Daydream Notes

Hugo and the Sunrise. Alcock was a man of action who had been sidelined for a year as a POW during the First World War. When he returned to England after the war's end, he was sidelined again, this time by his service. The Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service had merged into the Royal Air Force, and were keeping Alcock in barracks while trying to work out who was still needed. Meanwhile, the dream that had sustained Alcock through imprisonment - winning the race to be first to fly nonstop across the Atlantic - was now being pursued by others on both sides of the ocean. Some of these others were old friends of Alcock from his prewar flying days. In 1919, this sidelining got a little worse for Alcock, as the US Navy let it be known they were preparing for a transatlantic flight. Close reading would have shown this effort to be more paper tiger than bald eagle, as far as the race was concerned. Undersecretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt made it clear that the ...

 In Edwardian Britain at the turn of the last century, everybody was, like, super into balloon flying. The upper class, typically, did the flying, but everybody else was welcome to attend the balloon race, meet, fairground attraction, fete, [that one time a riot] , and observe the men ascending into the heavens. Despite it being the pursuit of the rich, the lower classes (if you pardon the pun) loved the sight of a man actually flying. The men flying could soak in the most gentle and settled land through the supernaturally weird perspective afforded by a balloon at 1000 ft. And since the balloon flight was well and truly random, nobody could say where the trip would end. It was an attraction where everybody got a picnic, and a first rate adventure could be had without leaving Buckinghamshire on a summer's day. It even received the ultimate mark of popularity in Victorian/Edwardian Britain: women were forbidden from some aspect of it. Women could go up chaperoned in a ballo...