Air Race E: Electric air racing looking to take flight

Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines used to be a television fixture on bank holidays in the UK, seemingly on rotation with The Great Escape and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. With a huge cast of such 1960s stalwarts as Terry-Thomas, Robert Morley and Sarah Miles, it was an Edwardian-set madcap comedy depicting an air race between London and Paris with a fiendishly catchy theme song: They go up-tiddly-up-up, they go down-tiddly-down-down. It directly influenced the immortal cartoon character Dick Dastardly (who memorably took to the air himself in a never-ending and never-explained quest to stop a carrier pigeon. Cue another theme tune).

However, air races were no laughing matter in the early 20th century. They have a long tradition in aviation, and made important contributions to aerospace development. The Schneider Trophy, a prestigious competition for seaplanes, was a testing ground for the development of aerodynamics and aircraft engines, and its winners were the forerunners of such famous fighter aircraft as the British Spitfire (whose development from a seaplane was immortalised in another bank holiday favourite film, The First of the Few), the American Mustang and Italian Folgore. And air racing is still going now.