Dr Martin Mahony delivers lecture on airships and empire at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum

Dr Martin Mahony, Research Fellow in the School of Geography, delivered a public keynote lecture at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum on Wednesday 1 March, drawing on his ongoing research on the historical geographies of aviation technology and atmospheric science.

The talk examined how imperial futures were imagined in the 1920s through the lens of airship technology, which appeared to offer a means of re-connecting and re-invigorating the British Empire as an economic and cultural unit. However, airships posed new challenges of dealing with a sometimes violent and unpredictable atmosphere, spurring new knowledge-gathering about colonial skies, and ultimately ending in the tragic loss of Britain's flagship R.101 on its maiden voyage to India.

The keynote lecture followed a workshop on Weather Science, Extreme Weather and Disaster Histories, which brought together historians of science with atmospheric scientists interested in reconstructing histories of weather and climate in South East Asia.