The Hindenburg Fire - Oh the HUMANITY! - Episode 57

Ed and Kara are back this week with a beast of an episode for you. It's been a long time coming, but Ed has finally dug into one of the worst air disasters of the 20th century, the Hindenburg fire! 

The Hindenburg was the largest dirigible? Blimp? Zeppelin? floaty thingy the world had ever seen. This thing was designed from the ground up to be comfortable, fast, and most importantly SAFE. Even though the thing was filled with highly flammable hydrogen gas, the Germans really did think of everything and we don't mean that in a sarcastic way... they really did think of everything. 

So how in the world did the Hindenburg burn to the ground in less than 40 seconds?

The answer is in the episode! So take a listen and discover how one of the greatest technological marvels of the modern era came crashing down in the most dramatic way possible. 

This episode has a ton of pictures and diagrams and what not, so be sure to check out The Day's Dumpster Fire website for all the details.  You'll also get to see the back catalog of nearly 60 historical dumpster fires as well as a collection of Kara's insanely good artwork. 

Be sure to send Kara and Ed an email at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com for show ideas and even corrections. We here at the Day's Dumpster Fire love all feedback as it makes the whole team better so that you can get the best content possible. 

In this episode, Kara and Ed talked about the following episodes that you may find interesting. All of which can be found on The Day's Dumpster Fire website!

Episode 14: The Molasses Flood Fire

Episode 26: Firing Fireworks Fire

Episodes 35 and 36: King Louis XVI 

Hey before you go!

If have ideas for future episodes that you want Kara and Ed to look into, email them at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com. They would love to hear from you!

You can also send them a text message by clicking on the link at the top.

Be sure to head on over to www.thedaysdumpsterfire.com for the ever growing library of historical dumpster fires.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:00

There's a conspiracy theory out there that states that aliens were trying to stop America's search for nuclear technology. So they shot down the Hindenburg as a way to distract things. Hence that flash of light on the tail end of the Hindenburg. That was the aliens shooting it down.

SPEAKER_04 0:18

It's that one.

SPEAKER_05 0:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 0:20

I think that's it. We solved it.

SPEAKER_05 0:22

I entertained that for about 0.3 seconds because none of that makes sense.

SPEAKER_04 0:27

I I I like that one.

SPEAKER_05 0:52

But we study and celebrate humanity's greatest failures because that's way more exciting. Uh I am your host, Ed, and joining me as always is Kara. How are you doing this fine Saturday late evening?

SPEAKER_04 1:07

Hello, hello. We do great. I binge watched a show with my husband all day today, and I slept in, and that's all I can ask for.

SPEAKER_05 1:17

As you get older, that's like that's like the only thing that really uh matters is just being able to sleep in and it's the simple things.

SPEAKER_04 1:26

It was so nice.

SPEAKER_05 1:27

Yep. You don't have to spend a ton of money. You just sleep and watch TV.

SPEAKER_04 1:32

That's it. That's all I did today.

SPEAKER_05 1:34

All I did was work on today's episode.

SPEAKER_04 1:36

Like I felt bad because I was I my goal was to work on my episode, my monstrosity. And then I was like, nope.

SPEAKER_05 1:45

It just it it just ain't happening after this past week.

SPEAKER_04 1:49

It'll happen tomorrow, maybe.

SPEAKER_05 1:51

So today's episode is not what I said I was gonna do on on the last one. Because the last one with the uh 1904 Olympics, I mentioned something about doing like childhood star actors like Judy Garland and how their lives kind of just you know, they're they're super famous when they're 12, but by the time they're 20, their lives are a ruin. Um or uh I was gonna do the Bay of Pigs, quite a quite a spread of topics there.

SPEAKER_04 2:22

But you got a lot of things going on.

SPEAKER_05 2:24

Uh yes, yeah, that yeah. Childhood star actors from the 1930s all the way to the Bay of Pigs and everything in between. Uh now the uh the Bay of Pigs thing is gonna definitely take a while because there is so many moving parts.

SPEAKER_04 2:42

Yeah, that one will take a bit. That's like mine, the one I'm working on. I was like, I need time, but I need time.

SPEAKER_05 2:48

Yeah, this this one is gonna be kind of like my cussers last stand, where we've got like three major players, and it's gonna be like a major player for each uh for like each episode. And then I've got to be able to like tie it all together at the end. So Bay of Pigs is going to be it's gonna be a Bay of Pigs. And if anybody knows their history, that was an absolute fiasco from the minute it was executed. So today I am shifting gears in a completely different direction. And Kara, I'm gonna need your help on this one because uh I don't know what it is that we're supposed to learn from this whole thing. Just because like once we dive into like what what actually happened and the causes of it and all the other fun stuff, it's just like did I don't I don't know if people screwed up as as much as we think they did.

SPEAKER_04 3:52

Because you know, like the th it could just be one of those things where you have to accept that a tragedy happens even though there's no reason for it.

SPEAKER_05 4:02

Yes, yes, and and it it's one of those things where humanity kind of like thought out everything, and they really did, but then the yeah, the ending of it is is weird in that like it's kind of like um was it episode 14, the uh 1919 Boston molasses flood, where like people on the outside are thinking, like, how can you drown in a pool of molasses in the middle of winter? And you know, at the end of that episode, there there was the idea that molasses under pressure behaves a lot like Ubleck, but you know, a non-Newtonian fluid, but in the exact opposite, where uh under pressure, instead of hardening and getting thicker, it gets thinner. Uh that's kind of the theme for this episode, which is all about the Hindenburg. And no, we're not talking about Kara's Hindenburg German leader that ultimately resulted in in the Third Reich. Yeah, that the guy just wanted to die.

SPEAKER_04 5:09

Yeah, I felt bad for him by the time I was done.

SPEAKER_05 5:11

Because wasn't that Hindenburg kind of like the uh German George Washington in a way? Um like he was he was a hero.

SPEAKER_04 5:21

He was a hero, but not he wasn't put up on a pedestal to the level that George Washington is.

SPEAKER_05 5:27

Got it. But even still, he was retired and they brought him back from retirement to 90.

SPEAKER_04 5:34

He was well respected, though, for sure.

SPEAKER_05 5:36

Yeah, so yeah, this this episode is going to be about the Hindenburg the Zeppelin or the blimp. Uh, it won't surprise me if they named this Hindenburg after your Hindenburg.

SPEAKER_04 5:50

What year was this?

SPEAKER_05 5:52

Uh this is like 1936.

SPEAKER_04 5:54

I mean, yeah, it's possible.

SPEAKER_05 5:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 5:56

Yeah. I could see that.

SPEAKER_05 5:57

Yeah, they the Hindenburg disaster is when I got to the end of this when I started studying or analyzing like what actually happened. And uh there's a there's a new theory out there because ultimately at the end of the day, we just don't know why this thing burned up, but there's there's a new prevailing theory out there that when we combine it with a theory that I have, I think it solves it. So the Hindenburg, for those of you who don't know, it was Germany's largest derigable, or if you want to call them Zeppelins. Um, it's it's a blimp.

SPEAKER_04 6:38

Uh it's a giant blimp.

SPEAKER_05 6:41

Yeah, it is a giant sausage-like blimp with swastikas on it. But I don't know about that, but piece of engineering. Did you just get a bad visual in your head?

SPEAKER_04 6:56

I didn't like that image no the sausage with swastikas? Yeah, it was weird.

SPEAKER_05 7:04

Wait till you see that comes out of the tip of this thing.

SPEAKER_03 7:07

Oh no.

SPEAKER_05 7:08

Yeah. We'll get there. We'll get there. But what I want to do is uh I I kind of want to go back to uh we'll we'll start with part one here. And when we get to the end of this care, I want you to be able to tell me what is the lesson that can be learned from this that we could apply to our own lives, because I just don't think that there's a lot of Hindenburg's in our lives. That I would hope not, because this is something that was kind of flukish, not necessarily man-cause. Like there is no way anybody could imagine this problem happening other than one component, and we'll we'll we'll get there pretty quickly. So let's start with part one. Man's desire to get into the air with floaty things. So humanity has always been fascinating or fascinated with getting into the air. For a species that has like zero percent physical capabilities to fly like birds, we certainly have a fascination with it. It's almost as though like we weren't meant to fly. Uh, that was actually sentiment amongst many scholars going all the way to the 1800s, is like, well, if humans could fly, then God would have given them wings.

SPEAKER_04 8:20

Do you remember that part on Toy Story where Buzz Lightyear is having a moment and when he realizes that he can't fly because he's a toy and he has like this crisis and he's staring down the stairs, and you know, the sad music is yeah. I I remember when I was a little kid watching it and I was like crying so upset, and I ran to my mom, Buzz Lightyear can't fly. That's what I think of. I think of Buzz Lightyear not being able to fly.

SPEAKER_05 8:45

Well, I think with humans, it's more like uh we understand that we can't fly, and we just didn't for the longest time we just didn't have the technology or the knowledge to actually make it happen. The French were the ones that really pioneered the first flight. Uh they were the ones that came up with the hot air balloon, um especially with anything sort of utility in 1783. Well actually, no, let me backtrack. The Shu Han dynasty, what is it, 220 to 280 BCE? Uh, they were really the the first ones to make like small silk balloons, and they would put like a little lantern on the bottom of it.

SPEAKER_04 9:24

Like, have you ever seen the end of Tangled or that's um for for those of you who aren't as familiar, that's China.

SPEAKER_05 9:32

Yes, that's not French.

SPEAKER_04 9:33

The the Shuhan. Yeah, that's China.

SPEAKER_05 9:35

Yeah. And is it the Shuhan dynasty, the guy that like strapped a bunch of rockets to his back and blew himself up?

SPEAKER_04 9:42

I believe it's very close. I have to double check my dates, but I love Chinese history. It's great.

SPEAKER_05 9:51

We'll we'll we'll put that episode in the show notes because that's that that's a that's a fun one. It's one of those things where, like, hey, if you think you really have a dumb idea that try flying. Yeah, flying with gunpowder rockets on your back.

SPEAKER_04 10:05

Yeah, it's a good time.

SPEAKER_05 10:06

Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? But yeah, the the Chinese were the ones that like would make those little silk balloons and they have the little candles underneath them to heat them up, and it's actually pretty impressive. They understood that heat rises. There's a lot of things that they understood that the western folks took over. However, though, like these little silk balloons with candles in them, these would be used for military communication. The big boys, as I call them, didn't come around until 1783 when French brothers Joseph Michel and Jacques Ertienne Montgolfier. I think I got that right. I love that last name, Montgolfier.

SPEAKER_04 10:45

Isn't it great? I actually mentioned these same guys when I uh did my Louis, when I did my Louis uh episodes.

SPEAKER_05 10:52

Yes, yes, because they were they were definitely around at that at time. And they were really paid by the uh monarchy to kind of like do their thing.

SPEAKER_04 11:02

And then everybody was like, why if we're so broke, why are we paying these guys money to do this?

SPEAKER_05 11:09

Yeah, wait till you see pictures of this stuff because it's oh it's amazing.

SPEAKER_04 11:12

Yes, please look it up.

SPEAKER_05 11:13

So over the top. Well, we'll we'll have pictures in the show notes for you.

SPEAKER_04 11:17

I actually went down that rabbit hole too when I read about it.

SPEAKER_05 11:20

Right? Yeah, I kind of wanted to be around at that time to see it because it was so monumental, but then I'd want to like immediately get out of there because it's all gonna upload really soon. Yeah. But, anyways, these guys uh they publicly demonstrated a big hot air balloon in NA, France. So what they did is they basically built a bonfire on the ground, and then they filled up a silk balloon, like a big one. This thing was like 20 feet in diameter, and uh they put it over the fire, and sure enough, the fire heated up the air inside the balloon, and then this balloon took off. Now, obviously, nobody was inside that thing because it was an inferno, and you would have died. But the but the the thing is that the the principle was there. People could make things fly. Uh, September of the same year, the brothers performed another demonstration before King Louis XVI in Marie Antoinette. Still too nervous to risk human lives, the brothers decided to attach a basket carrying a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. And I do believe you mentioned that in your episode.

SPEAKER_04 12:26

Sure did. Thought it was funny.

SPEAKER_05 12:28

And then I and I can only imagine what those animals must have thought during the whole thing. The duck may have been okay. He's like, hey, whatever. I'm in the air, anyways. But the sheep and the rooster, they must have been just the sheep must have been just going off like one of those screaming goats the whole time.

SPEAKER_04 12:45

Can't blame him.

SPEAKER_05 12:46

No. I mean, I would have done the same thing if I was even a human in one of those things. On November 21st, 1783, uh the Montgolfier brothers sent up the first man balloon. And now they had the two dudes in there. They went up and and it was tethered, so they weren't just flying away, but now the race was on. Now it was like, okay, humans have taken to the sky. This is where like everything changed in terms of flight capabilities, I guess you could say. And these early balloons consisted of like a raging fire inside of like this uh like cauldron kind of a thing, and everybody in a basket holding on for dear life. Uh, these early balloons were not controlled, these early balloons just they they did eventually like they they would have them tethered to the ground, but still they would blow all over the place. And if that fire went out, you came down real fast. It was because they'll those silk balloons leaked like a sieve.

SPEAKER_04 13:49

I believe it. So which is unfortunate. Silk's expensive. Sorry.

SPEAKER_05 13:53

Oh, oh god, yeah. That's true too, yeah, because they couldn't use cotton. So I think cotton would have been too heavy, which is ironic because when we would get to the Zeppelins, they did use cotton because it was so much stronger in certain aspects. Um well, yeah, actually, they melted down animal intestines and then put them in the cotton as a gelatin, and then that made it work.

SPEAKER_04 14:18

That's cool. I'm sure we'll get there. Sorry.

SPEAKER_05 14:22

So time progressed. Eventually, hydrogen gas was discovered to be lighter than air, and now balloons didn't need crazy fires. In fact, you didn't want crazy fires. These these next generation of balloons, uh, they could float on their own, assuming that there wasn't any fire to be seen, or a spark, or whatever. There were two main downsides to the balloons, especially with ones filled with hydrogen. Uh, one, they were unpropelled, meaning that they now had no way of control the dang thing. So you get up in the air and you get rid of that tether, and you're just going wherever the wind tells you you're gonna go. Today, hot air balloons, they actually have vents. I guess they can open up these vents to release air and it will push them in directions, but even still, like you don't see you don't see a hot air balloon in the middle of a hurricane.

SPEAKER_04 15:19

That'd be bad.

SPEAKER_05 15:20

Yeah. It would just be like a rag doll just flying all over the place. And then often these hydrogen balloons had a very loose stoichiometric combination of hydrogen and oxygen. So what the heck is stoichiometry? Stoichiometry is where you work out uh basically percentages of chemicals or substances that you're going to use for a specific purpose, right? There's no point in it like, say if you have a uh chemical reaction that needs gold, do you just go find 500 pounds of gold and just throw it into the experiment and hope for the best? No, you're going to use stoichiometry to figure out what is the minimum amount of gold that is necessary because gold's expensive and we don't want to waste it. In this case, uh, you can have a stoichiometric combination, meaning what percentage of hydrogen can you have to what percentage of oxygen to make it work? Because hydrogen is lighter than oxygen, hydrogen is where you get your lift. Now, obviously, you would want a very, very pure hydrogen balloon, right? You don't want any oxygen in there. Uh, all things considered, an all-hydrogen balloon with no oxygen is relatively safe. It's kind of hard to light that in a way. Uh, but if there's any air in there, especially if there is two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen, that's that sweet spot. Why do you think that is?

SPEAKER_04 16:48

Chemistry.

SPEAKER_05 16:51

What's the uh chemical uh expression for water?

SPEAKER_04 16:55

H2O.

SPEAKER_05 16:56

Mm-hmm. Meaning you have two hydrogens attached to one oxygen. Right. So if you're in a situation where you have two parts hydrogen with one part oxygen in a balloon, that makes sense now. That means you're going to have the maximum possible explosion when that thing goes off. And it's all going to turn to water.

SPEAKER_04 17:18

Okay. Yep, I'm here. I'm here.

SPEAKER_05 17:20

So yeah, that they would have a very loose uh stoichiometric combination, meaning that quite often they couldn't make these balloons as pure hydrogen. It was going to have some percentage of oxygen in there. Meaning, if that thing caught on fire, it doesn't. It doesn't catch on fire. It just makes a very loud bang. That's it. You're you're now in the hands of Newton. So, in other words, these things are floating bombs. And some of the early balloonists uh were into a method of mixing hydrogen with hot air to get it even more lift. So they would fill this balloon up with as much hydrogen as they can, and then they would pump in hot air. And the only way you get that hot air is from a fire heating the area. So I don't know, uh, I don't know how long it took before they realized that this was a bad idea, but I'm pretty sure it was it was pretty quickly. Uh, on one famous flight, Jean-Pierre Blanchard partnered up with a Boston physician to cross the English Channel in a balloon that could navigate somewhat. This thing is pretty cool. What they did is they oh, I'm sorry, I missed a spot here. On June 15, 1785, Pierre Romain and Palatra de Rosier became the first to die from blowing themselves up in a hot air balloon.

SPEAKER_04 18:46

Good. RIP.

SPEAKER_05 18:47

Or in a hot air slash hydrogen balloon.

SPEAKER_04 18:50

Yeah. I mean, it was bound to happen. But RIP.

SPEAKER_05 18:55

Two years, uh, but yeah, approximately about two years after uh the famous flight in 1783. Um, yep, they filled that balloon up with helium and uh not helium, but hydrogen, and that was the end of it. So that must have been quite a show. I bet. Because man, I I've I've listened even to small like party balloons mixed with two part hydrogen with one part oxygen, and it is louder than a gunshot. Like it is so loud when that goes off.

SPEAKER_04 19:25

So a big one, can you imagine?

SPEAKER_05 19:27

Oh, geez, like a like a 20, 30 foot diameter situation.

SPEAKER_04 19:33

That would be it would be loud.

SPEAKER_05 19:36

And then you hear the screaming guys coming to the ground.

SPEAKER_04 19:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 19:39

More than likely they were tethered, so they wouldn't have fallen too far. But it was probably still like a hundred feet. Jeez. Uh eventually the balloon with a flapper was invented, and uh, and some degree of navigation could be could take place, meaning this flapper, I think it was a dude at the back end of it with like a palm frond, just flapping it. hardest I could like Link in uh Zelda Wind Waker where you had that leaf that you could yeah high high technology stuff here but because of this flapper thingy they could actually they could actually navigate somewhat um one of my uh my favorite cases here was um the flight with Jean-Pierre Blanchard and who partnered up with a Boston physician to cross the English Channel in a balloon that could navigate somewhat okay this was amazing so ambitious I will give him that uh but uh the English channel's far it's like 38 miles the aircraft wasn't sealed very well and they started to descend so low that in order for the two men to make it across the channel they had to throw out all their supplies because it is not it's not like they had a stockpile of hydrogen sitting around it was yeah everything they had in there is what they had to work with. They barely made it to the other side and this must have been a heck of a sight because nobody knew where they were going to land because you know navigation. So people were running up and down the coast trying to find these dudes and when they finally found them they found these two buck ass naked men cheering their success meaning that they eventually had to give up their clothing in order to shed enough weight.

SPEAKER_04 21:24

It's dedication.

SPEAKER_05 21:25

Yeah like like everything just went flying over the edge and that must have been a heck of a sight too just like some little fisherman just sitting up there and then here comes this weird ball like thing and then all of a sudden you start seeing like barrels flying over and then you see like a pair of trousers and then a shirt and then a vest a hat. Yeah that that must have been a heck of a sight. There were a few other achievements uh but for much of the first half of the 1800s balloons kind of just fell out of interest they really struggled to navigate and it was really hard to keep them up in the air for any useful length of time. It would take another 50 years before some like some steam powered engines, an envelope design cell and aluminum manufacturing before we would see anything resembling what the Hindenburg would look like today. So for all the way up into the 1850s it was just a floating ball with some dudes in it hoping that they don't crash. Perfect part two the derigable the the derigable the the derigible derigible airship nailed it. Yes if you can kids if you can go home and pronounce derigable to your parents they will be very impressed if not worried because they don't know what that means. What does it mean? I don't know what to look I think it's I think it's just a style of the the aircraft it's like a long like oval shaped type thing instead of like a ball. Got it like a derigible can be the like you can actually send it straight but I don't know the actual translation for derigable I'll have to look that up later. Yeah yeah I should and maybe I'll put that in the show notes but essentially balloons suck. Uh-huh uh they are heavily subjected to any wind they are nearly impossible to maneuver slash navigate yes even with motors if your balloon experiences a crosswind your motor can only push in one direction so you're screwed like you can't turn left or right you can only just go straight and uh I think some of them actually had like a steam powered engine in them which that's gotta have a lot of a lot of horsepower especially back then. Sounds heavy though yeah especially with a like a two horsepower steam engine with materials as they were up to the 1850s the balloons leaked like a sieve no one wanted to see two naked men high-fiving each other on the beach next to a giant shriveled up sack that's I concur that's basically what it amounted to uh especially when they're just out there browing out yeah it's a lot everything changed in 1852 when I think it's pronounced Henry Gifford but if he's French it would be Henri Giffard I'm not sure but uh when Henry Gifford created the airship or better known yet as the dirigible the name airship comes about because well imagine using a balloon that resembled that the shape of a seafaring ship okay the logic was that if you get a ship in the ocean you don't shape it like a a round circle it's just not feasible. So instead let's make a aircraft shaped like a ship and see what happens. Makes sense so instead of being a uh like a a round being around body kind of a thing uh it's more or less like something that's shaped more like a football where they kind of each end comes to a point and then it's kind of like oval shaped in the middle and they would eventually become just perfect circles in the middle as they discovered that the perfect circle works better with a crosswind rather than having a uh oblong shape as well we'll get to it. The an engine and rudder could be placed in the rear of the aircraft and later elevator flaps to combat uh crosswinds could be uh used and be more maneuverable. So now you actually have something that resembles something that of like aerodynamic and it can cut through the air kind of like an ocean liner can cut through the water and they can steer left and right uh but that that that can be difficult as we'll see but you can still do it. And better yet you can put an engine on these things and actually go places. So in 1852 he attached a small steam engine with a massive propeller I think this thing was like five feet in diameter or something crazy. Sweet. Yeah yeah no he was he was balling out on this thing he was pimping my pimp my balloon uh instead of standing in a basket holding on for dear life uh Gifford's ship design allowed the pilot to sit comfortably because he actually had like a you know like a three foot long platform that he could just sit on and let the one or two horsepower steam engine propel the ship forward and it actually allowed him to fly forward that's really the only direction for 17 miles at five miles per hour. Ooh we're moving uh back then back then it was pretty good yeah I mean that's like a fighter jet I mean hey we're just thankful that we can turn so yeah I mean but as we'll see like once we get these things up to speed like at 84 miles an hour steering becomes a bit more difficult because these things are like 800 feet long but we'll get there. The long the the long story short of it is that this 1852 Gifford flight like changed everything. And it was like the first real advancement in balloon slash flying technology. The concept of a lighter than air ship was now locked in stone. Suddenly people started to think that there is something more to floaty things that might be able to serve a more genuine purpose. By the 1890s dirigable got way bigger way faster with the use of gasoline engines and applying aluminum instead of wood of what did I write here instead of woodland I was I yeah I was tired when I wrote this instead of wood the blimpy part uh was no longer just a leaky sack it was a semi-rigid sack with a metal gantry below that extended the whole length of the ship the new generation of dirigibles are even lighter than before despite being bigger the big thing was aluminum yeah it's a light there was a time when aluminum was worth more than gold I believe it is so funny because like at that time I mean earth has a ton of it it is everywhere but at that time it was just really hard to extract it whereas like now it's just it's just everywhere. I uh I think I read a story somewhere I can't remember the name of it but basically the plot of it was this this group of people they left their world to come to ours because our world had trees but their world was just nothing but gold there was so much gold everywhere that they were they couldn't get rid of it. Like they just couldn't get rid of it fast enough. And then when they discovered wood they they said that like the wood was the most precious thing in the world to them. That's interesting. Whoever thought that you could live in a world where like there's just too much gold something tells me that's not the case but I wouldn't mind visiting there. Maybe that would be nice yeah yeah I'll just take this paperweight with me. Right. So now like because we now have these derrigibles that could fly in a direction with a measurable speed like now we could put these things to work. By the 1890s they got way bigger way faster um the gasoline engine was the other thing as I mentioned before having that gasoline engine versus a steam engine was a uh that was another game changer because gasoline engines are just significantly more efficient than steam and you don't have to have fire necessarily like an open fire near your hydrogen filled balloon. We also see dirigibles becoming considered for uh military use. So like the uh the Baldwin dirigible American inventor Thomas Baldwin built a 53 foot airship called the California Arrow uh which won a one mile speed race on October of 1904 at the St. Louis World Fair.

SPEAKER_04 30:19

I'm so happy that that race turned out a lot better than the marathon that was held that same year or what is it the ethnic games or whatever it was anthropology days?

SPEAKER_05 30:31

Yeah the anthropology days that's so bad it's horrifying but it must have been a it must have been a a crazy time to be in St. Louis in 1804. There are so much stuff going on there like a blimp race like that is just it's wild especially if you're if you're a kid who's never seen anything other than a bird fly could you imagine what it must be like to see a like this blimp fly over right that that that that would have had to have been just absolutely mind blowing.

SPEAKER_04 31:07

That's around the same time that um circuses were a big deal too the circus was a big deal for the same reason. Because like you know the traveling circus would go through areas that didn't get a lot of excitement so hey here's the circus here's all this crazy weird things giant tents exotic animals acts entertainment.

SPEAKER_05 31:26

It's imagine just being like some farmer in Idaho and then all of a sudden here's a circus and uh here's an elephant. Yeah exactly you probably have seen drawn pictures of them in books but the here's an actual elephant here's the one in real life yeah there's no zoos at that or zoos were really um in early early early they were there but they were only in like New York.

SPEAKER_04 31:50

Yeah they were in big cities and even then it was um I don't I don't quite remember I think zoos were a product of the circus or something they're related anyway.

SPEAKER_05 31:59

You know that's a good question. I don't know where like the advent of zoos came from yeah I want to look that up later.

SPEAKER_04 32:05

So I wonder if it's one of those things like okay what do we do with the animals when we're done with them yeah I'm gonna look that up I'm pretty sure there's some dumpster fire ideas in that oh guaranteed this is an interesting time yes there is there was that one circus train that crashed or PT Barnum's museum or PT Barnum's first tent or or just P.T. Barnum in general I actually thought about doing that.

SPEAKER_05 32:28

Anyway we're getting sidetracked yes sorry yes I do kind of want to look up that train accident because there was like tigers and lions running all over the place I can see that just being a nightmare but uh yeah anyways 1904 St. Louis World Fair Baldwin and his little dirigible uh eventually got like a military contract in 1908 Baldwin sold an improved model with a 20 horsepower engine to the U.S. Army called the SC-1 and leave it to the U.S. Army or the government to take something that could be named really really cool and then give it a catalog number yeah that's okay that's what newspapers are for I got this derrible we call it the Raptor and the government's like cool it's the SC1 now now we're gonna come into a guy that uh changed everything and this is one of these things where um you got the right guy born at the right time who had just the right personality. It's like Winston Churchill man like I don't know of anybody else we could put alive in Winston Churchill's time in World War II to do what he did.

SPEAKER_04 33:49

We're gonna get the let out get the let out yeah that's what they say when you listen to Led Zeppelin.

SPEAKER_05 33:55

Oh jeez no we're not we're not getting the lead out oh that's unfortunate we are getting into uh Ferdinand Zeppelin this guy he was born in a wild time if you think about it like born 1883 and died 1917 like he was a German military general and it's like he was kind of a hero in his own right zeppelin when you look at that time frame like imagine how he saw the world change from 1838 we're still talking people that are like fighting in Napoleonic styles to 1917 and world war one machine guns and biplanes and all that stuff it's just yeah it's just crazy.

SPEAKER_04 34:44

That's why World War I is my favorite world war to study.

SPEAKER_05 34:48

Yes I know with all those guys shooting at each other with their machine guns and while riding horses oh it's amazing yeah it's a trip such a trip anyway so yeah born 1838 died 1917 he was a German military general who looked at the idea of the previous airships and had a brilliant idea instead of using ropes or nets to hold the shape of the blimpy part and I I I really don't know what the technical term is for that floating the the part that actually does the floating I don't know what that's called me neither it's okay I'm calling it the blimpy part. Perfect so the or the plumpy part either one I don't know if I like plumpy part that sounds weird. It's kind of cute the plumpy part? Yeah okay it did have girthy part but that still wouldn't work I don't like that one no I don't like that either no anyway actually we'll we'll call it plumpy part okay as a technical term so perfect look to the shape of the plumpy part in the desired shape use a uh use a material called dura lumen which is I guess that's like considered at that time aircraft grade aluminum so like uh yeah you probably hear it all the time in like knives like oh this uses aircraft grade aluminum and there's different grades of aluminum like I think there's like 6068 and there's 70 something there's 80 something basically like how you can have a steel that is harder uh or softer or you can have a steel that has more flux to it but doesn't break as easily and all that kind of stuff uh you can have the same exact thing with aluminum and uh you can you can make aluminum just absolutely insanely light as well as insanely strong and uh that's kind of what this dura aluminum dura dura alumin I think is what they eventually called it and and everybody used it England America Germany everybody was using this stuff uh even though it was really expensive to make but anyways he used that that aluminum to create like a skeleton inside the uh the plumpy part and basically instead of filling the whole thing up with just one giant amount of hydrogen gas you use like a series of bladders so kind of like um you know how like the Titanic had those baffles or those like those compartments that were built into it there was I don't know like what 10 12 compartments that they could close off and like so like compartment three is flooded cool shut it off and then that way we can't like we can't sink because it's just a that one uh this is kind of like the same idea but here we use these these what would be called gas cells and so like if a gas cell popped it's okay because we still have like four or five others that are you know not popped that was actually that that was a really really ingenious idea and the idea was that okay let's let's build like an exoskeleton and then we'll wrap that exoskeleton with the air bladders inside and now you could now you have a lot more control of what the aircraft could do. So now you could uh purge gas you could deflate something you could inflate something you could change pressures like you had a lot of control now in like how is the aircraft going to be balanced you know if it gets higher up the balloons or or the bladders are going to want to expand and explode or if you go down after you vented gas by the time you get down now you don't have enough gas to keep you afloat. So this this air bladder design was absolutely ingenious and because of this we are now entering the world of what we generally consider what the Hindenburg would look like we are now in the world of the Zeppelin not the Led Zeppelin that doesn't come around until like what 1970s? Yeah I'm planning on watching their documentary later anyway on July 2nd 1900 Zeppelin's first real working model the LZ1 and uh by the way we will see this LZ like the Hindenburg was I believe LZ29 or 129. So he made a hundred and twenty nine models in his time or the company did. So the LZ1 took flight it did work but it had a lot of like kinks to work out and it did crash but it was able to perform well enough for the government to be like okay I think there's something here.

SPEAKER_04 39:43

Yeah see if something fails it doesn't mean it's a failure. It just means we gotta fix some things.

SPEAKER_05 39:50

Yeah. Especially if it was able to like perform well before it crashed. Yeah. And through a bunch of donations he was able to put together an upgraded model That could fly over 24 hours in 1906. So now you have an aircraft that can hang out in the air for over a day.

SPEAKER_04 40:09

In 1906. See, now that to me is impressive. That's good.

SPEAKER_05 40:13

That is that is wild. Like that is when like an airplane at that time could only just fly a few miles at the best. Yeah, that that is absolutely incredible. Now, granted, that airplane would be flying much faster, but that's okay. We're not we're not looking necessarily for speed, we're looking for direction, and we are looking for stability.

SPEAKER_04 40:36

Slow and steady wins this race.

SPEAKER_05 40:39

Yes. Uh the German government now saw the advantages of these new Zeppelins for wartime use. And by the time World War One broke out, 100 of them have been commissioned. And that is something that you do see pictures of in World War I. You'd see these Zeppelins up in the air. And there wasn't like there was any anti-aircraft guns at that time to really shoot them down. Nope. Now, thankfully, they didn't have a lot of lift, so that it's not like they could strap on a 500-pound bomb and fly over and bomb you. No, it'd be a couple of dudes and they're just dropping hand grenades out.

SPEAKER_04 41:12

I think they were more used for like scouting and stuff, but yeah.

SPEAKER_05 41:16

Yes, yes. Uh to me, it reminds me of like those videos that you see of like what's going on in Ukraine where the drone flies over with like a basket of like a grenade on it, and they just drop it over their site, and then they see it hit, and then they just like float away. It's like that's kind of what these things were capable of doing. But yeah, they were really used for reconnaissance. It and even the Hindenburg was used a lot for reconnaissance. Um, Zeppelin worked on a passenger model known as the Delag or D lag, which is I think Americanized for Deutsche Luft. Okay. Luft Schiffart.

SPEAKER_04 41:57

Oh. I'm not going to attempt it, but it's Luft Schiff.

SPEAKER_05 42:06

Schiffart. Luftfarts.

SPEAKER_04 42:08

Okay, guys. L-U-F-T. S C H I F F A H R T S. I can see where you're getting the farts, but it's funny. I am so sorry for the Ger the German speaking people who are listening. We are butchering it, but hey, we're trying.

SPEAKER_05 42:27

Uh actually, we're right. Really? It is Luft, Schiff, fart. Excellent. The looft part sounds like Luft with a short oo sound as in book, a schiff similar to schiff. And the fart is pronounced with a long A sound like fart. Fart. Luft fart.

SPEAKER_04 42:55

That's a good word.

SPEAKER_05 42:57

That's amazing. I love the German language.

SPEAKER_04 43:01

That's great. Just have to say really angry. Sorry.

SPEAKER_05 43:05

Now we can Yeah, our one listener is just like nine, nine, nine, nine, nine.

SPEAKER_04 43:12

Sorry, sorry. I could have helped it. Fadela, Vadela, Veda.

SPEAKER_05 43:22

Oh man. He's probably in Nuremberg, too. Um and maybe that's why they changed it to just DLAG, because the Americans were just gonna have way too much fun with this.

SPEAKER_04 43:34

It's true.

SPEAKER_05 43:34

Uh, anyways, this passenger line, Delag, was commissioned or established in 1910 to be like an intercontinental ship to move civilians about. So now we're stepping away from the military side of things, and now we're getting into the people mover side of things. Zeppelin also established the Friedrich Friedrichshafen or the Zeppelin Foundation, which served to be a main development for aerial navigation and the manufacturer of airships. So now, like, that's all they're gonna do is just build what we would call today blimps. And boy, did they make one. 1928, the Groff Zeppelin was completed, and this thing was massive. Uh, my grandfather actually remembers seeing this thing in America. He it it flew over in Chicago, and my grandfather saw that for the first time and he like freaked out. Like, what is this thing? Uh, this thing was 778 feet long, so about what, two football fields? Two and a third?

SPEAKER_04 44:41

Something like that.

SPEAKER_05 44:42

Yeah, it had a diameter of 100 feet, so this thing was a thick boy. It had a lift capacity of 191,799 pounds. That's a very specific weight. It is 799 pounds.

SPEAKER_04 45:00

Like, I wonder what math went into that.

SPEAKER_05 45:02

Well, it also depends on the altitude of takeoff. Yeah, so like if if you are taking off at a higher altitude, you can't put as much on. But if you're taking off at a lower altitude, you can. As we'll see here with uh um the Hindenburg, it had a max speed of 80 miles per hour. Uh, it was powered by five 12-cylinder engines at 550 horsepower max, and it had a capacity of 20 sleeping berths. That's pretty that's pretty big.

SPEAKER_04 45:32

It's very large.

SPEAKER_05 45:34

Yeah, it's uh that would be the largest thing in the air at that time. The Graph Zeppelin would go on to fly 590 flights. By the way, this thing was filled with hydrogen the entire time. Um, helium was invented at this time, but America put the kibosh on helium because uh America owned all the helium that was produced because it only came from these oil mines in uh I think Texas or something like that. Uh, but yeah, this this bad boy would fly 590 flights, including the first transatlantic flight, uh, the first flight around the world, and the flight over the North Pole. That's not including all the flights to America and many different locations there. She flew until 1837 and was an icon of her time. She uh she became like something recognizable of the zeitgeist of the time. Everybody knew what the Graph Zeppelin looked like.

SPEAKER_04 46:30

Did you mean 1937?

SPEAKER_05 46:32

Yes. Okay. 1937. She did not go back in time.

SPEAKER_04 46:36

Got it.

SPEAKER_05 46:38

Could you imagine seeing something like that in 1837?

SPEAKER_04 46:40

Oh my gosh, they'd freak out.

SPEAKER_05 46:44

So, so yeah, the Graph Zeppelin, I mean, it's on postage stamps. It is it it it's it's just been one of those things where it's like the uh M1 Grand or or whatever, or the Honda Civic or the Toyota Corolla. It just worked, and it worked every time. And because of this reliability, the crews that worked it were very, very competent crews. Like they all knew each other, they all knew how to operate this thing. So, like whatever came after the Graph Zeppelin, it would it would be well manned. By the way, I want to do a huge shout out to uh airships.net. Uh, that website where I got a lot of this technical research from is amazing. They've got pictures, they've got schematics, they've got the statistics, they've got the stories behind everything. Like, go check them out. If you want like a very comprehensive site to go get more information on all these different airships, airships.net, they they are an amazing company. In fact, almost all the pictures that you're gonna see on on the website uh are attributed to Airships.net. Granted, a lot of these pictures are so old that they're kind of like open source or like they're not they're not copyrighted anymore. But the fact that airships.net took the time to like compile them all is pretty cool. So be sure to go check them out. Uh after nearly a decade of nearly flawless flights and zero injuries, the graph was ordered to or was ordered to like come back to Germany where the hydrogen was evacuated and eventually it sat in scraps until it was recycled for the Luftwaffe in World War II. If this thing is so amazing, then why was it returned to be decommissioned and turned into scrap? Because again, that Duraloom stuff was kind of useful in other aircraft. Well, the Hindenburg happened. That's what happened. So that was in 1937, if I believe. Part three, the Hindenburg. The Hindenburg built March 4th, 1936, was very similar to the Gruff Zeppelin, but there were some key differences that set it apart. Even though it was only 30 feet longer than the Zeppelin, Hindenburg was 130 feet, 135 feet in diameter compared to the Zeppelin's 100 feet. So for those of you who remember your uh, you know, your um surface area of a circle, we factor in pi and everything like that, you know, pi r squared, if you start increasing the diameter of that circle, its surface area it goes up exponentially. So yeah, it's weird. Like when you see the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg side by side, you can obviously tell which one is a Hindenburg. I mean, it is clearly bigger, but it's not like wow, this is Earth chattering. Like, it's not like it's twice as big visually, but there's a lot more to it. Um, this fatter design also gave it a bit more rigidity. So keep in mind that rigidity part to steer these things, you have to really flex that frame, that hard structure, because the motors were on the back, but the steering was in the front. To turn that nose, you really had to put a lot of torque on the back end of that thing. So this thing had to be very, very strong, especially when you um include the uh four Daimler Bend 16-cylinder engines with a max output of 1320 horsepower that could cruise at 850 horsepower. So the the Graph Zeppelin had 550 max. This thing could cruise at 850 horsepower, and it had a max speed of 84 miles per hour, with the Zeppelin only having 80 miles per hour. So I know it's like really all that engine output and all that kind of stuff, like really, that's all it could do is four miles an hour faster. Uh, the main difference between the two was that the Hindenburg was far roomier and was way more stable. It was said that a pen, because this thing made multiple trips across the Atlantic, you the the aircraft could take off, get to altitude, and you could set up a pen on a plate in the dining room, and that thing could get all the way over to Lakehurst, New Jersey, and dock, and that pen would never tip over. That's how stable this thing was. And those engines at 850 horsepower, those engines ran 24-7. They never stopped. That's a that's a lot of that's a lot of work for an engine to just run like that. And these things weren't flying super high, they were flying like no more than 400 feet high, like they weren't going above the clouds or anything like that. So they they stayed pretty low, so they didn't need turbochargers or anything. But the Hindenburg was kind of considered the uh Titanic of the day. It was just an absolute like ocean liner of an aircraft. The Hindenburg also had an innovative autopilot system, which I thought was kind of cool. So they could flip a switch and the autopilot system would automatically level it out, and it would automatically adjust like the air pressure of the gas cells and all sorts of stuff. Like it would, it was pretty clever. It was a very clever mechanical computer, all things considered. So perhaps the biggest difference was that this Zeppelin, a Hindenburg, was the first dirigible that was designed not to use hydrogen gas, but much safer helium. Helium floats, but it also can't catch on fire. Uh, helium also has less lifting capability than hydrogen. Hydrogen, I think, has what is it like 50% more lifting capabilities per volume than helium, but hydrogen also has that problem of you know exploding, whereas helium just makes your voice sound funny.

SPEAKER_04 53:33

Yeah, that sounds more fun.

SPEAKER_05 53:36

Well, in order to like, in order to to make the uh helium work, you actually had to make the whole aircraft way lighter.

SPEAKER_03 53:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 53:46

So there's a had to go uh do a lot of engineering into the structure, into the skeleton of it. Uh the designers of the Hindenburg decided to ditch hydrogen when the British airship, the R101, crashed on October 5th, 1930, near Bouvais, France, killing 48 out of the 54 people on board. Yeah, the the Germans were like, okay, our time is coming. It's we we haven't had we haven't blown up anything yet, but it's uh it it's it's gonna be a matter of time because I think in the United States the Shenandoah crashed. Um, but that was filled with helium. But either way, the Germans were like, okay, we let's switch over to helium because our time is going to be up here. Like, we can't dodge a bullet forever. Uh, Hindenburg had 14 adjustable helium gas cells that could be controlled from the control car. The original design called for an inner ring of hydrogen gas cells around the much larger helium cells, with all cells having a vent that led to the top and away from anything that could produce enough heat to ignite the hydrogen. So basically, the original design was going to be like the the gas cells inside would be like these giant donuts, and then in the middle of it would be like a long cylinder of hydrogen just to give it that extra lift. Uh, I think they did away with that idea, and they just decided, you know what, let's just stick with just all helium. And then they built a uh um like a really cool walkway so you could go from nose to tail and you could walk along the entire length of the balloon, or not balloon, but the uh the Zeppelin, and you would have like these gigantic bags of or these balloons inside of just gas, and everything had its own vent, and everything could be controlled from the uh control car. So Hindenburg also had special release valves on the top. So these were kind of like these um, these valves, what they would do is they would stay closed until they hit a certain amount of pressure. Once that pressure got up to a certain point, the valves would open up and vent the gas out. Uh, the higher the altitude you go, the more the balloons inside are going to want to expand. So it's kind of like um, you know how can they send up those weather balloons, right? And they gotta go all the way up to like the edge of space and they only look like they're like a quarter of the way full. Ever notice that?

SPEAKER_03 56:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 56:24

That's because when the higher up they go, the more that balloon swells, the more the gas wants to expand.

SPEAKER_04 56:32

Okay, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_05 56:33

And when they actually get up into space, then there's absolutely no atmosphere compressing it, and then the balloon pops and then everything falls down. So that that's the reason why they're like that. So yeah, basically, if the if the Zeppelin got high enough, then it could vent gas, and then it would bring itself down as necessary, but then it also had autofill features. So when it got down, so like if you're getting say like 100 feet above sea level, well, suddenly all that you have that atmosphere pushing down on those those gas cells. Now there's not enough lift. So then they had these gigantic uh hydrogen, compressed hydrogen tanks that would then automatically refill the bladder. So like this thing was self-uh leveling, I guess. It would uh if you set that thing for like say 350 feet above sea level, it stayed there. And it didn't matter if it lost. In fact, it did, it would lose 20% of its gas going over the ocean for a very, very specific reason, but it would always maintain the pressure in those gas cells. Very impressive stuff.

SPEAKER_04 57:40

Yeah, it's really cool.

SPEAKER_05 57:41

Yeah, it's almost like they thought this through.

SPEAKER_04 57:43

What?

SPEAKER_05 57:45

Those Germans. Uh, the gas cells are also made differently. Uh, previous dirigibles or Zeppelins were made from gold beater skin, which I had to look that up. Basically that's weird. Yeah, gold beater skin. I like I guess they you they called it gold beater skin because it's material they would use to uh extract gold from like sluice and stuff like that. Okay. Still, gold beater. That's just an interesting name. It is. I kind of want to name like a kid gold beater.

SPEAKER_04 58:15

I wouldn't do that.

SPEAKER_05 58:16

Nah. I'd you'd be better off called Sue than Goldbeater.

SPEAKER_04 58:20

Mm-hmm. I agree.

SPEAKER_05 58:21

But, anyways, gold beater skin um was basically made from the outer layer of cow or oxen intestine. So basically, it was a giant sausage casing. And and if you look at it, it's like translucent and it's like crinkly and it feels like plastic. It's fun, but it's actually cow intestine. Cool. So yeah, so when I said that the Hindenburg looked like a giant sausage-like thing, I wasn't wrong.

SPEAKER_04 58:47

No, not at all.

SPEAKER_05 58:50

However, though, the Hindenburg used a very different material that they actually got from the Americans. It's amazing up to this point, like how much the Americans and the Germans worked together. I thought this was even even when in the late 1930s, it was amazing how much America and Germany, even when Germany was under Nazi rule, how much like they worked together on stuff. I always thought that was kind of interesting. But what the Americans came up with, they used a special material that where they what they did is they took uh gelatin, which is you can use uh pig's feet, cow's feet, horse feet, whatever. You take their hooves and you boil it and boil it and boil it. And that's actually where we get gelatin from. So when you get a buy a package of jello and you mix it up, put it in the fridge, and got this gelatinous red mass, that's actually just horse hooves rendered down. Uh, but they what they would do is almost make like a composite. They would take a sheet of cotton, they would slather this gelatin all over it, and then they would sandwich it between two. Other layers of cotton to create the fabric for the gas cell. So it was very flexible, but because of that gelatin being sandwiched in between, uh, it was very strong. Like it was probably the strongest materials, the most space age stuff ever at that time. And it was very simple. It's uh, and even even to this day, like um, I know they're doing research on like Mars habitats. So, like, how do we build a habitat on Mars that won't just fall apart on us? That's what they're doing, is they're basically taking a thing like cotton and they're embedding it with like a resin of some sort, and then they're sandwiching it between two other things. And it's like uh it's a very, very strong and airtight material. Hindenburg's structure was built mostly out of duralumen. A lot of it they bought from the uh British, the R101, which I thought was kind of funny. They're like, hey, so what are you doing with all that uh leftover R101? Um guess do you want it? Yeah, we can use it. Recycle, yes, especially this stuff because it was very expensive. Um, it was actually purple in color. So when they manufactured it, they would put like a purple lacquer coating over it, over the finished part. Um, I'm not too sure why. Maybe they identify it as like that Duralumen stuff, but yeah, it was a highly sought-after material. But the R101 was sold and then reused to establish a 15-main ring connecting 36 longitudinal girders with a triangular keel at the bottom for rigidity. There's a lot of geometrical terms there. Yep. Basically put, the way that it worked is that the Hindenburg was divided up into 15 main rings, and as a result, you could hold 16 uh gas cells in there. And in the middle of all that, there was a walkway, as I mentioned before, and we'll have pictures of it on the website. Um, there was a walkway that goes from the nose all the way to the tail. That way, people could access every gas cell as needed. Like they could they could check on everything. And there was the same thing on the bottom of it. The the bottom of the Hindenburg was made out of like a triangular-shaped scaffold, and it was very rigid, and that's where the like the living quarters were, that's where the uh cruise quarter was. It had to be very rigid, uh, just because they didn't want people like swaying around inside because you know, nothing like getting seasick in the air. So that walkway, I have to imagine that there was no smoking signs everywhere.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:49

During this time, maybe, maybe not.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:53

What's really funny is that people would walk up and down that walkway smoking.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:58

Yeah, it's just kind of what people did. Like, I don't know. It's hard to describe without going into a full like historical detailed context of detail.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:09

Well, it's like that that lady that I knew growing up, she worked in a munitions factory in World War II, and her job was to pour the powder into the bullets, and then her next person, like her next partner would press the bullet in, and that's all she did for like 16 hours a day for the entire war. And like they all like the whole line of these bullet pressers smoked cigarettes while they were just pouring gunpowder into each bullet.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:33

They thought nothing of it, it was just really like I'm doing my job and I'm having a cigarette while I'm doing it, just like everybody else.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:39

Well, I figured too that like if anything goes wrong, they're erased. It's it it would be such a quick death. You you wouldn't even know what happened. And I would imagine it would be the same way in there, other than like, why?

SPEAKER_04 1:03:53

Now we think about it and we're like, oh, that's not a good idea, but yeah, that's like a hmm, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:00

That's not only do you get lung cancer, you run the risk of blowing up the whole factory.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:04

Yeah, there's a lot of things wrong with it, but you know, hindsight 2020, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:04:08

Yeah, they did have pretty interesting lives. I will say that. Uh the skin of the Hindenburg was made from a metalliz uh metal metallized fabric that was designed to block two types of solar radiation. This was incredible. I know Mythbusters, they tested this, is the uh they basically covered the whole entire skin of the Hindenburg with like this silvery aluminum oxide component, and they tested it to see if it was flammable. It is, it's very flammable, but this was very clever. And uh and again, you got it you cannot discredit German engineering. This material was designed to block two types of ultra or two types of uh radiation from the sun, ultraviolet and infrared. Ultraviolet light, this radiation has a tendency to wear stuff down, like synthetic things like fabrics and uh rubber, plastic, and all that stuff. Imagine going out, uh, I'm sure everybody's seen this. Like you go out to your backyard and you see like a plastic lawn chair that's been sitting up there for like five years, and you feel it, and it's really chalky and it's kind of brittle. That's because of UV radiation destroyed it. It happens a lot in Arizona. Maybe not so much on the East Coast, but it happens a lot here. That like the ultraviolet stuff can really wreak havoc on those gas cells. Like they really wanted to protect those things. So that was pretty clever that they were able to come up with something that could block that. And then the other thing, and this is the reason why it was silver and color and kind of shiny, is that they needed to block infrared. So infrared isn't destructive like ultraviolet, but it is also the source of heat that comes from the sun. So if you stand outside on a sunny day and you feel the warmth coming from the sun, that is because you're being blasted with infrared radiation from the sun. It's not radiation that'll kill you, but it's how we can't see infrared, but we can feel it as heat. Uh, take a flashlight, shine it in your hand for a while, like a really, really bright flashlight, your hand will start to warm up. That's infrared radiation. Again, we can't see it, but we can feel it. But this infrared radiation could cause the gas cells to heat up and cause the pressure to rise and then vent gas before it needs to. So, like by minimizing infrared radiation, it really stabilized those gas cells, which I don't know. To me, I thought that was just really impressive. Now, the control car. This is that thing in the bottom of the Hindenburg that has like all the windows on it, and it's it's very small in comparison to the rest of the craft, but it's uh this thing to me, I could I could have an hour just going over the control car because it's very, very small. It's maybe about twice the size of a minivan. So imagine like two minivans side by side. That's about how big it is, or one of those econo vans. So two econo vans next to each other. I'm not gonna go up, like go on for hours about this because the engineering nerd in me is just I just giggle like a schoolgirl just looking at the pictures of it and everything like that. But it's very, very simple, and I'm I'm just gonna just kind of skim over the basics of it. The whole ship, including the engines, could be controlled in the car. Well, hence the name, the the control car. However, unlike ocean ships, after all, that's what inspired the whole design of the rigid form airship. Instead of one wheel to steer the craft left and right, the Hindenburg actually had two. One wheel controlled the rudder, which steered the ship left and right. So that wheel would be you'd be looking forward out of the like the windows. And there was windows all around. It was really cool. Like you had a almost a 360-degree field of view. So you would have like a regular wheel in the front, like a ship's wheel, and that would you turn it left or right to steer the ship or the aircraft left and right. Then you had another one that would control the elevators, and the elevator is those flaps in the back that go up and down, and that's how you change the pitch of the aircraft. That wheel was off to the left, so it sat perpendicular to the rudder wheel, and you would actually have two or three guys on each wheel at all times. And the reason being, especially that that elevator wheel, if you're moving and that giant mass and you've got to try to like pitch up or down, it could take a couple of guys, including the captain, to actually turn that wheel to get the flap to go to the angle that you need it to. Dang. Because it's just so much air moving over an 800-foot-long object hitting those flaps in the back. And that was even using pulleys. That's crazy. Like that was even, yeah, that was using pulleys. If they had hydraulics, it probably would have worked better. But yeah, like it took two, three guys each to maneuver this massive beast of an aircraft around. And if it was a windy day, may God have mercy on your soul.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:21

How big were the wheels if it took two to three dudes to steer it? They must have been pretty big.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:26

They're about four feet in diameter. Okay. So nothing too, too crazy.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:31

Uh, it was just all done with pulley systems. And again, if they had hydraulics, it probably would work better. So, like, that's one of the things that Americans did with like their bombers, is they had two systems. They had a hydraulic system, which made like a bomber way more agile. Like, you could just well, it's like your car. Whenever you steer your car, you're using hydraulics. Whereas if you had a rack and pinion, you know, you had to like fight the car and you're relying on gears and everything like that. But like American bombers, they used a both a hydraulic system and then another system called a fly-by-wire. And that was more like a pulley system. So it would still work, but you would really have to fight the plane and just don't do a nosedive. Uh, the Hindenburg only had fly by wire. Got it. Probably because it doesn't break.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:20

Like it's very reliable. Yeah, they you had teams of people, uh, two different airmen operating these wheels, and they worked very closely together. And what's interesting is that the captain really didn't do much. The captain would just stand back and watch his crew. There would be like six guys in this little iconov, like double ikanovan size thing. And and these guys, they would run everything. And the only time the captain would get involved if there was a disagreement, or if there was some expertise needed, uh, if there was something specific that the captain needed, otherwise, he backed off. He did not micromanage anything, which was I thought was kind of interesting. So the crew breakdown is one, you have a captain, then you have three watch officers, three navigation officers, three ruddermen or helmsmen, three elevator men. So you have three guys turning the thing left and right, three guys pitching it up and down. You have a chief rigger, don't tell my middle schoolers that a chief rigger or sailmaker, uh, three riggers or sailmakers. So I'm assuming these were the people that would actually like go in and do repairs on the gas cells. In the 1800s, a sail maker was the person that would work on the sales. Uh, obviously, the Hindenburg doesn't have sales, so I'm assuming they would work on everything from the skin of it to like the gas bladders and all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:50

I just picture a bunch of dudes working with a bunch of patches and glue and yeah, they're slapping it on.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:56

They're slapping, just trying to just plug all these holes.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:01

Very likely, probably not how that worked, but that's just what my brain told me.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:05

Yeah. I do know like they could actually go out and uh they actually had special harness rigs where they could go on the outside of it while it was in the air and do repairs on the skin. That's cool. If needed.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:19

Yeah, that's neat.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:20

That's not cool. That's ballsy.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:22

Well, it's cool. I mean, I don't know. During this time period, they everything was ballsy from the construction of skyscrapers to washing a window, like all of it.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:34

Yeah, nowadays it's ballsy if you could use a chainsaw.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:38

Uh so you had a chief radio officer, and then you had three assistant radio officers. And uh these guys, all they did, because again, the Germans were all about safety, and the flight path they would take, they would be radioing into every land mass that they could see, asking for weather reports. That's that's all they did was they just wanted to know radio reports, which I thought was kind of cool. Then you had a chief engineer, then you had three engineers, and then you had 12 mechanics. So these people actually lived inside the engines. So I'll I'll we'll have a picture of it on the website, but like the engines were kind of like on a scaffold that sat outside of the aircraft, obviously, because of you know, hydrogen. These compartments were again, they're about the size of a like a pickup truck. And you could have a couple of these mechanics just sitting inside the engine room just working on it while these things ran 24-7. And you would take a little, you would actually have like a little like one foot wide walkway that went from the uh mechanics' quarters in the very tail end of the ship, and you would just walk out on this little one-foot-wide path out like six, seven feet to get to the engines while you're at 300 feet up in the air. It's it's a really it's a really trippy sight to just be like, dang, people were built different back then. Uh, you had a chief electrician, and then you had two assistant electricians. Uh, the crew were given a great deal of flexibility and discretion. Lieutenant J.D. Repi, who flew on four transatlantic flights of the Hindenburg, wrote, uh, Captain Lehman, of course, would be on the bridge for the landing, but generally acted in the capacity of observer and only gave an order when he considered that some phase of the landing was not going as it should. One officer handled the engines and he used his own judgment as to slowing, stopping, or backing the engines to have little or no ground speed at the instance of landing. Another officer had charged, um, had charge of the ballast. So the ballast is like a bunch of water they keep on board to like balance it out. Um that that's uh I'll go a little bit more detail about ballast here in a little bit. And here he was also exercised his own judgment as to when to drop ballast and also as to when the valve hydrogen. So meaning valving hydrogen, meaning you you open up a vent and you release hydrogen out of the gas cells. The remaining officer coached the elevator men as to the altitude and sometimes would order the ship valved if it appeared necessary. He also watched the ruddermen to some extent, uh, but in general, the ruddermen maneuvered the ship himself as necessary to keep in the wind and pointed towards the landing point. So basically, the dynamic here is just like because I think because the Graf Zeppelin lasted and flew for so long, they were able to train so many people. And like in the case of the Hindenburg, that the control room had six captains in it because that's how experienced these guys were. These weren't like lieutenants, there weren't any like sergeants, there weren't any uh no, these were all ships' captains, and there were six of them working this thing. It's it's just really weird, and it wouldn't surprise me if Gene Roddenberry kind of uh was inspired by that dynamic when he came up with Star Trek. Because when you look at especially like Star Trek's next generation, Picard, he gave a lot of autonomy to his officers. Like, you do what you feel is right, and then get with me if you need help or whatever. It's a very interesting way of leadership. So, in other words, the Hindenburg was operated by a crew of people that worked together and each person's judgment was taken seriously. So, this isn't like when we look at the Hindenburg going up in flames, this isn't like an idiot got everyone killed, right? This isn't somebody being neglectful, this isn't somebody, you know, screwing around and making a mistake, and it's not like the engineers were cutting corners. That's why, like, I need your help to come up with a lesson at the end of this, because I'm just trying to think like, man, how do we uh how do we avoid this in the future, especially in our own personal lives? During transatlantic flights, the uh airship would fly between three to four hundred feet above sea level. I thought it flew higher than that, but no. They wanted to stay under the clouds so they could keep a uh close eye on thunderstorms, and they would radio in constantly to any land source that they saw, asking for weather predictions. The Germans considered the Hindenburg an all-weather ship, but they still erred on the side of caution. They were worried about lightning strikes, even though it was designed to handle lightning strikes. It's interesting that lightning does not necessarily ignite hydrogen, which I thought was kind of interesting. It it takes a lot of electricity to uh ignite hydrogen. Uh, they were worried about lightning strikes. Perhaps one strike is okay, but then they were also concerned about multiple strikes weakening the frame or subsequently weakening the gas cells, hydrogen or helium, a weakened gas cell could cause a lot of problems. Um, there was a smoking lounge, which I thought was interesting, but it was like located in the middle of the living quarters, and it was pressurized. So they pressurized the smoking room to make sure that no hydrogen, if it was leaking anywhere, could make its way inside and blow the whole works.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:10

At least they thought about it.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:11

Uh yeah, it's uh it's a pretty clever again, a pretty clever idea. Only problem is that it pushes all the smoke out to like the living quarters and all that crap.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:21

But every back then everybody smelled like smoke.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:26

Yeah, it was just the way it was. They kept a very close eye on gas pressures. It seems as though like almost every crew member could operate the gas levels uh if needed, like everybody was trained on it. Uh it was more like at the back of the control car, and the every crew member could look at, and it was like this uh it was like this array of like 16 knobs, and then you have like these pressure gauges above each one, and there was like an art form of opening and closing and venting and releasing, and like they could look at the gauges and be like, okay, we need to increase the pressure in airbags one and three, and then let's vent some air out of you know 15 and 16 to help level it out as necessary. So it was a uh it was a pretty interesting dynamic that they they had to go off of while traveling. As I mentioned before, they would lose about 20% of fresh hydrogen. It was purposely vented out of the top. And I'm thinking, like, why? Why would you want to do that? Well, if you are releasing hydrogen out of a hole, oxygen can't come in. Whereas if everything is sealed through the process of nucleation, meaning at the atomic level, air can still make its way in. Like oxygen can still make its way in. It's like the reason why like you get a uh a uh like a party balloon, they don't stay. Inflated forever. They always leak out. And that's because at the atomic level, air particles or helium particles can work their way out between the molecules of rubber. And it's the same principle here. If you just lock up everything and uh don't let anything out in a controlled way, then oxygen can work its way in. And um, what happens if you have a uh a uh three million cubic meters of hydrogen being mixed with one part of oxygen?

SPEAKER_04 1:20:38

That's a big boom.

SPEAKER_05 1:20:40

Yeah, the the Hindenburg wouldn't even catch on fire. It would just pop, it would just explode instantly as opposed to like just burning to the ground. That's why they vented hydrogen out. They purposely vented it out and then they refilled it so that it prevented any oxygen from getting in there. Not to mention, too, oxygen ruins the lift capacity. It was like basically poisoning the gas cells, which again, I thought that was like, huh, I never would have thought of that. The main to maintain equilibrium, constant replenish, uh constantly replenish oxygen, oxygen, replenish hydrogen would be dumped into the gas cells. This meant that a steady stream of hydrogen is being vented, but a steady supply is being replaced, making it impossible for oxygen to contaminate the uh gas cells. It was added much to the cost of operation, but it was immensely safer, immensely safer as I do air quotes. Now, wait a second. All this talk about hydrogen, but I thought this thing was designed to be filled with helium. Like, where is the helium in all this? Well, there's a couple reasons why. The Hindenburg was originally designed to operate with helium. However, America had a complete monopoly on helium. And in 1927, it passed the Helium Control Act. This basically forbid any American company to sell helium outside the U.S. I don't know what America was using all that helium for, but they were like, hmm, other countries want it, you're not getting it.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:09

Yeah, I I don't know. I don't know the answer to that.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:14

Yeah, I don't I don't know either. It's just like, I mean, I do know that helium is is a relatively rare substance, and they do get it from the oil wells and stuff like that. But and there will come a time where there won't be any helium left on Earth because it's going out into space. But to make it, I think the like in 1936, the other thing was that Germany couldn't get their hands on the helium before, but they were like, let's design it to be used with helium just in case America decides to, you know, not be buttheads and make it, you know, so we could buy it. However, though, in 1936 to 1937, there was a guy by the name of Hitler and his little Nazi a-holes. Their their system didn't really jive with the democratic system of America. And America was like, oh no, no, no, no, Hitler. We are holding on to this helium. You can't touch this with a 10-foot pole. Basically, Japan at that time had an easier chance of getting helium than Germany did, all because of the whole Hitler thing. So hydrogen, it is. They can't get their hands on it, that's fine. Like Germany had a long history of using hydrogen airships without any incident. They knew what they're doing. What could possibly go wrong?

SPEAKER_04 1:23:35

Nothing.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:37

Oh, crap. I nearly forgot about the living quarters. Like, that's what this whole thing was built for. Okay, there were two decks. Uh, a deck was for the passengers and it was located above B deck. Uh, this deck had 25 double bunk cabins that were tiny, they were like the equivalent of like a bathroom size. I think they were maybe six feet wide, and I'm looking at a picture of it here, and you had like a little ladder to get up to the top bunk, and uh you had like a sink and like a little cloth table, and that was it. Me personally, if that thing was filled with helium, I would have flown on it. I would I would give it a whirl. Like, why not, dude? Like going across the ocean in a balloon? Heck yeah. But yeah, the I I guess the novelty of it is that you're flying in a freaking derigable. So just like live with it. And and this was only designed for very wealthy people. Like you were movie stars, you were politicians, you were business moguls, you weren't you there was no steerage in this thing. A one-way ticket was 400 US dollars back then, which is about$9,000 today. Is there a coupon? Well, that's also we're in the height of the depression, so uh yeah, yeah, especially in 1936, it was pretty bad. So uh, but even still, like there were still plenty of wealthy people. I mean, yeah, even at the height of the depression, America was what, 17% unemployment?

SPEAKER_04 1:25:07

I don't remember the exact percentage.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:09

Yeah, it for me it was Germany, like Germany, man, were they, but they were also climbing out of it uh since like 1934, 35. Yeah, that was that was Hitler's way of like, that's it, we're no longer in debt because I say we're no longer in debt. Oh, oh, okay. It was all steerage in a way, and only the very wealthy or the affluent could hit your ride. Surrounding the sleeping section is where you would find the observation promenades, eating area complete with a full-time chef and kitchen, a writing room, passenger lounge, uh, complete with a portrait of Hitler himself. That is right. Uh, you cannot have a luxury airliner like this without Hitler somewhere. But yeah, it was really cool. Like you had this observation deck where they had like these little train like what seats like that you would see in a train, and they sat by the windows, and you could just look out. And again, you had almost a 360-degree field of view of everything, especially designed grand piano made from aluminum and only weighed a third of a wooden one. I think this thing weighed three to four hundred pounds, whereas a normal wooden grand piano would weigh about a thousand pounds, a dining room hall that was perched near the observation promenade. So, like you would have like this large banquet table type thing that you could eat dinner at and look out the windows. It was, I think it was really inspired by like cruise ships and stuff like that, where no matter where you're at, you can look out and see something cool.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:42

Yeah, probably.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:43

Uh, to top it all off, uh, the decorations and furniture was designed by the very famous uh designer Fritz August Bauhaus. So look him up. I I kind of like his style and his designs, but it's very simple, but yet uh very functional kind of stuff. Uh B deck was more or less for the crew and their living situations like a small mess hall. However, in B-deck, everyone would find it gender-neutral bathrooms. So look, Nazi Germany being gender neutral. It's more like they just didn't care, like their bathroom stalls.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:24

Yeah, it's uh efficiency over social politics.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:29

Uh there was a shower. However, though, reports indicated the shower's water pressure was closer to that of a seltzer bottle and rather than an actual shower. Sweet.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:40

Hey, at least there's a place to get clean.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:43

Yeah, yeah. But but then again, though, you're only on this thing for like no more than two days.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:48

Because it could cross the Atlantic Ocean in two days, maybe get down to Brazil in three. Yeah, you're not getting all sweaty and all that other fun stuff. So and something to note too is that um the Hindenburg didn't have any water reclamation. When you, whenever you run an engine, one of the byproducts is water because you're burning air. That water, like I think it was in the Graf Zeppelin, could be collected and then used for ballast or used for showers or whatever. The Hindenburg didn't have any of that. It was just whatever water was stored on board is what it would have until it landed. The B-deck was interesting because there was also two exits. One exit had a gantry that went to some more crew living quarters in the back of the ship. That's where the engineers and mechanics lived. Uh that was closest to the engines. And then the back of the ship is where you could also find the chief officers and engineers, mechanics, and whatnot. And um, yeah, they they would have a walkway that would go out to the engines even when it was up in the air. It would, it's there's a picture of it on there. It's a dude like walking out to the engines. It's absolutely insane. Ugh, man, that's just to me, it's just mind-blowing. The other exit went to the electrical room and then to the control car. And well, we already talked about that. Lastly, uh, this is also where all the cargo was held, and uh surrounding the whole crew quarters were these massive, like 300-gallon compressed hydrogen tanks. So if something blowed up there, it boy. Yikes. I want to go through this real quick because I'm kind of running out of time here. Um, fun fact some people think that the Hindenburg went down kind of like Titanic did, like on her maiden voyage. It didn't. The thing actually flew 63 flights before its tragic end. June 1936, it made a surprise visit to England. Uh, just decided to just pop up there over uh West Yorkshire. And I guess the uh priest uh of the Hindenburg dropped like a parcel out asking, hey, whoever finds this letter, could you like put this little package by my dear brother Lieutenant French Schulte? Uh he's at this grave, he died in a prison camp in England. Uh many thanks to your kindness, John P. Schulte, the first flying priest. And two boys did actually find it. And I'm assuming they actually did drop that parcel off at the at the cemetery, which I thought that was kind of kind of cool.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:20

I like that story. Yeah, that's a that's a fun story.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:23

This is random box flying out of the sky. Oh, okay. I don't know if they did or not, but um, the other other reason is uh historian Oliver Denton, he thinks a surprise visit was more or less to fly over England's industrial complexes and take pictures.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:42

I could totally see that.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:43

Same.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:44

July of 1936, Hinberg broke a record for the fastest trip from Frankfurt to Lakehurst. Uh, we're gonna we're we're gonna hear about Lakehurst. Lakehurst, New Jersey is like the airport for blimps, like for all one of them. Uh, that is where, like, if you're going from Germany or England or France or whatever to America in a Zeppelin, you're going to Lakehurst. Like, that's all there is to it. Because it was a gigantic field and it could handle all that, all that space that these blimps would take up. October 8th, 1936, Hindenburg became known as the Millionaire's Flight, which it did like a up and down coast flight of New England, carrying 72 of the wealthiest people in America, including future ambassador to UK, Winthrop W. Aldrich, future governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, uh Juan Tripp, founder of the and CEO of Pan Am. And then WW1 Flying Ace, uh, Eddie Rickenbacher, president of Eastern Airlines. And then, of course, in the summer of 1936, Hindenburg made an appearance at the opening ceremonies in Berlin to help announce the upcoming visit of Adolf Hitler. And then there was like many other flights all over the world, including South America and Africa, as well as Europe. All in all, the Hindenburg was a very tried and true, reliable aircraft, well built, well manned, and well maintained. There was no major incidences to record, and it seemed as though the aircraft would remain a staple in disguise for quite some time, until around 6 p.m. at Lakers, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937, where the age of the airship would come to a close. Part four O the Humanity. Hindenburg's last flight took place on May 3rd, 1937, carrying 36 passengers and a crew of 61 with trainees. This was the 63rd flight. Hindenburg was on what was now a routine flight. The path would leave Frankfurt, yeah, Frank, Frankfurt, uh, Germany, and it would essentially head west until it hit like a portion in France, and then it would head north and hit the southern tip of England, probably taking some pictures of the industrial capabilities all along the way. And then from there they would head west. The strategy was simple. They actually followed the old sailing path, you know, because the Coriolis effect would make that what is it, the transatlantic wind? I can't remember what it's called.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:17

I don't remember.

SPEAKER_05 1:33:18

Like during the summer, that's when you would sail because you would go up and around the northern part of the Atlantic and come down to the Americas.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:26

Yeah, uh sailors used to use that all the time when they were um on the Atlantic trade route.

SPEAKER_05 1:33:32

Yeah, the transatlantic current, or I can't remember the name of it, but they would just follow that because the wind would do all the work for them. So yeah, by they took off at 7.16, they got to England, and then they started heading out to uh the United States at around 2 a.m. the next morning. And then from here, nothing happened. It was only a day, or was only a two-day flight to get to um Lakehurst, and the passengers and crew really had nothing to worry about. At this point, I want to mention an important fact. The uh control car and the entire Hindenburg itself was operated by six different captains. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. You'd be thinking having six captains and they would all just be fighting each other for authority and all that stuff. No, they actually got along fantastic. They all knew each other, they all worked together, they all worked under the graph Zeppelin. Yeah, as part of the Zeppelin company, they just they just knew each other. So the guy who was in charge, uh like the commanding captain, was Max Pruss. And then you have Captain Albert Sampt, who was the watch officer, and then you have Heinrich Bauer, who was the other watch officer, and then you had Walter Ziegler, who was a watch officer, and then you had Ernst Lehman. Remember, we mentioned him earlier, and then he was an observer, and then Anton uh Whitman was he was an observer. These were the guys that would control the rudder, they would uh control the elevator, they would, they would all control uh the gas levels, like they would all like take turns doing different jobs in that control room. It was yeah, it must have been a really cool sight to see these guys like working together and not just fighting and and all that kind of stuff, as you would expect to have that many captains in one room doing. It was later noticed that the airship was facing a strong headwind and it was slowing them down. When they were scheduled to get to Lakehurst at 6 a.m. on May 6th, the landing was moved to about 6 p.m. on that day. So they bumped the landing back 12 hours. Captain Max Press ordered the aircraft to fly around New York City when Lakehurst command officer or commanding officer Charles Rosendahl, and this guy was look him up. He's a very competent and experienced leader. Uh, he's got in a very extensive uh military background and a lot of experience with uh Zeppelins himself in America. He told uh Pruss to fly around to buy some time for the storm to pass through due to all the winds and the potential lightning strikes. So that yeah, New Jersey was getting hit with like a thunderstorm, and Rosendahl just told uh Pruss, like, hey, just just go drive about for a bit, take a scenic route, come back when I let you know the storms are gone. Okay, fair enough. Again, the Americans and the Germans, despite their political differences, they really work together a lot. So basically, with Rosendahl on the ground and his crew, uh, we have like another competent person in place here, which was kind of cool. Like, normally you'd have like one idiot running around. No, no, we now have seven people, including the ground crew, that were very experienced that knew what they were doing, and not a one of them was screwing around. By 6.12, Rosendahl messaged the Hindenburg and told Pruss that the wind temp the winds, temperature, and air pressure had died down, and the conditions should be suitable for landing like now. For some odd reason, Pruss didn't get the message or or it took some time to get back. But by 7.08, Rosendahl sent another message that he strongly recommends Captain Pruss bring in the Hindenburg ASAP. So Hindenburg came back. Hindenburg's approached the Lakehurst, New Jersey landing site shortly after 7 p.m. at an altitude of 600 feet, but Hindenburg was approaching from the southwest. This is a tricky situation because for a winged aircraft, even for a winged aircraft, because a crosswind uh wants to push the aircraft to the left, like it wants or to the right. Um, no, yeah. A left, so a left blowing would want to blow the aircraft to the left. That makes it very difficult to try to land when your plane is drifting off to the left, as opposed to like just staying straight and narrow. It's even worse for a Zeppelin because it's a round mass, which means it has a resistance coefficient of exactly one half, meaning that 50% of the aircraft is going to be affected by this crosswind. Yeah, just broadsiding an 800-foot long cylinder. It's not as easy as a uh as an airplane, even though you're flying like at 10 miles an hour. So press decided like, okay, we're gonna come in from the southwest because the wind is coming from the east. We're going to head northeast, go over the Lakers side, and then basically fly around in like a giant oval, and then make a left-hand turn and then fly straight for a bit, make another left-hand turn. So now he's heading south, and then make another left-hand turn, and now he's flying east. So basically, he made three left-hand turns coming from the southwest, and that way he is now heading into the wind, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:56

Okay. Uh, we'll have a map up of like the path that he took. And that was sound procedure. That is exactly what you're supposed to do. Yeah, coming in straight and uh right into the eastern winds. Sound sound maneuvering. As the ship was coming about uh uh after the second left-hand turn, first officer Albert Sampt, uh, who was in charge of the ship's trim and altitude, and was assisted by watch officer Ziegler, who watched the gas valves and assisted by second officer Heinrich Bauer on ballast, valved 15 seconds of hydrogen into the air from the gas cells. Meaning, okay, guys, we gotta lower the altitude, and then we're going to release this gas by that that will get us to make the ship less buoyant. Basically, yeah, they're just venting hydrogen out into the air to lower everything. So far, so good. Right now they're they're starting to descend. I think they get down to about 300 feet or so. As Captain Press was in the midst of making the third left-hand turn to head straight into the landing site, Samson noticed that the airship was suddenly tail heavy, meaning that the airship was starting to like point upwards, which isn't good for landing. You you need that ship to be perfectly level with the ground. And I think the uh like they would dock the nose of it up to like this tower that I think was like 50, 60 feet up in the air, and there was two dudes standing on the top of that tower that would be responsible for literally putting a hook on the nose of the Hindenburg when it came in. Like that just seems that that that's just a lot of bigness coming at you.

SPEAKER_04 1:40:44

Yeah, that's terrifying. No thanks. I don't want that job.

SPEAKER_05 1:40:47

I mean, that's that's precision though. Like, gotta give him credit. What Sam did then, since the it was starting to point upwards, he valved 30 seconds of gas out of cells 11 through 16. So basically, the gas cells at the very, very tail end, that was like number one. And then number two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, four, three, five, sixteen was the very front gas cell. So what so and I'm mentioning like 11 through 16, that would be out of the front. So like the first or the very front five gas cells. If I'm mentioning one through five, that's at the very tail end. He vented out like 30 seconds of gas from 11 through 16, that would make the the nose less buoyant. And then when he noticed that after he vented that gas out, like it still didn't work, Sant ordered three drops of water. And I like how they did say, oh, just dropping water, totaling about 2400 pounds. That would be out of the back. So that 2400 pounds would hopefully make the less the back of it less heavy and start bringing it up. And Zeppelins operated much like submarines, right? You had these tanks that you could fill with water and that would make the submarine heavier, goes underwater. You could push out that water uh out of the ballast tanks, and then it would want to go up. Zeppelins work the same exact way. On top of dumpling the water, Sam't valved out an additional five seconds of gas from the nose. So SAMT here is like trying his best to get this thing to level out, and he's like, for some odd reason, it's not working. Like, this is what is going on. The only conclusion is that there had to be a leak. When this didn't work, six crewmen were ordered from the back of the aircraft. So these would be like mechanics. Uh, they were ordered from the back to go the whole length and go hang out at the nose, where there was like six other dudes just chilling up there. And they would just uh they were just there for weight, just try to weight that nose down as much as possible. It's funny how delicate this balancing act is. Uh at this point, Captain Press stepped in, which was uncharacteristic. Uh, normally he would let his officers do it, but when he started to see that things weren't working, then it was like, okay, I've gotta I've gotta step in here and try to figure this out. At the last minute, so they were approaching the uh mooring tower head on, like due east, and at the last minute or so, the eastern wind was now blowing southwest. So now they've lost their headwind. That's a problem. So to fix that, Press ordered the ship to steer hard to port, meaning like just steer really, really, really hard to the left, and then what they're gonna do is make like a little loop-de-loop, and they were gonna go from the left, point it up towards north, and then make another hard turn and whip the tail around so that the tail would be pointing north and the nose pointing south, and then they would approach that mooring tower. This is what's known as an S curve.

SPEAKER_04 1:44:00

So just picture like six to ten dudes just heaving and hoeing all these wheels.

SPEAKER_05 1:44:06

Uh, that's the thing, yeah. There would have been there would have been six guys in there just trying to wrench these wheels as hard as possible. Yeah. Not to mention, too, like the engines uh were working super hard. Two of them were shut off because they were getting ready to dock. And like they just trying to torque an 800-foot-long lever. Yeah, that I I I can't imagine what those guys were going through in there. Press continued the approach to the mooring tower at about, oh, I'm sorry, it's 180 feet above. That's what they got the uh aircraft down to. 180 feet, that was enough to drop the landing ropes. And the landing ropes are crazy because like dozens of dudes would come out, like grab these ropes, and they would help guide in, like they would be on the ground guiding in this gigantic blimp to the uh mooring tower, which I guess, hey man, if it works, it works. Yeah, no one to let go. Yeah. After a few minutes, a few minutes after, so I think it was like four or five minutes after uh 721, the ropes had all been dropped, and observers noticed a flash of light towards the back, like the back end near gas cells five on the port side or the left side. So you've got like these four gigantic fins, like one on the top, one on the bottom, one on the left, one on the right, on the back of it. And that's where like gas cells four and five were located. And suddenly people were like, what's that flash of light back there? That's kind of weird. Lakers commander uh Rosendahl later described a mushroom-shaped flower or flame bursting from the front of the upper fin. This was confirmed by RW Antrim, who was on the ground and on top of the mooring tower as well as Navy Lieutenant Benjamin May, who was with Antrim on the tower. So there's three dudes that all confirmed like, hey, there is like a weird flash of light going up there. From here, everything happens in 35 seconds. So everything that I read off here until we get to part four uh happened in 35 seconds, which is terrifying. Suddenly, there was a muffled explosion, and the entire back end of the ship was engulfed in flames. Observers on the ground reported seeing flames on the inside of the aircraft making their way to the front. Other people on the ground noticed that in these first few seconds of the fire, pieces of duralumen frame were melting and raining to the ground. That's how hot that fire was. The skin of the Hindenburg caught on fire and vaporized instantly. It seemed as though there was absolutely nothing inside or outside of the aircraft that was immune to this fire. Like to see burning aluminum, that is very, very hot stuff. Uh, once the front of the ship was pointed about 30 to 40 degrees uh to the sky, so at this point there's no back end. Now the thing is really kicking up um because, well, there's nothing holding the back end up. The fire wasted no time in traveling from the gas cell to gas cell, heading up to the front of the ship at a terrifying speed. So you remember that walkway that I talked about in the beginning, that like in the middle of the craft that goes from nose to tail. That's where people could check all the uh gas cells and everything. Um observers noticed that at the very, very nose of the uh Hindenburg, they saw flames and a blue-white color shooting like dozens of feet out the tip.

SPEAKER_04 1:47:44

Yikes.

SPEAKER_05 1:47:45

That is all that is very hot. Uh a blue-white fire is like a blowtorch. Super hot. Yeah. In fact, they called it the torch um or the blowtorch effect. Remember uh earlier I mentioned that they ordered six crewmen to come from the back up to the front to hang out with six other guys to try to like balance out the uh Hindenburg. Well, that's where they were when all that went out the nose. Yeah. So these 12 guys, I think 10 out of the 12 were incinerated instantly because of this. Uh, anybody who is like the furthest away from that nose stood a chance of surviving. But yeah, those guys died just instantly. And you can see it um on the uh video uh where the uh like there's just flames blowing at the nose of this thing. It's uh pretty crazy. As for the passengers, they actually stood a little bit better chance of surviving. A lot of them were observation promenades watching the landing process when the tail caught fire. Some reported hearing like a muffled explosion, but most knew something was terribly wrong when the back of the observation promenade started to tip down violently, and then like everybody went sliding down to the back of the uh the promenade. Like, oh, that's not supposed to happen. Those who could reach a window would jump out. It only took a few seconds for the tail end of the craft to hit the ground, which meant that the living quarters and the promenades and all that stuff up front would only be like maybe 10, 12 feet off the ground. So at that point, jump out. There were a lot of tragic reports though of folks dying because instead of jumping out to save themselves, they ran into the living quarters and tried to get their family. Oh, that's sad. According to Airships.net, the fire spread so quickly, consuming the ship in less than a minute. The survival was largely a matter of where one happened to be located when the fire broke out. So the folks that were the remaining folks, like the engineers and the mechanics that were in the back of the ship, they were gone. They there was no way they could survive. Yeah, but the ones up the front towards the uh living quarters, you you actually stood a surprisingly good chance. Uh passengers and crew members began jumping out of the promenade. Windows escaped the fire and the burning ship. Most of the passengers and all of the crew who were in the public rooms on deck A at that time of the fire, close to the promenade of Windows, did survive. Uh, there were those who were deeper inside the ship in the passenger cabins, it it they just didn't have enough time. Yeah. If they had maybe another minute, they could probably make it work. Uh, one passenger, John Pans, Paines, the Union manager for the Hamburg America line, which handled the passenger reservations for the Deutsche Zeppelin uh readerie, was in the dining room when the fire broke out, encouraged, jumped by the ship's photographer, Carl Otto Clemens, who escaped from one of the windows and survived. Paines uh instead left the dining room to go find his wife Emma, who had returned to their cabin for her coat. Both died in the fire. Uh, Mr. and Mrs. Herman Doner and their three children, Irene 16, Walter 10, Werner 8, uh, were also in the dining room watching the landing, but Mr. Donner left the fire or left before the fire broke out. Mrs. Doner and her two children or her two sons uh jumped to safety, but Irene left the dining room in search of her father, and both of them died as a result. Given the speed with which the Hidden Berg burned, survival for the crew was largely a matter of luck. As the diagram that we'll have on the website shows, as the diagram below shows, those who were close to uh close to a means of exit at the time of the fire generally survived, including nine of the 11 of the engine cars, um, men in the engine cars, and 12 of the or 10 of the 12 men in the control car. Uh those who were deep inside the ship, such as the electricians in the power room, um along the keel, or Max Schultz in the smoking room, bar on B deck, or those in the starboard side, since the flaming ship was uh rolled slightly to the starboard as it hit the ground, were generally trapped in the wreck. And the men stationed in the bow were exposed to the column of flames that rose through the ship as the bow pointed skyward. The nine men who were closest to the front of the ship at the time had they literally they could not find the remains. The only way that they were able to figure out where those nine men were that were in the front of it was based off of the uh captain's orders that was written down and that was recovered. That was the only way they know who those guys were. So within 30 seconds, the Hindenburg was lying flat on the ground like a metal mangle skeleton in an inferno. It was still burning and it burned for quite some time. Uh, chief petty officer Frederick J. Bull Tobin and his Navy men descended onto the record to try to find survivors. So if you ever watched a video of the uh the guy saying, Oh, the humanity, if you ever watch him or watch that video, you see all these Navy men just go running towards it. And it's a very iconic picture. It's like it really stands testament to how the uh, you know, how how the military men viewed this. There was like they don't care who was on there, they just got to get them out as much as possible. But by the time this thing fully burned down, it I mean, it was literally just a heap of aluminum scaffolding, and that was it. There was little traces of anything else. The final toll shockingly, as well as tragically, out of the 97 souls on board, 62 survived. That that kind of blew my mind. Like, given how fast this happened and how violent it was, that's pretty impressive. Like 62.

SPEAKER_04 1:53:54

Yeah. Now you lost less than 30 people.

SPEAKER_05 1:53:58

Yeah, 35 people. Now, those that did survive, many of them suffered burns and broken body parts and and whatnot, because he just jumped out like 10 to 20 feet. But um, thankfully the ground was really muddy.

SPEAKER_04 1:54:13

That actually does help.

SPEAKER_05 1:54:14

And the reason why it was really muddy is that whenever you burn pure hydrogen with oxygen, what do you make? Water. Water. That field was uh it was still pretty damp from all the rain, but all that water from that burning hydrogen, it was actually kind of like raining almost because of uh all the water that fire produced, which again, that's kind of weird. But you know, a lot of them landed in just mud and then just trying to like climb out of it and get somewhere. 13 of the 36 passengers and 22 of the 61 crew died alongside one civilian on the ground landing party, uh Alan uh Hageman Hagman. I bet that poor guy just looked up and then just saw this 800-foot long flaming mast. Like, well, my time is up. Like, you're not gonna be able to outrun that. So it's just ugh. The following morning, over the radio, the following recording was played over and over and over again, and this should sound familiar.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:17

It's starting to rain again, the rain has uh flanked up a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:21

They backed loaders of the ship is just holding it uh keep it from it in the place, get the somebody, get the somebody, it's it's a little bit please, it's a please. I'm gonna have to tell for a minute because they have lots of poison things I've ever witnessed.

SPEAKER_05 1:56:36

Pretty sure everybody in the world has heard that. At least the oh humanity part. That reporter, Herb Morrison, he later said that he was saying oh the humanity because he honestly thought like everybody was dead. Like there was nobody that could survive that. And um he he was kind of shook up after that. I think anybody who witnessed something like that would be a little shaken up. I remember as a little kid listening to that, and I would be laughing, like, dude, get a grip. Like, dude, calm down until I got a little older and realized, like, oh, oh, oh, oh dear. Uh, my grandfather remembers he remembers that as a kid, woke up, of course, the family always turned on the radio, and they were playing this recording over and over and over again. And that's how my grandfather found out about the uh the fire. And it's just like any other person, like like anybody who remembers like where they were at 9-11, right? It's just one of those things where it's such a a massive, unexpected event that it kind of just burns into your brain. So that's what America woke up to the following morning. So part five, the aftermath and lesson learned. The next day, 1,500 various sailors and marines and law enforcement surrounded the crash site. Both America and Germany wanted to conduct an investigation to figure out just what had happened. Well, they knew what had happened. They just wanted to figure out, you know, how it happened. Hundreds, if not thousands, of civilian onlookers converged on the site trying to get a glimpse of things or even take a piece of the wreckage as some morbid souvenir made which made the investigation uh even more difficult. And I don't know if there are actually pieces of the Hindenburg out there. I don't know how much of it actually made it out.

SPEAKER_04 1:58:33

Could be some out there in the world, like family heirlooms or hiding and antique storage.

SPEAKER_05 1:58:40

Like a scrap of aluminum or some rivets or something like that. I'll have to look that up because also, how do you verify it?

SPEAKER_04 1:58:47

Like yeah, it's like how do you know that's legitimate?

SPEAKER_05 1:58:50

Yeah, you could take any piece of aluminum and just burn it for a while. And but yeah, once the uh once like all these thousands of people were just like converging in on the site, they were trying to just grab like a piece of it, and that like really messed up the uh investigation. So that's why they had all these military guards out there and everything. Just like, guys, back away. Regardless of the rising tensions between America and Nazi Germany, both sides put down their differences to get to the bottom of what happened. Uh, it it seemed like and I I couldn't get this vibe, but it wasn't like Germany was pointing a finger at America, like, and America wasn't pointing a finger at Germany. It was more like, okay, what what happened here? And I thought that was kind of interesting. I'm sure there were newspaper reports out there like blaming Nazis and all the other fun stuff. But both sides can conducted their investigations, including getting eyewitness accounts and even trying to get a hold of the schematics of materials used uh from Germany. But the Nazis were pretty secretive about all that stuff, and they were kind of cagey on releasing specifics of the schematics to the Americans, especially like what was that skin made out of and and all that. Other fun stuff to this day, like we don't know exactly 100% how all this went sideways, but there's there's a number of theories out there that I'll try to explain real quick from like the least probable to probably what I think is the the real cause. So the first one aliens. There's a conspiracy theory out there that states that aliens were trying to stop America's search for nuclear technology. So they shot down the Hindenburg as a way to distract things, hence that flash of light on the tail end of the Hindenburg. That was the aliens shooting it down.

SPEAKER_04 2:00:38

It's that one.

SPEAKER_05 2:00:39

Yeah. I entertained that for about 0.3 seconds because none of that makes sense.

SPEAKER_04 2:00:47

I I I like that one.

SPEAKER_05 2:00:52

Elvis.

SPEAKER_04 2:00:55

That's ridiculous.

SPEAKER_05 2:00:56

Yeah, that's just insulting to the people who died. This one is a bit more reasonable, uh, but the you know, there's political terrorism. There was a lot of anti-Nazi sympathizers out there, both in Germany and in America. And the idea was that somebody would put a bomb on there or somebody would try to sabotage it or whatever to make the Nazis look like they're not competent. There is that idea of political terrorism. I can kind of see that. Uh, I just don't know how that would make it work. There's also the theory that American British spies tried to shoot out or poke holes in the gas cells of the Hindenburg, which could explain the leak on cells four and five. Okay. So somebody was on the ground with a rifle, just like trying to shoot holes into it. Like, okay, I guess you're gonna need a lot more than just some bullet holes that break that thing down. Um, a popular and what I think could be a very plausible cause is a lightning strike. Uh, there was a storm nearby and it was starting to rain, and it was the largest and tallest thing in the whole area of a flat field. Where does lightning strike? It strikes the tallest thing that it can. So it if somebody wanted to hold on to the theory, like, oh yeah, no, it was definitely lightning, I want to blame them. I I think it's uh a very valid way. Now we start getting into like the findings. Uh, both the Americans and the Germans basically concluded that static electricity was the cause of the explosion. Uh, the idea is that when the storm passes over, it generates a lot of ecstatic electricity between the clouds and the ground. That's where we get lightning from. However, though, the Germans and the Americans differ in terms of the nature of static electricity. On the American side, um the Hindenburg was floating over, and people on the ground reported that they saw like glowing parts. They saw like uh like a bluish glow around different aspects of the craft. And that's a type of static electricity called St. Elmo's Fire. So it's basically like a static electricity that hovers over something. And a lot of people reported seeing something that was like that. And uh the uh the uh the Americans said that like okay, there was clearly a leak in the back, and it just took that Felix Fire stuff, or that St. Elmo's fire, and that like the movie. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 2:03:35

Uh if it helps you remember.

SPEAKER_05 2:03:38

Yeah, there we go. Uh but yeah, they think it was that that current, and and that's the static electricity thing. It's uh it's a phenomenon that you see on sailing ships and and whatnot. And that phenomenon was enough to trigger the hydrogen explosion in the back. And it and a lot of eyewitnesses did claim that they saw that like that bluish glow. And it's literally all it is is like, you know how when you like shock yourself with static electricity and you see that little flash of light. But if that static electricity has nowhere else to go and the static around it is super, super strong, it'll just kind of like float there for a few seconds. It's it's really weird, and you gotta have a really massive surface, and you've got to have a lot of metal to make it work. But the Americans said that's what caused it. When you combine that with the leak, that makes sense. The Germans were like, no, it had to be a hard, strong spark. It had to be a like the mother of all electric shocks, and that's both of which are static electricity based, but one is based off of observations of seeing that St. Elmo's fire, the other one is based on like a hard, almost like an internal lightning strike. That's yes, that both are very strong possibilities, but I think it gets a little bit more complicated than that. And then this is where we get into what I think is the the nature of what happened combined with my own theory here. And because uh because I I teach uh I teach uh school that makes me an expert, and I'm more than I have all the credentials to like really put my own take on this. So Professor Constantinos, Constantinos Giapis, professor of chemical engineering at Caltech, has a very compelling theory that is actually testable. Many observers uh testified that they saw that glowing parts on the surface of the aircraft mentioned or moments before the explosion. This is where the American agree the Americans agreed that the buildup of static electricity that caused the problem. However, according to Emily Velasco, who wrote an article titled History's Mysteries, Caltech Professor Helped Solve Hindenburg Disaster, wrote that the American committee theorized that the hydrogen was ignited by a phenomenon known as a corona discharge or St. Elmo's fire. This soft leakage of high voltage charge from the surface of something occurs on the mass of ships or on airplane surfaces in flight during a stormy weather. In contrast, the Germans' investigation committee suggested that a high-intensity spark had instead triggered the explosion. So the Americans think it was that St. Almost fire, and the Germans think that it was a strong Uber spark, for the lack of better words. So Geopas tested this on a piece of simulated skin material from the Hindenburg using an abundance of static electricity, and then he grounded it. So the idea was that the static electricity is what triggered everything when they dropped the ropes. So when they dropped the ropes, ropes hit the ground, and now the static electricity can be discharged somewhere. And because it was raining out, the ropes were wet, and that conducted the electricity up from the ground into the aircraft, and somewhere, whether it was at San Omo stuff or it was a strong spark, that's what started it. So Jeppus tested this theory. So he connected ropes to the ground and nothing happened. Well, there was like thousands of volts of static electricity involved. Then he sprayed water on the skin. Uh, so that his sample, he sprayed water on it as though it was raining, and suddenly large powerful sparks were jumping the gap between the fabric and the frame holding it up. Um, the skin of the uh of the Hindenburg was actually lifted above the metal frame. There was actually uh a whole bunch of uh little struts on the inside that suspended the skin away from the rest of the frame. So when you see it and how it has those those straight edges on it, that's actually the frame using another piece of something that doesn't conduct electricity to keep it off from the frame, if that makes sense. So basically the skin did not touch the metal, it just kind of like sat above it. Probably because they didn't want the uh the skin, which was metalized, to be in contact with the aluminum frame because whenever you have metal touching metal, you start corrosion, which would just weaken the skin and all that stuff and cause all sorts of problems. So they separated the two. Uh, you see this in home air conditioning systems. You'll have like a uh a copper return line that goes to your compressor outside, and then it'll be connected to an aluminum fixture that goes into your compressor, and they have to put something in between those two metals. Otherwise, it's copper and the aluminum touch for too long, they'll corrode each other, and then you have like what you had where everything leaks out, and then you have a hot, nasty night ahead of you. That's that's kind of what the Germans were trying to avoid. Again, that's brilliant. I never would have thought of that. So once you sprayed water on the skin of it, it was sparks were jumping the gap between the frame and the skin. That basically showed that basically proved the Germans' theory that there was a it was a very strong spark. And then like Jeppus was trying to figure out like, okay, so then why did this take place three to four minutes after the ropes were dropped? Like, why would it do that? Why would it take so long? Shouldn't it just be instantaneous? The thought, the the thought was that the Germans thought that the ropes needed to be sufficiently wet in order for electricity to conduct from the ground up to the aircraft. But Geopis tested it and he tried it both wet and dry, and both conducted electricity. So it didn't matter if it was wet or dry. The ropes were the thing that caused that charge to take place. Now, the question is why did it take so long? Why did it take three to four minutes? This is where it gets interesting. So you remember how like the Hindenburg was coming up from the southwest, and it kind of had to make that weird like make a left-hand turn, go straight for a little bit, make a left-hand turn, then go straight, make a left-hand turn, and then head in eastwards towards the uh Mooring Tower. By doing that, given the proximity of the storm, the outside of the Hindenburg, that skin, was just absorbing a bajillion positive ions. The outside of it was positively charged, like static electricity, but it's positively charged. Okay. When they dropped the ropes off the side, because they didn't know how positively charged the skin was, how could they know? Nobody could have known. Well, when they dropped the ropes off the side, those ropes are connected to the frame of the aircraft. When those ropes hit the ground, then negative ions came from the ground and electrically charged the frame of the uh Hindenburg with a negative charge. So the outside was positive, the inside was negative, and it was just separated by a few inches of like insulation, right? Because remember, the skin doesn't actually touch the frame, it just sits on these insulators. That basically turns the entire aircraft into a gigantic capacitor. So, what a capacitor does is that it holds a bunch of positive ions on one side and it holds a bunch of negative ions on the other side until the current gets high enough, then it can jump, like the two can meet, and then the capacitor will dump all its power at once. That's what a capacitor does. It's almost like a battery in a way, but you're not using any sort of chemicals or whatever to generate the power. You are dumping electricity into it, and so like one part of it is going to be positively charged, the other part's gonna be negatively charged, and then when it gets high enough, they both can meet up in the middle, like they can jump that gap, and then all that charge can just leave at once, if that makes sense. I'm not sure if that sits well. Okay, yeah, you're good. So Jiappis did some math, and he's like, Oh my god, for a capacitor the size of the Hindenburg, and let's say this the skin of it is so positively charged, like it's just like it's just so positive, it's so happy about life. When they drop those ropes down to charge up that capacitor, he calculated that it would take about four minutes to do it. So when the ropes hit the ground, it would take four minutes to charge the skeleton frame on the inside. It would take four minutes for it to get fully charged before this the positive and the negative ions could jump that gap and then release all the power at once. So basically, that flash of light that they saw at the back end of the uh Hindenburg was actually that all that current jumping the gap between the skin and the frame separated by that insulator. It was jumping that gap, and then who knows how many hundreds of millions of volts dumped right into that leak and kaboom. Because otherwise, static electricity alone isn't enough to ignite hydrogen. It's it like it just doesn't work. Now, to finish this off, where did the leak come from to begin with? So here's my theory because even with all that static electricity, that shouldn't be enough to light it. Like if everything was still inside those gas cells, the it wouldn't have nothing would have happened. The the they would just discharge the current and somebody would get a doozy of an electrical shock, whoever grabbed that rope, but nothing would have happened. Remember when Captain Press started to make those three left-hand turns, and he kind of made those three turns kind of tight? Well, by doing that, he was putting a lot of stress on the frame of that aircraft, right? Because he also had that eastern wind coming at him, so he was trying to turn left, right, to head west, so then he can make another left-hand turn to make another left-hand turn to head to the east to get to the mooring tower. By doing those turns with that kind of wind, like it took three dudes to turn those wheels inside, as we mentioned before. That is the torque. When you look at those motors in the back, those motors, which are connected to the frame, are now it's like um the best way I could describe it is okay, take a broom and then hold it at the very, very, very end of the handle, and then hold that broom handle out at arm's length, and then try to lift that broom up using your wrist. Could you imagine like how hard that is? Well, that's exactly what I think was happening with the Hindenburg when they were making those turns. You had the energy source in the back trying to swing around like 700 feet of a gigantic Zeppelin with all those winds and top of it. Like they were just torquing the holy living crap out of the back end of that thing. And they did it three times. And then to make matters even worse, they did it a fourth time when they did that S curve, and the S curve was even tighter than the original three were to begin with. But you'll notice that after the second turn, Sompt was reporting, like, um, the back end is dropping. Like, why is the back end going down? And that's why they were like venting air out of like 11 through 16. They were, you know, getting rid of ballast water. They were trying to put air or gas into those back ones. And they're like, okay, cells four and five are the ones most affected here. Cells four and five is where they saw the flame initially start. Cells four and five also have these cables, these taut cables that kind of give it like internal support. So, like these cables would go in between the uh gas cells and they would be kind of like tensioned. That's what kept the thing as a circle, where all these cables that would go through the uh diameter of the craft. When they were spinning that ship around after the second time, it put so much torque on the frame that those cables snapped. And when those cables snapped, it ripped holes into the uh gas cells of four and five. And that those and I looked it up on the schematics, there were like four cables that crisscrossed the whole diameter of the craft, and I looked at where the engines were, and uh gas sacks or gas um cells four and five is right where I think the most amount of torque or leverage was being applied from swinging that nose around and having those motors having to, or those engines trying to twist everything. That was enough to twist the frames, snap the cables, and that's what cut the bags open to begin with. And then you combine that with the out combine that with the whole thing being a giant capacitor with all that leaking uh hydrogen gas, and it wasn't just like a leak, it would have been like a rupture. So, like when they vent hydrogen out, they do it in a very controlled manner so that there's no way that it could catch on fire. But this was probably just dumping out at a huge rate, and then all it took was that spark, and then that's it, it's all over. So that was the end of the airliner, that was the end of the Zeppelin-like uh blimps. They were never made again after that. It was just considered too dangerous, and the helium was just too expensive to be commercially viable. We do have blimps today, but they're obviously way smaller, and like the Goodyear blimp and stuff like that, but nothing like the Hindenburg, like the there will never be anything like that again unless you see the movie up. After all that, Kara, what's the lesson here, dude? Like, what is the takeaway from this? Because I just don't feel like this is a traditional dumpster fire.

SPEAKER_04 2:18:41

Sometimes it might be better to go with nature than to fight it.

SPEAKER_05 2:18:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 2:18:50

So they probably should have either waited longer, gone somewhere else, instead of trying to fight the storm and go through it. Because when it comes to Mother Nature, you can't fight it.

SPEAKER_05 2:19:04

I like that because there there's gotta be a point where and and and we we saw this with the uh the Tory Canyon oil spill. They were running behind and they tried to take a shortcut. The autopilot was engaged, they didn't know that they were fighting the ship and they ran ashore. Here they were behind, but I didn't get a sense like, oh my god, somebody's gonna lose their jobs if they don't land it here soon. But they figured, hey, we've got six to three flights in with this thing. We can we can figure this out, like we know what it's capable of. But they should have been like, no, let's not risk it. Yeah, don't chance it. And I think that's a really, really tough thing about life is like when do you risk something and when do you don't?

SPEAKER_04 2:19:47

Right.

SPEAKER_05 2:19:47

Because if you don't risk anything, you get no gain.

SPEAKER_04 2:19:50

Right.

SPEAKER_05 2:19:51

But you also gotta be prepared to lose everything. I guess. I don't know. I wouldn't but in this case, I don't even know how they could. measure the risk.

SPEAKER_04 2:20:01

I wouldn't fight Mama Nature. I'd be like, no, we're waiting. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 2:20:05

Yeah. I mean you've already been yeah, you're already running an hour late. So it's just like who cares? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:20:09

It took them an hour to yeah. It took them an hour to respond when they're saying now or never and then you wait an hour. You're like I don't know about that.

SPEAKER_05 2:20:17

Yeah and that Rosendahl is like uh it's now or never guys come on. Yeah. But I mean they had the capabilities of staying up probably for days longer if necessary.

SPEAKER_04 2:20:26

Like I shouldn't wait and don't fight the nature. The other thing too is uh when it comes to accidents that happen in nature, it can be a hard thing to accept. So a lot of people want to point fingers, they want to blame spies, politicians. We're in the middle of a war. It's aliens but in reality it's definitely aliens. It's just a a really bad accident that happened because uh nature took over and that happens and sometimes we just have to accept it and learn from it.

SPEAKER_05 2:20:54

And it and it is the it is a classic case of like the Germans really did think of uh everything everything from the uh ultraviolet to infrared light they thought of everything from like venting the gas like having automatic vents that could expel gas if necessary to keep it level um they even thought about putting insulators in between the frame and the uh skin of the ship knowing that the two are metals and they would react together. Um but it's one of those things it's like it's it it is a failure of imagination. And sometimes you just gotta be prepared for that that you just you're in a mess right now because you just didn't think of something. But uh guess what? The next time you will and in this case they're just like we're done. And and and here's the thing though the Hindenburg was already on the way out like uh airplanes were now flying over the Pacific. It just wasn't like the Hindenburg was becoming more of a novelty. Yeah it was at the early stages of it um but it would have been like one of those things where I want to take a train across the country. No I can hop into a plane and get to New York in hours or I can spend like four days in a train going across the country. You would want to do it because of the novelty of it.

SPEAKER_04 2:22:10

Oh right you can stop in different places when the train stops or whatever. Kind of like a cruise but not as luxury I guess.

SPEAKER_05 2:22:17

Yeah same thing I can get to Hawaii in five hours or I could spend like a day or two on a cruise ship. Like how do you want how do you want to approach it? That's the Hindenburg folks uh be sure to check us out on the day simplifier.com uh there you will find all of uh Kara's art contributions and whatnot plus uh other articles our show notes and um daysomsifire.com you can also find um links to you know like iTunes Amazon whatever we we're we're on every platform and um be sure to tell a friend or a family um easiest thing to do is just grab their phone and uh show them how to do it in case if they don't know what a what those podcasts are email us at the daysdumpster fire at gmail.com or message us on Instagram we're at the days dumpster fire over there follow us give us a like um and if you could leave a review and obviously share on your social media platform of choice that'd be great otherwise oh real quick I want to do a shout out to that airships.net I know I uh I I mentioned them before but guys be sure to check them out right there that's an incredible uh website a ton of information uh on pretty much anything that floats um in the air they they get you covered so if you want even more details if you want to know like the operation manuals of how the Hindenburg worked amongst the crew like they've got it uh so yeah huge shout out to them they did it they that they did an incredible job a lot of the pictures that you'll see on our website I got from them so I'm crediting them for for the uh images that I'm using and the diagrams and whatnot but yeah they they they did a an incredible job so be sure to check them out so yeah until next time I say uh keep it a hot mess thanks for listening bye