9/11 ... 1910
Bernard Porter points out similarities and contrasts between terrorism then and now.
The picture on this page shows an aircraft hi-jacked by anarchists and loaded with dynamite attacking the tallest New York skyscraper of its day. ‘Ground zero’ is in the foreground. The year is 1910. The peculiar shape of the aircraft is due to the fact that they have hardly been invented yet. It is taken from George Glendon’s The Emperor of the Air (1910), one of a number of sensational novels based on this kind of theme that came out around the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.
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