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Airship Flight to France Newspaper cutting relating to Willows Airship Flight, 4 November 1910
Publisher: Daily Telegraph, The
Loose inside the front fly leaf of album P.14417-R. A newspaper clipping with printed title: 'AIRSHIP FLIGHT TO FRANCE' and large photograph of an airship low in the sky with crowd waving below, captioned: 'START OF THE WILLOWS AIRSHIP FROM WORMWOOD SCRUBS'. A hand-written inscription in black ink (unknown hand and not Glaisher's) along the left side indicates that the clipping came from the _Daily Telegraph_, November 5th, 1910: 'D Tel / Nov 5/10'. The cutting relates to a flight of one of the airships designed and built in Wales by Ernest Thompson Willows in the first decade of the 20th century. The first airship, Willows No. 1 flew in 1905 and the last, the Willows No. 5, in 1913. This particular cutting relates to the flight of the airship Willows No. 3, which first flew on 29 October 1910 over White City in London, England. Willows renamed his airship the _City of Cardiff_ and on the 4 November 1910 left from Wormwood Scrubs for France. It was the first airship to cross the English Channel at night and the first from England to France. The journey was not without problems including dropping the maps over the side during the night and problems with the envelope caused the airship to land at Corbehem near Douai at two o'clock in the morning. With the help of a local French aviator Louis Breguet the airship was repaired and arrived at Paris on 28 December 1910. He celebrated New Year's Eve with a flight around the Eiffel Tower. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willows_airships). The location of the clipping inside one of Glaisher's valentine albums shows that Glaisher continued to have an interest in early flying experiments following his father's pioneering balloon ascents at high altitude of the 1860s. As Julia Poole has outlined, J.W.L. Glaisher's father, the mathematician, astronomer and meteorologist, James Glaisher had made 37 ascents in a hot air balloon between 1862 and 1866. When Glaisher was admitted to his degree in the Senate House at Cambridge University in 1871, the undergraduates sang _Up in a Balloon, Boys_, which had been composed after his father's most famous ascent from Wolverhampton on 5th September 1862, when he and a Mr Coxwell, reached a height of over 30,000 ft. and became unconscious in the process. Glaisher's ceramic collection contains five ballooning plates. See for example, C. 1561-1928. See Poole, Julia, 'J.W.L. Glaisher: a Cambridge Mathematician and Collector; A paper read by Julia Poole at the Linnaean Society Rooms on 10th October, 1992', _English Ceramic Circle Transactions_, Vol.15, Part 2, 1994, p. 161.
Bequeathed by Dr J. W. L. Glaisher, 1928
Method of acquisition: Bequeathed (1928) by Glaisher, J. W. L., Dr
20th Century
Production date:
AD 1910-11-05
Accession number: P.14417-R-L1
Primary reference Number: 215337
Stable URI
Owner or interested party:
The Fitzwilliam Museum
Associated department:
Paintings, Drawings and Prints
This record can be cited in the Harvard Bibliographic style using the text below:
The Fitzwilliam Museum (2024) "Airship Flight to France" Web page available at: https://collection.beta.fitz.ms/id/object/215337 Accessed: 2024-11-24 18:46:28
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{{cite web|url=https://collection.beta.fitz.ms/id/object/215337
|title=Airship Flight to France
|author=The Fitzwilliam Museum|accessdate=2024-11-24 18:46:28|publisher=The
University of Cambridge}}
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<div class="text-center">
<figure class="figure">
<img src="https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/imagestore/pdp/pdp77/P_14417_R_L1_1_201607_amt49_dc2.jpg"
alt="Airship Flight to France"
class="img-fluid" />
<figcaption class="figure-caption text-info">Airship Flight to France</figcaption>
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