Abstract
In 1913 the Daily Mail offered a substantial prize for the first transatlantic flight. The first flights occurred in 1919. Twenty years later the route’s first commercial heavier-than-air service opened. The path from 1913 to 1939 was technologically challenging, but rewarding since it sped up connections between London and the emerging second trading state financial centre of New York. Civil aviation was closely linked to the technologies needed for strategic bombing and long range maritime air patrols. Such technologies emerged first in Imperial Germany although from British theoretical roots, then from developments at the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, all of which spread widely in the late 1920s.
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Notes
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Alan P. Dobson, FDR and Civil Aviation: Flying Strong, Flying Free (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
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Ibid.
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Ibid., 7.
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Bloor, Enigma, 21.
Ibid., 27.
Ibid., 137.
Peter J. Hugill and Veit Bachmann ‘The Route to the Techno-Industrial World-Economy and the Transfer of German Organic Chemistry to America before, during, and immediately after World War One’, Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 3, no. 2 (2005): 159–86.
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C.H. Barnes, Shorts Aircraft since 1900 (Revised edition, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1989), 197.
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Ibid., 213.
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Francillon, McDonnell Douglas, 265, 313–33.
René J. Francillon, Lockheed Aircraft since 1913 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1987), 222–35.
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Ibid., 312–33.
Ibid., 345.
Ibid., 334–43.
John Wegg, General Dynamics Aircraft and their Predecessors (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1990), 66.
William Green, Warplanes of the Third Reich (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 223.
Ibid., 232.
Bowers, Boeing, 240.
Green, Warplanes, 223.
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Dr Peter J. Hugill was born in York, England, and holds degrees from British, Canadian, and American universities. He is currently Professor of Geography at Texas A&M University, where he has taught since 1978, and a Fellow of the Scowcroft Institute in the Bush School of Government & Public Service. He has published five books. His major books are on the relationship between technology, geography, and the world-system. Two are published by Johns Hopkins University Press: World Trade since 1431 in 1993 and Global Communication since 1844 in 1999. His third major book, Cotton in the World Economy since 1771, is due to be published in 2015. His current book project is on the hegemonic struggle between Britain and America in the early twentieth century, an economic struggle between two trading states obscured by the larger, often military struggles that occupied much of the 1900s and that we call the two World Wars. He has also published numerous articles and book chapters. He has served as President both of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors and of the Texas Association of College Teachers.
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Hugill, P.J. Closing the Atlantic gap: the symbiotic development of civil and military aviation technology through the 1930s. J Transatl Stud 13, 235–250 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2015.1058566
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2015.1058566