IDENTIFIERS ----------- id: 215337 accession number: P.14417-R-L1 DATE AUDIT ---------- created: Tuesday 14 February 2017 updated: Friday 26 January 2018 DESCRIPTIVE DATA ---------------- object type: 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. title: newspaper cuttings LICENSING --------- text license status: CC0 image license status: CC-BY-NC-SA OWNERSHIP --------- instutition: The Fitzwilliam Museum department: Paintings, Drawings and Prints creditline: Bequeathed by Dr J. W. L. Glaisher, 1928 STABLE URL ---------- url: https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/id/object/215337 TECHNIQUES ---------- letterpress CATEGORIES ------ category: album category: archive document DATING ------ creation date: 1910 - 1910 creation date earliest: 1910 creation date latest: 1910 culture: 20th Century CREATORS -------- maker: Daily Telegraph, The IMAGES surrogate: large format: jpeg location: https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/imagestore/pdp/pdp77/P_14417_R_L1_1_201607_amt49_dc2.jpg height: 954 pixels width: 1024 pixels surrogate: mid format: jpeg location: https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/imagestore/pdp/pdp77/mid_P_14417_R_L1_1_201607_amt49_dc2.jpg height: 466 pixels width: 500 pixels surrogate: original format: jpeg location: https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/imagestore/pdp/pdp77/P_14417_R_L1_1_201607_amt49_dc2.jpg height: 954 pixels width: 1024 pixels surrogate: preview format: jpeg location: https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/imagestore/pdp/pdp77/preview_P_14417_R_L1_1_201607_amt49_dc2.jpg height: 233 pixels width: 250 pixels surrogate: large format: jpeg location: https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/imagestore/pdp/pdp77/P_14417_R_L1_2_201607_amt49_dc2.jpg height: 910 pixels width: 1024 pixels surrogate: mid format: jpeg location: https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/imagestore/pdp/pdp77/mid_P_14417_R_L1_2_201607_amt49_dc2.jpg height: 444 pixels width: 500 pixels surrogate: original format: jpeg location: https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/imagestore/pdp/pdp77/P_14417_R_L1_2_201607_amt49_dc2.jpg height: 910 pixels width: 1024 pixels surrogate: preview format: jpeg location: https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/imagestore/pdp/pdp77/preview_P_14417_R_L1_2_201607_amt49_dc2.jpg height: 222 pixels width: 250 pixels