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Episode 3 - Flying into a Bunker (Part 1)
34 Plays6 months ago
Did you know that Canada once had the ability to manufacturer planes that were rather cool and technologically advanced for their time? How the Eaton's department store chain is connected to a famous World War I pilot? Or that Zellers once made excellent commercials which are still useful for censoring out when Heather and Tamarack say a little too much?
This is part one of a three part series!
This episode's news:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-trudeau-whacko-1.7189600
https://globalnews.ca/news/10460920/house-of-commons-poilievre-wacko-unparliamentary/
Heritage Minute:
https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/avro-arrow
Shawinigan Moments is written and recorded on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Stó:lō (Stolo), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) first nations in what is otherwise called Vancouver.
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Transcript
Choosing the Right Clip to Play
00:00:00
Speaker
All right, well, I don't know. So Tamarack, what the hell is this clip? Which one am I playing? Is it two or one? That's a good question. All right, I'm gonna go and gamble on two.
Kite Power: A Humorous Exploration
00:00:17
Speaker
The electrician who captures lightning from the sky runs it through a copper wire to illuminate this room and light up the world is not ordinary. What the fuck?
00:00:29
Speaker
Yes. The future Prime Minister of Canada, God help us, thinks that electricity comes from the sky. Oh yeah. Okay. This is...
00:00:47
Speaker
Like, kite power is a thing. I don't know how good it is, but it is a thing. He just thinks, you know, a light bulb goes out and the electrician shows up with a fucking key attached to a kite and is like, oh, I'm going to fix this, don't worry.
00:01:06
Speaker
Imagine like being the electrician that has to deal with all the kites. Like you have like, you know, a billion kites because that's probably how many you need to power a single home. And he's like, oh, fuck, I got to go out here and deal with this shit and gets tangled up in the rope or whatever.
00:01:23
Speaker
Yeah, if we actually drop this in the real recording on the YouTube, I'm going to put a picture of early 1900s telephone wires and electrical wires. It'd be like that, but all over the fucking sky.
00:01:43
Speaker
You know, looking up sometimes in some places I've been to, like, you'll just see all the power lines. And, you know, it's fine. But then, like, I think in this case here, it'd be sort of like you have a ton of crows that fly over and your sky gets black. And in this case here, it's just a shitload of kites. Like, I don't even know how you'd keep them all separate. That's why I'm going to show that's why I want to show a picture of of how it used to be. I think I think we're just going to start the episode.
00:02:11
Speaker
The secret of how you keep them separate. I don't like this. What is this? You don't. We're not going back to that era of telegraph wires or whatever the fuck this is. I've seen this image before. We're not going back to this. Yeah, it'd be that with kites. That's the future that our brave Prime Minister Milhouse wants for us. We're starting the episode. I don't care.
00:02:41
Speaker
Okay. One, two, three.
Introduction to Schwinnigan Moments Podcast
00:02:48
Speaker
Welcome to the Schwinnigan Moments podcast. My name is Heather and I use she, they pronouns. Hi, my name is Tamarack. I use they, them, or it's pronouns and also torment Heather with weird clips. Yeah, we're not going to be like Kite fucking power. I can't believe this.
00:03:09
Speaker
Well, maybe I'll put that in the episode. We'll see. But how are you doing besides torturing me?
Origins of May Day and Labor Day
00:03:17
Speaker
I'm doing pretty good, actually. It is May Day. It's International Day of Labor, the original Labor Day, so it's a good time. Am I correct in my understanding that Labor Day is where it is because the United States and Canada didn't want to follow the rest of the world and just kind of stick the middle finger to the labor movements?
00:03:40
Speaker
Oh, yeah, I kind of regret not having a direct piece on this. But yeah, like, May Day as like International Labor Day has a very radical history. And, and Labor Day being in September is a way to kind of stamp that shit out. Yeah, sounds normal. Doesn't work. There's just two Labor Days now. Like fuck you capitalists.
00:04:05
Speaker
Fair enough. Well, you know what? Let's just go to the fucking news. A
Pierre Poliev's Parliamentary Antics
00:04:18
Speaker
future Prime Minister and Milhouse impersonator Pierre Poliev got kicked out of Parliament. Cool. What did he do? Did he touch the mace? No, he did not touch the mace. Yet.
00:04:33
Speaker
Um, he, uh, he got kicked out for un-parliamentary language. Uh, specifically he called, uh, he called out, uh, Justin Trudeau for having WACO policies and being a WACO prime minister. And the Speaker of the House stopped parliament and asked him to, you know, withdraw that statement because you're not allowed to directly attack people in parliament. You're not even supposed to directly like address people in parliament. You're supposed to talk to the Speaker.
00:05:01
Speaker
Yeah, for our American listeners, the way kind of Westminster Parliament systems work is everybody talks to the speaker. You don't talk to each other. That's supposed to make things a little bit more kind between various blocks and parties. It doesn't work, but that's the idea.
00:05:23
Speaker
And I'm just trying to remember the last time somebody got booted from parliament and I, it might've been more recent this, but I do remember in 2002, I think it was Keith Martin.
00:05:35
Speaker
He was a Canadian alliance member at the time. He later crossed the floor to the Liberals, but he did something with the mace, and the mace is another object. The speaker is supposed to represent the crown. The mace is a symbol from the crown saying that Parliament can actually pass laws, the mace being a symbol of wielding power.
00:05:54
Speaker
Yeah, no mace, no laws. No mace, no laws. And in Canada, we haven't lost our mace in a brothel yet, but in Australia, they did it once. Story, is that even a true story? I don't know, actually. I've heard this before, and now I'm like, I don't really know Australian history that much, but I've heard when Melbourne was originally the capital, somebody lost the mace in a brothel or something. Anyway, that aside, because this is not an Australian history podcast, there are a lot of things you're not supposed to do. And if the speaker who represents the crown
00:06:23
Speaker
uh, says you're out of, uh, line, um, you are. Yeah. So the, the, the clip, and I might play, I might inject this later or we might inject this later in editing, but the clip, like what the exchange between Poliev and the speaker is like the most frustrating thing as you're watching the speaker trying to be calm and collected as he's asking, you know, he's asking Pierre to withdraw his statement to which he stands up and says, I'll replace Wacko with extremist. It's like,
00:06:53
Speaker
No withdraw the statement stand up again, I'll replace wacko but with radical No, just withdraw the goddamn statement to which he finally says. Okay. I withdraw the statement
00:07:05
Speaker
But I also call him a radical, and then he got booted out. Yeah, no kidding. The thing is about Pierre, and I'm going to keep this short because I don't really want to talk about Pierre on this podcast that much. But he has never worked in the private sector. He's never worked in an actual. I shouldn't say that he's had two jobs that didn't involve being a conservative dickhead. The first job is that he worked as a paper boy for the Calgary Herald.
00:07:30
Speaker
And then the second job he had was working as a collections agent for, I think it was TELUS. And in both cases, he worked those jobs as a teenager. And then by the time he was like 18 or 19, he got a job working for some Alberta conservative rag that isn't the Western standard, believe it or not.
00:07:52
Speaker
eventually managed to get further and further into politics and joined the Canadian Alliance, made friends with Ezra Levant, surprise, surprise, and has been touring it up since what, 2000, actually since 1998, I think is when he was first showed up on the scene. Like he's he, anyone who votes for him thinking that he's there for them is completely misguided. But I don't really want to get into this rant because I don't, they have something more cool that's
00:08:18
Speaker
Actually, no, you have something ridiculous to talk about, but anyway, I
Controversies Around Pierre Poliev
00:08:23
Speaker
hate Pierre. Ester Levant is actually quite topical. Thanks for bringing that up. Oh, for fuck's sake. This exchange happened basically as, like, this all was part of Pierre deflecting from being himself called out for refusing to disavow
00:08:45
Speaker
white nationalist groups, Diaghlon, all those fuckers, because he was attending a bunch of acts-the-tax rallies out in the Maritimes. I remember seeing this in the news. Yeah, basically, unless he doesn't disavow any white supremacist group, unless they say slanderous things about his wife, which appears to be his position.
00:09:05
Speaker
Yeah, so that's the first thing I wanted to bring up. The second thing I wanted to bring up is post media, they're reporting on this is asking the really hard hitting questions.
00:09:18
Speaker
Is Wacko even on parliamentary? Was it even a bad thing to say? It's an ad hominin. I don't fucking care. It's an ad hominin. You're not supposed to use ad hominins in parliament. Well, okay. Again, they're asking... This is the thing that they wanted to ask, not...
00:09:38
Speaker
Hey, is it kosher that our guy, Pierre Poliev, is cozying up to all these right-wing, directly fascist groups? They want to know if—is the speaker right or wrong with this? I miss the days when Post Media was actually—the papers under Post Media was owned by Izzy Asner, and he had a huge fetish for Jean-Claude Chen. So, yeah.
00:10:03
Speaker
Anyway, so fucking Millhouse over here is probably going to be the next prime minister and that sucks. Yeah. If you're voting Tory, you're making a huge mistake. He's not there for you.
00:10:14
Speaker
uh yeah no uh i think i provided you a relevant clip of his working class origins and knowledge if you want to play it actually i since you have put two like audio recordings here i'll play the other one the waitress who balances 12 plates on a trade serves 12 tough customers at once
00:10:35
Speaker
works a double shift and comes home with enough energy to teach her kids math and balances her budget on a minimum wage salary, she is not ordinary, she is extra ordinary. Oh yeah, okay, I fucking love this clip. Like, okay, this and the other clip are on his, like, official campaign, like,
00:10:55
Speaker
like socials, like they're easy to find, get undeleted. This and the electrician one are part of the same speech. This one I find specifically infuriating, because yes, I agree that a waitress who can provide for her family on a minimum wage salary is exceptional, because in the same way that a unicorn is exceptional, it's a mythical fucking creature.
00:11:21
Speaker
You know, you know, if he thinks that like, if he thinks that a waitress can live on a minimum wage,
00:11:29
Speaker
Um, I think he should too. Yeah, honestly, I am, I am, I am 100% on team, uh, members of parliament and members of legislative assembly should make the minimum wage for the riding that they represent. Yeah. There's something to be said about that. I don't know how that would ultimately work out because then God knows, I don't know where I'm going to go with this, but this, this is depressing. But hey, it's Mayday.
00:11:58
Speaker
It's May Day. Let's move on.
Canadian Aviation History and the Avro Arrow
00:12:01
Speaker
I want to talk about planes. So I have a clip and I need to play. Although the government canceled the project and destroyed the prototypes, the Avro Arrow remains for Canada a world benchmark in aerospace achievement.
00:12:19
Speaker
All right. Go chats. Go chats. Go Winnipeg chats, right? Although this was not in Winnipeg. That was a no. No, it was not. That was a clip from the moment about the Avro Aero, a jet interceptor designed and manufactured in Canada. This project would ultimately be canceled by John Diefenbaker and his progressive Conservative government.
00:12:42
Speaker
Processive, progressive. However, progressive, what? Look, uh, Diefenbaker had a strictly bunkers only cold floor policy. No, no, no, no, no, trust me. We're not even close to talking about the bunkers.
00:13:00
Speaker
We're not even close. Different bunkers need to be their own like episode. No, that's that's bonus episode material. We'll never see that as an actual as an actual clip. Good fucking Lord. Let's get into the topic of flight and its role in Canada leading up to this moment. So so I have a simple question for you. I have no idea where I'm going with this
Human Flight Myths and Technological Progress
00:13:22
Speaker
one. This is this. It's been a long day.
00:13:24
Speaker
I have to ask you this question. What is flying? Flying is an abomination by which we defy the the will of gravity and and use air to lift us off of planet earth but only briefly. I was going to say like you could have said like
00:13:43
Speaker
Humans have only managed to fly on their own on our own court. No, it's not really quite like that I was trying to figure that Spanish fascist that got launched into orbit through a car bomb and you can see a photo of him flying off That was assisted flight. The only human who is ever unassistedly flown was Icarus and it did not go well
00:14:01
Speaker
Well, no, that's exactly what I was going to bring up. So Mad Flight was a dream for humanity for much of recorded history and probably before that, of course. Famously, we can reference the Greek mythology around Daedalus and Icarus. The story goes is that Icarus had wings made for him, fashioned using beeswax, leather, metal and feathers. It was made by Daedalus.
00:14:23
Speaker
I am not a Greek scholar, nor is this a Greek mythology podcast. It's pronounced Daedalus, by the way. It can be pronounced both ways, actually. The AE is what makes it actually possible to say it both ways. It doesn't matter. But you can correct me.
00:14:42
Speaker
Again, I'm not a Greek scholar, nor is this a Greek mythology podcast. So I don't have much more to say, but it did not work out for Icarus. He did fly a little too close to the sun. Did you know you can fly to the sun? There becomes a point where, are you really flying if you're in space? That's okay. We're not getting into that. That would be very confusing. I don't know how to answer that.
00:15:05
Speaker
So there are lots of records of humans attempting to mimic the idea of having wings attached to arms, especially over the past two millennia. Spoiler, none of them worked out. Famous Italian and member of the Ninja Turtles, Leonardo da Vinci, was much wiser and decided that he was going to make a machine or rather design a machine that mimicked the flight of birds. Yeah, Ornithopters. We're going to talk about Ornithopters. In fact, I'm going to talk a lot about this because this is one of my favorite things in the world.
00:15:34
Speaker
humans are too heavy and too easily made tired to fly using wings attached to arms. Go figure like just go swimming you get tired real quick. Just imagine trying to fly through the air with things attached to you that way a lot. So he sketched out a machine which used hand levers and foot pedals to flap wings instead, creating what you had just referred to as an ornithopter. I
00:15:59
Speaker
love ornithopters and it's so cool. They are. So here's the thing. I'm a birder and these planes were designed to mimic birds, insects or bats. So moving forward, I'm going to say ornithopter. Just assume everything I say is about flapping wings. They have a lot of advantages over helicopters and airplanes, which we'll talk about airplanes in a moment. And they work really well as drones. And I'll explain why they work really well as drones and then why they haven't really gone beyond that.
00:16:28
Speaker
in a little bit. I bring up ornithopters because in 2010, someone at the University of Toronto built a human powered ornithopter, fluid for a distance of 145 meters in some airfield on fake Tottenham, Ontario. We found another place named after England that we can talk about Tottenham.
00:16:53
Speaker
It's not fake London though. Ontario is filled with them. You got fake London, fake Tottenham, fake Thames. We'll just keep coming up with new ones. Yeah, don't forget that fake London has the fake Thames running through it. It does. They managed to get to 26 kilometres an hour and they kept them in the air for 20 seconds. They also achieved 16 flaps of its wings.
00:17:14
Speaker
But no more. If you really want to see how Ornithopters would work in a really cool sense, just go watch Dune. That's the David Lynch Dune. No. The Denny Venev one is the one you're supposed to watch.
00:17:29
Speaker
So eventually humans did achieve flight before airplanes in the form of hot air balloons. In October 1783, Jean-Francois de Rosier made the first tether flight from a workshop in Paris, France. A month later, both de Rosier and Marquis-Francois de Arrange became the first pilots to freely fly, as in no tether. King Louis XVI initially wanted to use convicted criminals to pilot the balloon instead,
00:17:56
Speaker
That would have been the best fucking K4 ever. It's pretty funny that he was like, no, I don't want to have the honor of going to noblemen. They were noblemen. To noblemen, I'd rather just kind of send two criminals up in the air to their own possible demise. Two people almost got the best out by any state ever. Oh, no, no, we're going to talk about that in a moment.
00:18:25
Speaker
So the two of them petition Yvonne de Paolo Strang, favorite to marry Antoinette.
00:18:31
Speaker
to have the honor given to them. So basically Marie Antoinette said to King Louis, just give it to these blokes. The two of them proposed a flight across the English Channel from Calais to Dover, but this was scrapped and instead achieved by Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jefferies in 1785. It was like January or something. De Rosier attempted to follow this up with a hydrogen hot air balloon hybrid. Yes, 1700s Hindenburg.
00:18:57
Speaker
But it caught fire over Callie, crashing and then killing both him and another passenger. And it's considered the first fatal aviation accident in recorded history. And that exact sequence of events under that exact condition would never happen again. Exactly. Hydrogen, famously, you know, not flammable gas. Yeah.
00:19:22
Speaker
Blanchard would eventually die in March 1809 after having a heart attack while piloting over the Hague in the Netherlands and falling out. Okay, great. Yeah, it gets worse.
00:19:38
Speaker
His wife, Sophie Blanchard, continued his profession, but she too would die in July 1819, when she opted to launch fireworks from a balloon floating 300 meters above the streets of Paris. Beautiful, beautiful. You know, like this, like these balloons are made out of, like, what, cotton? Like, with wax, I guess, because you got to keep the air in a little bit.
00:20:02
Speaker
that's gonna burn like why would you launch fireworks from a hot air balloon and uh and their their grant their grandson uh shreya blanchard would go on no we do not we do not fuck up trans care for everyone continuing the family history of disasters i don't want to mention him on this podcast ever
00:20:24
Speaker
I'm cutting this out, sorry. I don't want to talk about you. Sorry, you just keep talking about blood sharks. I know, I read it the same fucking way too.
00:20:38
Speaker
At some point, we're going to have like an episode where like we talk about the things we cut out and we're like, yeah, we had about like 30 seconds of me trying to tell you to shut up about Ray Blanchard. Okay, well, we can at least leave him a bit, but like, and the Blanchard name would go on to never be associated with disasters ever again. That sounds about right.
00:21:03
Speaker
So military use of pilot of the hot air balloons did not come to be for another decade. This happened during the Battle of Flouris in 1794 in the French Revolutionary Wars. You can actually find a painting that shows this battle with the hot air balloon. Yeah, I think I've actually seen that. Yeah.
00:21:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's a very famous painting. It's really cool to see that. And it's the first depiction of a hot air balloon that would have had people in it. One of the things I don't have noted here is that the concept of hot air balloons did not come from France. It actually came from China. But I don't believe the Chinese ever sent anyone up in one. So just something to keep in mind there. So let's talk about Canada. We're not doing Eurocentrism. No, we're not.
00:21:47
Speaker
We are a Canada History Podcast. Yeah. So let's talk about Canada. The first use of a piloted balloon in Canada did not happen until August 1840, when Louis Anselm Lariat blew up the balloon dubbed the Star of the East. 16 years later in 1856, a Frenchman Eugene Godard operated a balloon called Canada, which was notable because it was made in the province of Canada. Oh, hell yeah.
00:22:14
Speaker
Yeah, it carried three passengers from Montreal to Saint-Matisse-Richelieu. So, you know, I think that was like 50 kilometers. It's not very far. But Montreal, too, slightly outside of Montreal. To be fair, it was in a hot air balloon. It's a big deal in 1856. It was in a hot air balloon and there probably wasn't actually a much better way of getting there. Yeah, I don't know if there's trains. Well, no, I don't know about the train situation in Montreal then. At some point, we're going to be talking about trains on this podcast, but that's a five-part episode and this is a three-part episode, so good luck.
00:22:44
Speaker
Canadian Pacific were coming for you. Oh, that episode I am looking forward to and it's going to be a while before I get to it because Jesus Christ, I'm going to need to put a lot of time aside for that one. Get ready for a 20-parter episode or 20-parter. It's not going to be 20 parts. I'm trying to make it five. I'm already planning it out and it's like 50 episodes away.
00:23:04
Speaker
The first instance of a hot air balloon accident occurring in Canada was not until 2007. Oh, wow. Stellar safety record. Most of the accidents happen in the United States. The incident happened in Surrey, British Columbia, not far from where I used to work. And I can't remember how many people were killed, but it was something like three or four people. It just crashed into a field. I believe it caught fire and it just crashed down.
00:23:28
Speaker
As a result, I am not fond of ever flying in a hot air balloon. My ex-spouse wanted me to go in one, I believe, or was it skydiving? I can't remember. But anyway, I barely like flying and being in a hot air balloon is very much a no-go. Would you want to be in one? I have been in one and I can tell you that it is perhaps the most terrifying experience I've ever had that I voluntarily took part in. Would you do it again? No.
00:23:55
Speaker
No, never. So let's talk about airplanes. The first successful powered flight, as everybody knows, was the Wright Flyer, invented by Orville and Wilbur Wright, aka the Wright Brothers. On December 17, 1903, the plane flew 260 meters on its fourth and final flight over a beach near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It was powered by a 12 horsepower gasoline engine pushing two 2.6 meter long propellers. So I'm going to talk about
00:24:25
Speaker
The differences between all of these things that I've just talked about, because I want to talk about birds. So really straightforward. Airplanes and ornithopters can be grouped together. Hot air balloons are separate altogether. Airplanes and ornithopters are heavier than air flying craft. Yeah, they don't they don't have intrinsic buoyancy in the atmosphere. Exactly. And hot air balloons, as well as blimps and zeppelins and all those sort of things. I think Zeppelin is a brand, isn't it?
00:24:54
Speaker
uh yeah it's a it's a company um those are all lighter than air aircraft yes so i said i wasn't getting into the physics of this but i feel like i want to talk about ornithopters because i really like birds and i don't get too many operates birds are awesome so
00:25:12
Speaker
Do you know the fundamental difference between an airplane and a bird? Well, is it just a function of the amount of lift it generates versus its weight? So the difference between an airplane and a bird is simply that a bird or an ornithopter or an insect or a bat generates its lift from its wings.
00:25:33
Speaker
But it flies no differently than an airplane. It has a pressure differential. There's lower pressure on the top, higher pressure on the bottom. You go up, right? What an airplane does that's completely different is that the thrust is not generated by the wings. The thrust is generated by a propeller, a turbo prop, a jet, a rocket, something that can just shoot shit out the back. Yeah, OK, right. That makes sense. It's where the thrust is coming from, not the wing, but a secondary power source.
00:26:02
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So when some cool things I can tell you, ornithopters can sort of fly in place. You can, so like a helicopter, you can just, you can stay in a single spot. The difference between a helicopter and an ornithopter is a helicopter practically works the same way as an airplane, but you can't turn a helicopter without having something else to like move it around. Things like that. The other thing is the hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards.
00:26:29
Speaker
Is that just a function of how rapidly its, uh, its wings are beating? Or is it because it can like tilt its, uh, its like wing bone, like its shoulders? It's, it's kind of the reverse that was kind of, sorry, it's the latter. So like when it flies backwards, it could just rotate its wings to kind of go backwards. Yeah. Cause if you've ever seen one like fly the angle that their wings are at changes quite dramatically and it's honestly a little terrifying.
00:26:56
Speaker
Yeah, I love I love having birds. I have a hummingbird feeder on my patio and I have a camera on it so I can watch it when I'm at work. They're really straight. They're really beautiful birds. The other thing I want to mention is there is a one of the reasons why we don't make flapping machines is ornithopters because of material science don't really scale. So you may notice that a lot of birds don't really get too, too big.
00:27:19
Speaker
I think the biggest bird is an albatross and those have a pretty big wingspan, but they also have like pretty thin wings.
00:27:27
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So now the trial sounds like very long or very wide wings, but it also has, but they're very thin. And as you scale up, basically what you run into is the wings will want to tear themselves apart. So you can't really have a Boeing 737 flap its wings because despite the fact that the wings can actually take a lot of abuse before they break off, they're not going to be able to sustain that forever.
00:27:53
Speaker
the wings will want to rip themselves apart. So anyway, that's me and birds and why I love ornithopters and wish they were more of a thing, but they work really well for drones because the size is perfect for them. Maybe when material science catches up, we can have actual ornithopters, although the big difference, I think with planes as well as they can still go faster fundamentally because of the thrust being elsewhere.
00:28:16
Speaker
Yeah, it has a linear source of thrust and that transfers to forward momentum much easier than not having that. I just don't think we'll be able to make an ornithopter that's not going to be as much of a terrifying contraption as modern day helicopters are. I have never been in a helicopter. I hope to God never will. Second most terrifying experience of my life. Yeah. Yeah. I don't like flying.
00:28:43
Speaker
And I don't like flying either, although I do fly a couple times a year. Anyway, it took until February 23rd, 1909 for the first powered flight to happen in Canada. This, of course, was six years after the Wright Brothers. This was when the Aerial Experiment Association's Silver Dark flew a distance of 800 meters at elevations no more than three to nine meters at a speed of 65 kilometers per hour. Two weeks later on March 10th, it flew 35 kilometers through a circular course. So it took almost six years, actually,
00:29:11
Speaker
less than that by the looks of it. It looks like it's five years, so I stand corrected. The plane was piloted by John Alexander Douglas McCurdy, who was both the first British subject to fly an aircraft in the Empire and later became Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia. I believe he was also a Lieutenant Governor when the Blue Nose was racing. Yeah, he probably would have been like all these characters were around at the same time. Canada is like a very tiny country.
00:29:38
Speaker
It is, especially in the 1910s. He was also a designer of the plane, but he was a designer alongside other people from AEA, including Alexander Graham Bell of Telephone fame and possible future topic for this podcast. We'll see. Oh, we're coming for him too. And also Frederick Walker.
00:29:59
Speaker
Baldwin, AKA Casey, also known for his work on hydroplanes, which are really cool machines. Glenn Curtis, an American who was known for an unofficial speed record of 220 kilometers an hour on a motorcycle in 1907. Go, King. Like King shit right there.
00:30:17
Speaker
Could you just imagine in 1907, like, yeah, I'm going to go ride this motorcycle, this powered bicycle. Dude's wrong. Yeah, no kidding. Dude's wrong. Like, even today, it would be terrified. Like, the fastest I've ever gone in a car is, oh, I don't know. Maybe I'll blurt this out, but the fastest I ever went out.
00:30:38
Speaker
Oh, dear God, that is not a speed you want to go on. Yeah, I'm probably going to blur this one out, but it'll probably be just like a whole bunch of if this makes it into the recording, the fastest speed I've ever gone in the car is 120 kilometers an hour on a highway that was perfectly legal because I am a good person on the same highway. So, you know, I'm a fucking liar.
00:31:06
Speaker
I'm gonna have to like blur it out that answer there the only people the only people going the speed limit on the only people going under the speed level are under the fucking are in the fucking ditch so and also tom is selfish
00:31:26
Speaker
a man known to be the first to die in an airplane accident well before his achievement. His death was also witnessed by and documented by Orville Wright. Oh wow. Going back to the whole kites thing from earlier, by the way, there was a thing called a powered kite. They were like these weird contractions that would allow like, like had motors on them and they would fly in the air. Okay, interesting.
00:31:50
Speaker
Yeah, prior to the Dart, there was something called the Signet, and it was actually designed by Alexander Graham Bell. It was a heavier, heavier than air machine, which achieved a 51 meter height in late 1907 on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. So kind of cool. Yeah, interesting.
00:32:05
Speaker
The pilot of the Silver Dart, McCurdy, would later set an over-the-water record by flying from Florida to just about Cuba in 1910. I don't know what they mean by just about Cuba, but I imagine he must have crashed in the water like he must have ditched it. Yeah, that sounds like an almost made-at-home sort of statement. Yeah.
00:32:28
Speaker
So the first fatality as a result of flying in Canada did not occur until August of 1913. And it was a fucking yank. Yes. On August 1st and 2nd, Americans John Bryant and his wife, Alice McKee,
00:32:44
Speaker
gave flying demonstrations to crowds in Minoru Park in Richmond, just south of Vancouver. Have you been to Minoru Park? I have not. It is a very unremarkable place. The thing about Richmond, and this is the reason why Vancouver International Airport is where it is, is that Richmond is built on silt, so it's very flat. And as a result, landing an aircraft on a flat piece of land is, as a result, it's just a very convenient place to land an aircraft. Yeah.
00:33:13
Speaker
The runway is practically built for you, just also sinking. Oh yeah, that's gonna be great during an earthquake. In attendance at Monroe Park included Prince Edward of Wales, later King Edward VIII. Do you know why he's important? Uh, yes. He's a man who knows how to wave.
00:33:33
Speaker
That's all monarchs. No, he was the one that came into power and reigned for a year because he wanted to fuck off and marry some American woman. But it was the whole thing about her being divorced or him and him getting a divorce, something like that. I'm having a hard time remembering because again, fuck royals.
00:33:49
Speaker
Yeah, I think he also did teach a bunch of them to Nazi salute. I think that was the guy. I don't think he did that. Oh, no, he right. He actually did. He favored an alliance with Nazi Germany. Hell yeah. Well, so I believe you mean to say in attendance was Prince Edward of Wales, later King Edward. Oh, sorry.
00:34:12
Speaker
uh in attendance was uh prince edward of wales and george duke of york later king george the sixth and nazi sympathizer no that was king edward who was a nazi sympathizer oh is king ed okay in attendance in attendance i believe you mean to say in attendance was prince edward of wales later king edward the king edward the eighth and nazi sympathizer
00:34:38
Speaker
Yes. And then, of course, George, Duke of York, later King George VI, known for his time during World War II and father to former Queen Elizabeth II. He was considering running off to Canada during World War II. The King Edward reigned for less than a year. That's why I barely know anything about him. But he is responsible for the current lineage of royals. So it's his fault. Yes. All right, dig him up and hang him. We're not doing grave robbing.
00:35:09
Speaker
During these demonstrations, Alice set two records in Canada with the first flight in this country to be piloted by a woman, and also for attaining a height of 670 meters. They then took her demonstration to Victoria on Banker Island. They were off- How she was tall. What? Okay, yeah, you read that that way, yes. She's a 680 tall, sorry, 600, I am, God fucking damn it.
00:35:39
Speaker
Transition calls. Shut up. They then took their demonstration to Victoria on Vancouver Island. They were offered a thousand Canadian dollars, or about 27,000 today. But due to the last minute offer, maintenance was deferred. Oh, good. Not a thing that's going to come up in aviation ever fucking again.
00:36:00
Speaker
Now, you can neglect your plane, especially in 19, what was it, 1913. When has deferred maintenance ever caused a problem on a Boeing flight? Well, this wasn't a Boeing yet.
00:36:16
Speaker
No, but it's the same shit. That's fair. So on August 6, on a second demonstration in Victoria, John Bryant took to the air. So the numbers are a little bit hazy here because I don't think we really knew how to say how high up somebody was, but he was around 120 to 240 meters in the air and his plane suddenly went into a dive disintegrating in the process and crashed into a building in Chinatown.
00:36:42
Speaker
Yeah, the height that he achieved didn't really matter. The only height that actually mattered that he achieved was zero meters. Well, he crashed into a building that sold dye. I don't know the whole thing about this place, but the crash resulted in him breaking his neck due to the engine hitting him. Jesus Christ. And he died as help arrived on the scene. Some reports say he died instantly, but again, like,
00:37:07
Speaker
he was going to die because he was crushed by a literal airplane engine yeah it's uh a thing about this era of flight is that planes didn't stop being like contraptions until like the mid 1950s ah
00:37:22
Speaker
Eh, sort of. We'll talk about that as we go along here. Of course, Alice witnessed the whole thing and she was rather distraught and fainted in the process. 70% of the demonstration fee, being that's $1,000, that would have gone to them, ended up going towards repairs of the damaged building. Again, it was a die factory.
00:37:42
Speaker
Yeah, I have it in my notes here that early flying was fucking dangerous. Again, these things were just contraptions until way later than you would think, and totally reasonable to defer maintenance on.
00:37:56
Speaker
I mean, that has nothing to do with them being engines and everything being really unreliable at that point in time. That's still just true today. Yeah, that's fair. We're going to get into World War I. Do you know what? What's World War I? It's the seminal tragedy where the British Empire sent a bunch of Canadians to just die for no fucking reason a bunch of times. Some Irish people, too. Oh, yeah, a bunch of Irish people, some people from India.
00:38:23
Speaker
Whoever they could, do however they could throw at German machine guns. Yeah. And then, you know, Japan became a really cool country, et cetera, et cetera. World War I won. A cool country. They wanted to be empire. That made them cool. Yeah. We're going to be talking about Japan in the next episode.
00:38:45
Speaker
Ah, yeah. So World War I, the first war. We didn't have any wars after that. While the earlier mentioned French Revolutionary War used hot air balloons, I believe they were largely used for reconnaissance. Like, good luck trying to like shoot somebody from a hot air balloon with an early 1800s gun.
00:39:06
Speaker
Yeah. Prior to the onset of the war during the Mexican Revolution in 1913, two American mercenaries fighting for opposing sides were ordered to shoot to kill, but neither chose to do so and instead just opted to exhaust their supply of ammunition by missing every shot. It supposedly used two pilots for friends and they were just using pistols, so whatever they had on their person.
00:39:28
Speaker
I think actually that was pretty common. Like even the first like airplane to airplane like combat happened with just the pistols that the we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about that because it gets it gets wild fast bombings from planes are also a thing. But again, the payloads at these early aircraft were like not very large. Like you couldn't take a lot of weight on these planes. They weren't really designed to carry more than
00:39:57
Speaker
itself and the person that was piloting it, maybe a second pilot as well. Aircraft proved their worth in World War One quickly because they were providing reconnaissance on German advances towards Paris in the second month. It was proven that cavalry was useless to provide information by this point in history. They weren't fast enough against then modern technology.
00:40:16
Speaker
And like, how does it, it can't really compare to literal eyes in the sky. Like the overview of like that you get is like advantageous, just on its own, like irrespective of the, the speed of it. Yeah. Well, you can just fly in and fly out. Like, what are they going to do? Like there was no, um, like long-range artillery that could take out a plane just yet. The other thing about planes was that they were only used for reconnaissance early on because it was
00:40:42
Speaker
because of the hate conventions of 1899 and 1907, which would never be violated, or thought that they would be violated if they started bombing by airplanes. But, you know, that really didn't matter. Yeah, that wouldn't last long. No, not really.
00:40:57
Speaker
Combat in the air was initially not thought of, as I mentioned, and its usefulness was debated amongst higher ups. As a result, most pilots would just gesture at each other. I'm assuming giving each other the middle finger and, or either they would give a wave. Like, I think they were just kind of like, hi, hey, how's it going over there? You know, like you're you.
00:41:13
Speaker
You're a kraut, and I'm a wimey. I don't know. That sort of makes sense, because keep in mind at this time, the German army has eight pilots, so sending them up there, potentially risking their life just operating an airplane, potentially risking their life against another pilot doing the same thing, this is a bad trade. Oh, we're going to talk about this.
00:41:38
Speaker
So weight restrictions on these planes meant that there was little they could do when they did want to fight. Some early examples included throwing bricks, grenades, and rope with the latter's idea being that you could just entangle the propeller and fuck some shit up. Yeah, much of the early German offenses are actually done by Zeppelins, which of course are not planes and are lifted using hydrogen. However, on August 15, 1914, a pilot for the Royal Serbian Army, which only had
00:42:06
Speaker
Three planes recorded the first dogfight during the Battle of Sur in northern Serbia near the Austro-Hungarian border. Myotrág Tomić found himself facing an Austro-Hungarian pilot with a revolver shooting at him. Tomić responded in kind and fired back. They eventually swerved from each other and flew off recording the first dogfight. Hell yeah.
00:42:27
Speaker
In the summer of 1915, the British introduced the Vickers FB-5, standing for Fighting Biplane 5, to the Royal Flying Corps. This was the first purpose-built fighting aircraft. It was fitted with a 7.7 millimeter automated rifle, a Lewis gun. Ah, yeah. This is like, this is the classic, like, old-timey, like, guy shooting out of, out of, like, a co-pilot seat and airplane set up. Yeah, that's exactly what it was. They required a separate operator to shoot.
00:42:57
Speaker
Oh, yeah. This coincided with the Germans introducing the Fokker to the Imperial German Flying Corps and thus began the race to build more and more effective fighter planes. I do I do want to contend here. Neither of these are effective. Oh, there's some there's some really cool mechanics that come up. I want to say it's not it's not going to be. Yeah, it's going to be in this one here.
00:43:20
Speaker
Yeah, I just I wanted to contend that more effective fighter plans. No, that's a race to build effective ones. Okay, I'll give you that. So the Fokker needed the shooter to aim directly in front using the use of a pushrod controller, which was a synchronization gear permitting the machine gun to fire bullets between passes of the fucking propeller blade. Hell yeah.
00:43:44
Speaker
I'm just thinking that timing is insane. Oh yeah, it's real tight timing, but the ballistics of it do work out. Oh no, absolutely. It's going fast enough that the propeller should not hit that bullet as it flies out. The plane itself was introduced in 1913, so it existed before the war, but it was super effective in taking out
00:44:06
Speaker
120 Royal Flying Corps planes. This was countered by the British and the French with new planes. The British in particular put out the Royal Aircraft FE2 and Airco DH2, which were considered matches to the Fokker. The thing about the Airco plane is that its company, Airco,
00:44:22
Speaker
had its successor become known as De Havilland, which is the company we know as De Havilland Aircraft in Canada Limited, which is still here today. The advent of being a fighter pilot in World War One led to the invention of the term flying ace, which is rooted in the ace. Insert joke here. Ah, yes. I mean, OK, being a flying ace, being a German flying ace, flying a Fokker is a little bit too on the nose. I'm just saying.
00:44:51
Speaker
The term ACE in this case is actually a war propaganda term to provide the home front with acts of heroism Despite the war being a war of attrition and you know what do you know what? Let's talk about some good guys. Okay, let's talk about the troops
00:45:12
Speaker
I have been dying to use that drop. We have been sitting on that for an unreasonable amount of time. So the most famous flying ace is William Avery Bishop or otherwise known as Billy Bishop. Yeah, Billy is credited.
00:45:32
Speaker
We're going to talk about how much he's there. He's a really well embellished story and that's where I'm going to get into here. So he's credited with 72 victories, making him not only the best fighter pilot in Canada, but the entirety of the British Empire. God knows that everything and everyone wanted to kill Billy. Some examples of where he should have died
00:45:54
Speaker
or been severely injured, include, in grade school, he fought seven boys all at once and one." That one I'm a little bit questioning about, but sure, whatever. That seems a little bit much. It doesn't necessarily pass the smell test, but it's officially noted that he did that, so I'm going to take that as fact. Speaking of things that don't pass the smell test, the next entry in the show notes, what the fuck?
00:46:20
Speaker
At the age of 16 in 1910, he made a glider out of cardboard crates, bedsheets, and twine, and then proceeded to glide off of his three-story home in Owen Sound, Ontario. His sister had to dig him out of the mess he created when he fell, but told him that he had to date her friend Margaret Burden.
00:46:43
Speaker
What? I kid you not, like he fell off the roof, survived after trying to make a glider out of crates and bedsheets. This is some Icarus shit. Like, seriously? Yes.
00:46:58
Speaker
The reason why I bring up Margaret Burden is she becomes important, um, later on in his life, especially because Margaret Burden is the granddaughter of Timothy Eaton of Eaton's department store fame. Cause again, Canada is actually just a small town. Uh, don't listen to people who bitch that like, I don't know anyone from Toronto. I'm from Vancouver. It's not, not every Canadian knows each other.
00:47:24
Speaker
At this time, we actually did. OK, so to be fair, most people born after 2000 have no fucking idea what Eaton's is. I remember Ian's. You probably remember Ian's. I remember Ian's. Yeah. So Ian's was a department store chain, not much dissimilar from the Bay. If you're American, it'd be similar to that of Woolworth's. It's Canadian Target. No, I would say it's more like Woolworth's.
00:47:51
Speaker
What killed Ian's ultimately was that it tried to shift away from being chic fashion to upscale fashion, like try to compete with what the Bay did or be sort of akin to a larger Holt Renfrew, if anyone's familiar with Holt Renfrew.
00:48:07
Speaker
They really, they really painted themselves into a corner. Like you're correct that in some ways they were like Target, Walmart, ultimately killed them. I feel like Eanes is worth talking about in the future. Uh, it's just, it's a little bit more obscured in contrast to that of Zeller's because Zeller's is still alive because of HBC, like resting on his laurels. I don't know. It's kind of strange. Those are some laurels to rest on. I mean, Zeller's isn't really alive because there aren't like, like full Zeller's stores.
00:48:35
Speaker
Like the entire floor is dedicated to them. Sure. There's a zeller on top of like a bay in Abbotsford.
00:48:45
Speaker
Yeah, but that's just HPC waving around the corpse of Zellers. I think they're just trying to do this to keep the trademark or some shit. Probably, parading out, letting Zeddi out of the vault. Poor Zeddi. Poor Zeddi. Anyway. Welcome to Shooligan Moments, a podcast about Zellers and Zeddi. Hashtag free Zeddi. I got a friend in the studio I have tortured over Zellers, and if she's listening to this podcast, I'm so sorry, friend.
00:49:15
Speaker
In 1915, he fell off of a horse he was riding and it fell on him. Just everybody's out for him. We got Bully's gravity, his horse. So here's the thing. He was back in action a week later, but in the same month, the bolt of a rifle he was firing flew back and whacked him in the cheekbone.
00:49:36
Speaker
Okay, that is a your own fault as a shooter if that happens. I will let you talk about guns. I know fuck all about them. That is an own goal if I've ever seen one. Make sure your bolt's actually properly seated before you close it up and shoot it. I should go on record and say that I have no military background. My family is not really a military family. I have
00:50:01
Speaker
One relative who's an active member in the Irish military, he recently got married in his military regalia. Like he had everything on, um, rather sharp uniform to say the least. Yeah. I don't have any military experience, but I do shoot guns for fun. And at some point I'm going to take you up to shoot guns and maybe we'll record an episode about it.
00:50:23
Speaker
We'll have to find an episode about guns that's relevant. We just do a bonus episode where I interview you about shooting shotgun or something. We'll see. So another thing, inoculation, he got inoculated. So he's not an anti-vaxxer, but he was so taken aback by getting inoculated that he fell off of this horse again. Oh, good. Did the horse go for him or did the vaccine cover horse injuries?
00:50:50
Speaker
I have no idea. I imagine he was getting vaccinated against smallpox, I guess. I think that was what you would have gotten, like the cow pops one or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is not a Billy Bishop episode. I should note it's just that he's one of the more famous early pilots of Canada. He did live into his 60s, married into the Eaton family.
00:51:11
Speaker
And of course, Billy Bishop Airport in Toronto is named after him. It's tough to say how many stories about Billy Bishop are true. Many of the stories that were claimed to be of him, like claimed to him, were suggested as increase for dramatic effect.
00:51:29
Speaker
And that the records on the German side didn't line up with what was on the side of the RAC, the Royal Air Corps. On the flip side, over counting of enemy casualties inflicted and minimizing friendly casualties sustained is like a thing in warfare that goes back to the beginning of warfare.
00:51:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's precisely why it's it's hard to accept like, oh, well, the German records don't line up. And it's like, of course they don't fucking like they just wouldn't. Right. Like it's same in both sides would be kind of like, we should kind of fudge your numbers here a little bit because it's perfectly normal in the war.
00:52:06
Speaker
And that's even before you take into account that the First World War was a war where also a squad of guys gets turned into a uniform paste by some artillery. Yeah. World War I was the war to end all wars, right? Yeah, that's why it had a sequel.
00:52:25
Speaker
We'll talk about that. Again, this is not a Billy Bishop episode, but at least I can safely say he married into the Eaton family and the Eaton family was successful for all of history. Yes, nothing would ever go wrong at the very least during his lifetime. At the end of the war, it was firmly established that air-powered mattered as much as land and sea.
00:52:44
Speaker
Advances in aerospace were made and Canada found itself flush with an imperial gift from Britain, which included 114 aircraft, allowing Canada to form the Royal Canadian Air Force, which continued to birth a Canadian aerospace sector after the war. This included 62 Avro 504 trainers.
00:53:03
Speaker
That's not a name that'll come up again. Yeah, we'll never talk about Avro. And this leads us to the end of the part as we have a lot more ground to cover. What did we learn so far, Tamarack? That Billy Bishop will simultaneously beat you up in a fight, but also the universe wants to kill him and also aircraft want to kill whoever is flying them. It's their natural state. I was going to say, don't defer maintenance.
00:53:29
Speaker
Yeah, also don't defer maintenance. That's not going to stop anybody, again, see Boeing. Yeah, that's true. Well, the next episode will be the second part, The Deep and Bunker with an appearance by William Lyon Mackenzie King. Oh yeah, he didn't get reference this episode. Our boy, our baby boy. Well, I had to slip him in on this one. I had to slip him in at this end here.
00:53:49
Speaker
our beautiful baby boy, Mackenzie King. Holy crap, did we actually manage to keep this around one hour? There's like a good 10 minutes of preamble that's probably going to get cut out, so yeah. Oh, it's fine. We can have episodes that are not that long. Well, apparently one of us could keep our episodes to a reasonable length. Well, that's why I broke it into multiple parts. All right, well, that's a podcast, I think. We'll see you all in part two. Bye.
00:54:19
Speaker
Byeeeeeee!