Historical Planet

Sunday 16 February 2020

Wreck of Zeppelin LZ33

On the night of September 24th, 1916, the Zeppelin L33 was brought down by the combined efforts of the London defenses and 2nd Lieut. A de B Brandon of 39 Squadron, flying his BE2c Landing in an almost intact state in a field near the Essex village of Little Wigborough. It provided an ideal opportunity (and the first) for British aviation scientists to study the intricacies and details of Zeppelin technology at first hand.

The information gathered was then used to improve the designs and structure of the ‘R’ series airships that appeared at the end of the war. The account (unsigned) of the wrecking of the Zeppelin L33 is the official report, written at the time and can be found in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, London.

The description of the wrecked ship is extracted from “The Great War’ by H.W. Wilson & J.A. Hamerton which appeared in February 1917. Although lengthy it is interesting for its detail, available for public release only six months after the ship’s crash.

The Wrecking of the Zeppelin L33

There can be little doubt that during the bombardment over East London one propeller had been damaged and a shell passed through her body. She also began to lose gas, though not rapidly, through punctures caused by shell splinters. In getting out of the rays of searchlights at Kelvedon Common she attempted to climb rapidly and appeared to release a smoke cloud. At about 12.30 she was attacked by 2nd Lieut.

Captain A. de B. Brandon, Royal Flying Corps, but his bullets failed in their purpose of bringing her down. The majority of prisoners of the L33 were vague as to the airplane attack which passed off more or less unnoticed by them but were unanimous that the ship was pierced by a shell shortly after leaving the river i.e. over East London.

The aviator continued his close pursuit of the airship which at 12.35 am passed south of Ongar, and at 12.45 am north of Chelmsford. There she began to jettison the cargo. At Broomfield spare parts, two aluminum cartridge boxes and a leather machine gun case were thrown out and at Boreham, a mile or two further, a machine gun followed. At 12.55 am the airship was between Witham and Maldon.

She now began to labor considerably as her height and speed diminished. About 1:00 am she dropped her second machine gun on the grounds of Monckton’, Wickham Bishops. A third machine gun followed at GateHouse Farm, Tiptree. About 1.15 am she went out to sea at West Mersea, but her commander, who in view of her condition, preferred to be taken prisoner rather than to run the risk of drowning with his crew like the men of the L15.

Therefore, almost immediately returned to the coast, and at 1.20 am brought his ship down to earth in a field between Little Wigborough and Peldon, some three miles inland, northeast of Mersea. There a slight explosion took place and the ship took fire, but owing to her great loss of gas comparatively little damage was inflicted upon her, only the outer casing is being destroyed and the front gondola suffering severe damage.

The framework partly collapsed amidships when the casing took fire. She probably dropped a good many bombs (HE) at the mouth of the River Thames on the way over as the number dropped by her in this country, 26, is much less than that usually carried by an airship of her type’.

The Wreck of the Zeppelin L33

The Super Zeppelin was of immense bulk, little inferior to the Lusitania. It displaced 50 tons of weight of air and contained 2,000,000 cu. ft. of gas. Its outer surface was not of goldbeater’s’ skin which in the past was commonly employed for airships but of finely woven Manchester cotton.

On this cotton, delicate wavy lines were printed in black or dark blue. The color effect of the envelope seen from a distance was grey. Closely examined it looked like newspaper covered with the very fine print of a microscopic font.

This material was perhaps adopted to make the airship less visible, though it is also possible that the lines may have been printed to make the fabrics resemble shirting and to enable them to pass the blockade. It was not varnished or treated in any way except, it may be, by a solution rendering it non-flammable. It played in the airship the same part as the thin outer steel plating of a seafaring vessel.

It was tough and very hard to tear, while it would offer no resistance to artillery projectiles unless they had a very sensitive fuse. As the outer steel plating of a sea-going vessel is carried on frames so was the cotton covering of the airship. But whereas the frames of a sea vessel are of steel and are ponderous, in the airship they were of the lightest metal available, an alloy of aluminum, and of a latticework design, with an air of extraordinary fragility about them that made them seem almost fantastic.

Besides these frames there, actually were longitudinal girders running the length of the ship. The enormous skeleton of metal 680ft long and 72ft beam covered an acre of ground and looked as large as a fairy-like Crystal Palace. In shape, the hull was streamlined, which means that the forward end was comparatively blunt and was larger in diameter than the mid-ships portion.

Astern it tapered down and terminated in a fine point at the tail. The general shape of the hull was that of a cigar with 25 sides. In this respect, it differed from the earlier Zeppelins, which were not streamlined and had a bow-shaped similar to the stern, and 17 or 18 sides. The Super Zeppelin’s hull was far more favorable to high speeds.

It seems possible that she may have attained 80mph in fine weather conditions although her average speed would not have been more than 50mph. Within the great cigar-shaped hull were 24 gas-bags made of silk fabric coated with India rubber varnish and gas-proof. Each bag was shaped like a Cheddar Cheese and probably each was fitted with valves, one of which was hand-operated, while the other, an automatic valve for releasing gas when the pressure rose dangerously, was placed in the side of the hull.

Passing through the gas bags by a gas-tight valve and running from end to end of the hull was a great hawser. From these radial wires were carried to each aluminum transverse frame, like the spokes of a cycle wheel run from the hub to the rim of the wheel.

These radial wires kept the gas-bags apart and when the great central cable was tightened – for which a very simple device was fitted – the tension of them was tautened too, and the whole of the framework of the ship braced, exactly as the sails of a sailing ship are braced at sea by tightening the stays and rigging.

The great cable, the existence of which no-one in this country suspected, thus served to keep the hull of the ship together and to relieve the strain on it when it was exposed to gun, fire or wind. On the top of the hull forward was a small platform on which were two 5ins guns, firing a little shell of nearly a pound in weight. Right astern, not far from the apex of the tail, was another station for a single 5ins gun, in a yet lonelier and more dangerous position.

These were the weapons to which the designers of the Super Zeppelin trusted for repelling airplane attacks. These remote stations in the great rustling hulk were reached by ladders or by climbing a catwalk that ran along the keel. This walk gave a means of passing from end to end of the hull, but it was so perilously narrow that it must have strained any but the steadiest nerves. The width of the gangway was only Sins.

Thinnest plywood laid directly on the girder framing. If a man missed his footing he would shoot through the flimsy cotton cover and fall to a certain death, though there was a handhold in the form of a rope to enable him to grope his way in the darkness of the ship’s interior In this dim alleyway, abaft the forward gondola was the bomb chamber where were hooks for 60 bombs, which may have weighed one and a half tons or more.

The Zeppelin hooks were electrically operated by the sixty buttons on the murder keyboard which was placed in the forward gondola. In the form, the buttons resembled bell pushes. When the button was pressed the hook released the bomb, a lever was previously moved which opened a sliding shutter that allowed the bomb to fall.

This device was the crudest possible, and it made accurate aiming out of the question. Anyone who examined it would realize why Zeppelins never hit their targets. A lavatory was also placed in the cat-walk but there were no arrangements for cooking. The gondolas were four in number. Two of these were like large boats about fifty feet long, placed forward and astern.

The two others were smaller and placed abreast on either side of the hull, nearer the center of the ship. The forward one contained the Captain’s cabin with wheels controlling the two rudders for horizontal and vertical movement and other controls for the petrol tanks and water ballast. The gondolas were covered with fabric but had non-flammable celluloid windows.

Abaft the Captain’s cabin was the wireless room which was little more than a cupboard, six feet by four feet and abaft that again was a 240hp Mercedes Maybach Engine with dynamo and two machine guns. The engine drove a propeller immediately behind the gondola and underneath the hull. The two small amidships gondolas each contained a similar engine driving a similar propeller with dynamo and machine gun.

The large gondola astern carried three engines, two of which drove propellers at the side of the airship by level gearing, and a third propeller astern of the gondola and underneath the hull. Each engine was fitted with a dynamo and in the gondola, there were two machine guns. Thus there were six engines each of 240hp, totaling 1440hp in all, 6 dynamos, 6 propellers (four under and two at the sides of the airship) and six machine guns, besides that three. 5ins weapons at the bow and stern.

The petrol tanks of the Super Zeppelin carried 2,000 gallons and were placed in or near the cat-walk so as to keep them well away from the engines. There were many ingenious contrivances, among them an apparatus for releasing the mooring rope by pressing a button. The exhaust from the engines appeared to be carried out through the hull so as to keep the gas warm when cruising in the frightful cold of the upper air. A smoke producing apparatus was fitted.

Like other Zeppelin, this airship was probably equipped with an observation car capable of containing one man which could be lowered 1,000 yards and was connected with the airship by a telephone cable. The report that the gondolas were armored was explained by the appearance of the aluminum of which they were made, and which looked like burnished steel.

The metal was very tough sheeting about a fifth of an inch thick and was strongly stayed. The gondolas appeared watertight and would probably have floated but for the heavyweights they contained the crew numbered 23 men of all sizes and not chosen for their lightness.

They wore very heavy and warm clothing and many of them had special knowledge of East Anglia, indeed one had worked in Colchester. The engines were fitted with silencers and despite these, the noise they made was very great and was noticed all over the place that they landed. Such were these ‘Super Zeppelins’ of which the first seems to have been completed in June. Zeppelin L33 on her tanks bore the mark: ‘H14 7 16’ which probably stood for ‘Herbst (summer) 14th day, 7th month (July) 1916.

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Wednesday 12 February 2020

Samuel Eliot Morison -- American Scholar and Historian

Like the Greek historian Thucydides and the American historian Francis Parkman, Samuel Eliot Morison writes his books as much as possible from firsthand experiences. Indirect contact with the events that he recorded in his monumental History of United States Naval Operations in World War II.

Early Life

He was born on July 9. 1887 to John Holmes and Emily Marshall (Eliot) Morison in Boston, Massachusetts at 44 Brimmer Street. That was in a house that his grandfather, Samuel Eliot, a historian and educator, had built. His other grandfather, Nathaniel H. Morison, originally from Peterborough, New Hampshire, had been the first provost of the Peabody Institute in Baltin.

As Morison has related in his autobiographical notes for 20th Century Authors (H.W. Wilson Company, First Supplement, 1955), he was reared in "an atmosphere where scholarship, religion and social graces were happily blended." He attended Noble's School in Boston and St. Paul's in Concord, New Hampshire in preparation for Harvard University, which he entered in 1904.

Charles Homer Haskins and Edward Channing were among the distinguished scholars and professors at Harvard who aroused Morison's interest in history. Receiving his B.A. degree cum laude in June 1908, he went at once to France for a year's study, at the University of Grenoble during the summer and at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques in Paris during the winter.

Throughout his career, Morison has returned to Harvard repeatedly. In 1909 he took his M.A. degree there, and he remained at the university for the next three years (while assisting as a history instructor at Radcliffe College) to work for his Ph.D. degree, which was conferred in 1913.

Scholar and Historian

He gathered his material under the actual stress of battle as a commissioned officer in the Navy. Morison's meticulous scholarship has not interfered with his desire to avoid pedantry and to reach many contemporary readers. He is widely known for his biographies of Christopher Columbus (1942) and John Paul Jones (1959), both of which won Pulitzer Prizes.

Several of his other books have established him as an authority on early American history and on the history of Harvard University, where he taught for almost forty years. New England has been the earliest, the most profound, and the most prolonged of the several major influences on Samuel Eliot Morison's life and writings.

He had followed the suggestion of Professor Albert Bushnell Hart in choosing one of his own ancestors as the subject of his dissertation: his first book, The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist, 1765-1848, was published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1913. After another trip to Europe, in 1913, which he spent partly in the on-the-scene study of the Balkan Wars, Morison taught history briefly at the University of California.

He joined the Harvard faculty in 1915 as an instructor, but three years later enlisted as a private in the Army. Instead of returning to the classroom at the end of World War I, he served as an attaché to the Russian division of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace and was also a delegate on the Baltic Commission of the Paris Peace Conference.

I unsympathetic towards the Treaty of Versailles, he resigned in July 1919 and went back to Harvard in the fall. The courses that Morison taught at Harvard included one on the history of Massachusetts. His enthusiasm for the subject led to The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 (Houghton, 1921).

Which he ranks among his most successful books. It is a result of both scholarly research and the personal observations that he made while enjoying his hobby of sailing up and down the coast of New England. In its fusion of the authentic and the interesting. It is an early fulfillment and illustration of the aims that he set forth in his pamphlet History as a Literary Art, published in 1946 and reprinted in his collection of essays By Land and By Sea (Knopf, 1953).

In 1922 Oxford University invited Morison to become the first incumbent of its new chair of American history. During the next three years, while teaching at Oxford as Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History, he worked on his Oxford History of the United States, 1792-1917, a textbook that met the needs of British readers of American history.

Later, in collaboration with Henry Steele Commager, he enlarged his book into The Growth of the American Republic (Oxford, 1930; fourth revised edition! 1950). Home again at Harvard, where he accepted a professorship in history in 1925, Morison turned to more local subjects. He occupied himself in Builders of the Bay Colony (Houghton, 1930) with early New England and the culture that the Puritans had brought to America.

In 1926 Harvard had appointed him the official historian for its 300th anniversary. By the time the tercentenary was celebrated in 1936, the Harvard University Press had published a book that he had edited called The Development of Harvard University since the Inauguration of President Eliot, 1869-1929 (1930); most of Morison's multivolume Tercentennial History of Harvard College and University, 1636-1936.

Moreover, his more popular survey Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936. The Tercentennial History brought him both the Jusserand Medal and Columbia University's Loubat Prize. Professor Morison deplores the lack of knowledge of foreign languages that he finds in many young historical researchers. He told Earl W. Foell of the Christian Science Monitor on September 29, 1960.

That when he encouraged his students to work on the discovery of America in celebration of the 450th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' discovery of America, they shied away from the subject because of language difficulties: "Nobody was left but poor me to do anything on Columbus."

Following the example of Francis Parkman, who had prepared for his Pioneers of France in the New World (1865) by retracing the routes of the French explorers and living among the Indians, Morison tried to approximate the experiences of Columbus on his voyages to America.

Between 1937 and 1940 he made four trips in sailing vessels in the waters. That Columbus had explored, crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic in 1939-40 as commodore of the Harvard Columbus Expedition. Several of Morison's major books grew out of these adventurous investigations.

The Second Voyage of Christopher Columbus from Cadiz to Hispaniola and the Discovery of the Lesser Antilles (Oxford, 1939); Portuguese Voyages to America in the Fifteenth Century (Harvard. 1940); and Admiral of the Ocean Sea; A Life of Christopher Columbus (Little, 1942).

His work on Columbus, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 1943. was hailed as a monument of scholarship. The comments of Lincoln Colcord in the New York Herald Tribune Books (March 1, 1942) reflected the opinion of many reviewers: ''Combining extreme erudition and the art of good writing in almost equal quantities.

The narrative flows like a superb novel, while all the facts and observations are buttressed and re-buttressed with four centuries of references until there is hardly anything left to say." Admiral of the Ocean Sea proved to be an excellent recommendation for Morison when he set out in early 1942 to interest President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his proposal to prepare "a full, accurate and early record" of the part played by the United States Navy in World War II.

Morison has said that the welcome that sailors everywhere gave him as the biographer of Columbus was an even greater advantage to him than his commission as a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, which he received in May 1942. Although he held the title of the historian of naval operations and was given a staff of officers and access to naval documents, he was not an official historian for the Navy.

Beginning in July 1942 with a convoy trip across the Atlantic, during the next three years, Morison covered almost all the battle areas and important naval operations of the war. He was an eyewitness to the North Africa landings in the fall of 1942, participated in the Central Solomon’s campaign in the summer of 1943 and later in the Gilbert Islands assault, visited the beachheads at Salerno and other areas of the European theater.

However, in 1945 saw the battle for Okinawa from the bridge of the flagship Tennessee. He served on some dozen ships during the war, earning seven Battle Stars and the Legion of Merit with combat clasp. Much of Morison's naval history was based on the notes of facts and impressions that he jotted down with a pencil on yellow paper during interviews and battles.

He filed these away, with official reports and other documents, to await the end of the war. He did not begin to publish his History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Little) until he could examine enemy records. Working for the most part at an office in Harvard's Widener Library, he produced about one volume every year between 1947.

Later Years

When the Battle of the Atlantic: 1939-43 appeared, and 1960, when Victory in the Pacific, 1945 closed the fourteen-volume series. (Victory in the Pacific is the last of the narrative volumes. A fifteenth volume contains a cumulative index and list of errata and various annexes.) Because Morison's work is his own history.

Rather than the authorized or official record of the Navy, he has room for personal judgment in his treatment of Navy heroes and for his own conclusions in considering such questions as the justification of dropping the atom bomb on Japan. Hanson W. Baldwin, the military editor of the New York Times, expressed the view in the rimes Book Review (November 6, 1960).

That among the minor defects of Morison's cycle was an occasional indulgence in "sweeping generalizations impossible to prove or disprove." He found, however, that "the virtues are self-evident a combination of painstaking research and clear dramatic writing in a sweeping pageant of action." During the fifteen postwar years that Morison winked on his naval history he wrote eight other books.

Also, including The Story of the Old Colony of New Plymouth (Knopf, 1956) and Intellectual Life of Colonial New England (N.Y. Univ. Press, 1956), as well as John Paul Jones; A Sailor's Biography (Little, 1959), for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize in biography. Columbia University awarded him its Bancroft Prize in 1949 for the third volume of his history of World War II naval operations.

The Rising Sun in the Pacific, 1931-42 (1948), and in 1962 he received the Gold Medal for History and Biography of the National Institute of Arts and Letters for the excellence of his work as a whole. His autobiographical One Boy's Boston was published by Houghton Mifflin Company in the autumn of 1962.

Since August 1951 Morison has been on the Navy's honorary retirement list in the rank of rear admiral. Since 1955 he has also been retired from teaching at Harvard, having become Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, Emeritus, after holding that professorship in active service for almost fifteen years.

Semiretired as a historian, however, he began working on his Oxford History of the American People before the final volume of his World War II cycle was off the press in 1965. Morison has also continued to add to the scores of articles that he has written for scholarly journals and for more popular periodicals like the Saturday Evening Post.

He has been a member of the editorial boards of the New England Quarterly and the American Neptune; president of the American Antiquarian Society, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and the American Historical Society; and a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy, and the Royal Academy of History in Madrid.

His many other professional affiliations have included the chairmanship of the council of historians of the Institute of Early American History at Williamsburg, Virginia, trusteeship of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, and vice-presidency of the Naval Records Society. Many colleges and universities — Yale, Oxford, Notre Dame, and Columbia, among others, have awarded Morison honorary degrees.

He is a member of the Charitable Irish Society and of several clubs, including the St. Botolph and Somerset in Boston and the Athenaeum in London. His church is the Episcopal. For some forty years he had been a member of the Democratic party, but in 1952 he voted Republican in support of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Samuel Eliot Morison was six feet one inch tall and has the hale look of a seagoing man. The dignified, somewhat reserved manner generally associated with a Boston Brahmin. Samuel Eliot Morison and Elizabeth Shaw Greene, a painter, were married on May 28, 1910, and had four children, Elizabeth Gray (Mrs. Edward Spingarn), Emily Marshall (Mrs. Brooks Beck), Peter Greene, and Catharine. Morison's first wife died in 1945, and in December 1949 he married Priscilla Barton of Baltimore.

She has accompanied him on his travels to the Far East to revisit the scenes of World War II and on the trips, he took to collect material for his biography of John Paul Jones. She also shares Morison's hobby of sailing his yawl out of Northeast Harbor on Maine's Mount Desert Island, his lifelong favorite vacation resort, which he celebrated in The Story of Mount Desert Island (Atlantic-Little, 1960).

Many his books are Mariner 1955, Freedom in Contemporary Society in 1956, Old Colony of New Playmouth in 1956, William Hickling Prescott in 1958, Nathaniel Holmes Morison in 1957, A Sailor’s Biography in 1959, Story of Mount Desert Island, Maine in 1960, One Boy's Boston, in 1962, Introduction to Whaler Out of New Bedford (1962), and A History of the Constitution of Massachusetts in 1963.

Honors and Awards

Samuel Eliot Morison received 11 honorary doctoral degrees and many military honors, literary prizes, foreign and national awards. The list includes Balzan Prize, Legion of Merit, two Pulitzer Prizes, two Bancroft Prizes and Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1979, the frigate USS Samuel Eliot Morison was launched, in the honor of S.E. Morison by the U.S. Further, there is a bronze statue of Morison depicting in sailor’s oilskin.

Death

In 1955, when he retired from Harvard University and devoted his rest of life for writing purposes. His home otherwise is still Boston's Brimmer Street. He died on May 15, 1976, at the age of 88 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. You can read the bibliography of Samuel Eliot Morison on Wikipedia.

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Tuesday 11 February 2020

NORTHERN BOULEVARD, LOOKING EAST TOWARD 82nd STREET, SEPTEMBER 13, 1933.

The main shopping district of Jackson Heights. The apartment house at the right, erected in 1914, was the first garden-apartment building built by the Queensboro Corporation. The Boulevard Theater, the first theater in Jackson Heights, is visible just ahead. (Photo by Frederick J. Weber; The Queens Borough Public Library.)

NORTHERN BOULEVARD, LOOKING EAST TOWARD 82nd STREET, SEPTEMBER 13, 1933.

MAURICE’S WOODS, ca. 1900.

Maurice’s Woods was the name given by Maspeth old-timers to a 72-acre forested tract bounded by what was to become Maurice Avenue, 66th Street, Jay Avenue, and the Long Island Expressway.

James Maurice, a very prominent New York lawyer, moved to Maspeth in 1840 and built a mansion on the south side of Maspeth Avenue about 800 feet west of the railroad tracks.

In 1850 he was elected to the Assembly and in 1852 to Congress. In 1882 he donated the Woods to the Episcopal church as a site for a seminary, but the moving of the diocesan see to Garden City put an end to the project.

For years the woods were enjoyed as a park and nature preserve by Maspethites, while houses grew up on all sides. Finally, in October 1920 the church sold off the track for development, and by 1922 streets and houses had wiped out all traces of the former green oasis. (Courtesy of The Queens Borough Public Library, Long Island Division.)

MAURICE’S WOODS, ca. 1900.

Friday 7 February 2020

California Style Paddle Manufactured by Denver's Edward Gallatin in 1862

Pistol Model of 1842-54

Johannes Havelius - The Man Who Map the Moon

Johannes Hevelius published the first detailed map of the surface of the Moon in 1647. He was born on 28 January 1611 in Danzig (Gdansk), now a city in Poland. His German name was Jan Hewel, Latinized to Hevelius. Titled Selenographia, the map was based on his own astronomical observations from the roof of his house.

Like many 17th-century astronomers who supported themselves financially with another occupation, Hevelius represents an era when no distinction was made between accomplished amateurs and professionals in this science. Johannes Hevelius was a successful merchant and city councilor and mayor of Danzig.

His rooftop observatory, built-in 1641 by his three connected houses. His splendid instruments, books were destroyed by fire in 1679 including a massive Keplerian telescope of 150ft focal length. Many of his observations on star locations and comet paths were gathered and published posthumously by his wife in Uranographia (1690). Mapping the Moon in the mid-17th century represented a clear departure from the pre-Copernican view that celestial bodies were made of completely different materials than terrestrial ones.

With designations of mountain ranges and the incorrect designation of flat plains as mares or seas, the astronomical community came to accept that Earth, Moon, and the planets were similar in form, an indication of the diminution of the special place in the universe previously assumed to be held by Earth and its human inhabitants. Further, he successfully unearthed four comments in 1652, 1661, 1672 and 1677. These discoveries were published in his thesis which believes such bodies revolve around the Sun in parabolic paths.

Johannes Havelius considered himself as being a citizen of the Polish world. Because he believed he has worked for the glory of his country and for the good of science. Also, he was an exorbitant hard worker, while not boasting much, executed his work with most effort per his abilities.

He was famous due to his brilliant caliber in astronomy and regarded as “the founder of lunar topography”. His father and mother were wealthy German merchants. In 1660, Polish Queen Marie Louise Gonzaga visit his observatory and hugely applaud his efforts. His health was deteriorated by the loss of his instruments and books, so he died on 28 January 1687 at the age of 76 in Danzig (his hometown).

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Saturday 1 February 2020

1902 White House reconstruction discovery of an icehouse originally constructed under Thomas Jefferson.

An airplane visit to an Eskimo village, 1938

Coronation of Wilhelm I as King of Prussia, Königsberg, 18th October 1861

the first German Emperor from 18 January 1871 to his death in 1888, the first Head of State of a united Germany. Perhaps, but a mustachioed man named Otto would like to have a word with you.

TBD Devastators on the deck of the USS Enterprise. 1942.

Corporal Louis B. Swingle standing in front of a wall map

Corporal Louis B. Swingle standing in front of a wall map, between two ladders, in the United States 8th Air Force headquarters operations room, possibly outside London, England during World War II - 1940s

16-year-old Willi Hübner being awarded the Iron Cross for bravery under fire, March 1945

Willi Hübner was a 16-year-old boy who served as a messenger in the Führer Grenadier Division and was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery under fire during the successful German attempt to recapture the town of Lauban during the Upper Silesian Offensive. He would survive the war and died in 2011.

Civil War veteran poses with a fighter jet, 1955

Civil War veteran poses with a fighter jet, 1955 - “Uncle Bill” Lundy claimed to be the last living Confederate Civil War veteran in Florida, and spent his 107th birthday at Eglin AFB, Florida in January 1955.

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Statue of David by Michelangelo

Statue of David by Michelangelo, encased in bricks to prevent damage from bombs, during world war 2