4,890 B-17s might look like:

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

The Message is the Medium--Children and Bombs, London, 1943

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1035

I have no doubt that the history of decorating "bombs" reaches far back into dim history--decorating launched explosives I guess must be as old as the medium itself, though I've gotta say that the earliest photographs of decorated bombs goes back only to WWI.  In "reading" the Illustrated London News for the WWII years I found this image of children in Trafalgar Square fixing savings stamps to 500-pound bomb shells, part of a significant mile-long parade and will-to-win display--the "Wings for Victory" campaign-- illustrating the Empire's aeronautical might hat took place in London on 8 March 1943 and published a week later in the ILN.

The "Wings for Victory" campaign targeted raising 150 million pounds; by this point more than 50 millions had been raised via monies being placed in War Bonds, Savings Bonds, Saving Certificates and Defense Bonds. My guess is that you'd get a sticker saying that you had invested x-pounds--these were the stickers placed on the bombs by the kids, I think. 

It was pointed out in the accompanying text that the bombs would "at the end of the week...be dropped on Germany".