The Zankel Research Colloquium, Fall 2014
John Anzalone, Professor of French
The outbreak of the Great War in the summer of 1914 acted as a powerful accelerator to the development of aviation. Even if General Ferdinand Foch—later to become Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies—could claim in 1911 that “Aviation is fine as a sport, but as an instrument of war, it is worthless,” events on the ground and in the air as early as the first days of the conflict would redefine forever the space of the sky. And the airplane would also alter, forever, our way of seeing.
This illustrated lecture will present rare images from the author’s personal collection in an attempt to understand how contemporaries of the 1914-18 cataclysm understood what they were seeing when they looked up into the wartime skies; and how looking down from those skies would initiate lasting changes to the visual plane