If you had been walking along the streets of eastern Manhattan on 5 May 1969, you would have been greeted by a curious sight. Hovering in the skies above the great metropolis like a giant steel kestrel was one of the most technically advanced military aircraft in history. Instead of rolling down a runway, the plane slowly descended vertically to the ground in a cloud of dust. Once it touched down, its canopy opened and a pilot hopped out and zoomed off towards the Empire State Building in a red motorcycle.
What on Earth was going on? And why was the pilot in such a hurry? The answer is that he was one of the frontrunners in an event called the Daily Mail Transatlantic Air Race, and he was just a matter of miles away from scooping a £6,000 prize for bagging first in class.
The giant steel kestrel – which was, in fact, a Hawker Siddeley Harrier, among the Royal Air Force’s most prized pieces of kit – was just one of the many weird and wonderful vehicles to convey competitors across the Atlantic in the seven-day competition. Tandems, sedan chairs, speedboats and hot-air balloons were all deployed in an attempt to cover the 3,400 miles that separated the start and end points as quickly as possible. With everyone from racing drivers and athletes to millionaire businessmen and high-ranking royals throwing their hats into the ring, it’s hardly surprising that this madcap, high-speed contest made headlines around the world.
Simple but deceptive
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Denne historien er fra Christmas 2023-utgaven av BBC History UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Viking mussels
ELEANOR BARNETT digs into archaeological research to recreate a Viking-cum-AngloSaxon seafood dish from medieval York
Fingers, frog's and fairies
Fortune telling was all the rage in the 16th and 17th centuries, and practitioners would stop at nothing to tap in to the supernatural. Martha McGill tells a story of Highland seers, tarot cards and encounters with the spirit world
Nothing matches being with Alexander the Great on foot in the Hindu Kush
AT OUR LITTLE FILM COMPANY, MAYA VISION, we recently took the decision to digitise all of the rushes of our key films so that we could dispose of hundreds of boxes of tapes that had been kept in storage, throwing out stuff we thought we would never need again.
Library of the dead
Highgate Cemetery, created as a fashionable resting place for wealthy Victorian dead, is a veritable who's who of London's great and good. PETER ROSS roams the avenues of this most atmospheric necropolis
Slavery, exploitation and racism. These tragedies have long dominated histories of Africa. But there's another way to tell this story. And it's one that puts Africans right at the centre of their continent's extraordinarily rich and vibrant past
An 1414, in the Chinese city of Nanjing, a giraffe caused a stir. Amid a crowd of shocked, noble spectators, an official, leading the creature via a rope tied round its face, presented it to China's Yongle emperor. His officials said it was a qilin - an auspicious unicorn - which his sage governance had made appear.
England's forgotten hero
When the Hundred Years' War was reaching a climax, one man was fighting tenaciously to secure the English claim to the French crown. So why, asks Joanna Arman, is Henry V's formidable brother, John, Duke of Bedford, not better known?
HENRY III AND THE MAGNA CARTA THAT MATTERED
King John's sealing of a charter at Runnymede in 1215 is one of the most feted moments of the Middle Ages. Yet, writes David Carpenter, it was the charter issued by his son 10 years later that became fundamental to England's history
Gutenberg publishes a pioneering new book
‘The printing press triggers an information revolution
How empire ruptured rural Britain
We know that enslaved Africans and their descendants suffered in the distant colonies of empire. But, as Corinne Fowler explains, the colonial system also had dire impacts on people in the countryside of the 'motherland'
"I FELT VERY ALONE IN A WORLD GONE HORRIBLY MAD"
It was a moment of possibilities, dislocation and dread. Dan Todman tells the story of the 1.5 million urban Britons evacuated to the countryside at the start of the Second World War
