99% Invisible - 300- Airships and the Future that Never Was

Episode Date: March 28, 2018

They are hulking, but graceful -- human-made whales that float in the air. For over a century, lighter-than-air vehicles have captured the public imagination, playing a recurring role in our dreams of alternate realities and futures that might have been. In these visions, cargo and passengers traverse the globe in smoothly gliding aircraft, then dock elegantly at the mooring towers on top of Art Deco skyscrapers. Today, blimps are mostly just PR gimmicks, but for 100 years, lighter-than-air crafts were seriously considered as the perfect design solution for all kinds of problems, at least in theory. And despite setbacks and failures, people just wouldn’t give up on the promise of airships. The most promising (and most opulent) rigid airship of the 1920s era was Britain’s R101 (the R stands for rigid) and its rise and dramatic fall is the primary subject of engineering expert Bill Hammack’s new book about Britain’s last great airship, called Fatal Flight. Airships and the Future that Never Was

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. They are hulking but graceful. Human-made whales that float in the air. For over 100 years lighter than air aircraft have fascinated us, and they have this recurring, storing role in our dreams of an alternate reality, of a future that might have been where cargo and passengers traverse the globe in a civilized fashion and dock elegantly on the morey towers on top of art that goes skyscrapers. If you've seen one in real life, it was likely a blimp emblazoned with the good year logo.

A blimp is a non-rigid airship, meaning there's no structure inside the balloon, it's just a balloon. The shape is maintained by the pressure of the lifting gas inside. Then you add a little cockpit and engines and rudders on the outside of that big balloon to make it fly. Today's blimps are basically cute PR novelties, but for around 100 years, lighter than air aircraft were seriously proposed as the perfect design solution for all kinds of problems, even though none of these proposals actually happened. People just couldn't give up on the promise of airships.

In the 90s, there was a company called Sky Station. They raised some 4.2 billion or at least solicited it to put 250 antenna equipped airships to deliver internet service. This is Bill Hammack. He's the engineer guy on YouTube in an airship enthusiast. In the 80s, there was the British Antarctic Survey. They revealed a hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole, and so pretty soon a professor suggested sending blimps that dangled electrical wires to zap ozone-eating chemicals. Then in the 70s, they were supposed to help developing nations. Using a hybrid blimp to usher those nations into the 20th century, no need for roads, no need for railroads and tunnels and bridges,

but just to lift stuff in. In the 1950s and 60s, nuclear-powered airships, with unlimited energy and an unlimited capacity for work were proposed. In the 20s and 30s, they were to fulfill imperial ambitions, both to the Germany and the British. We're looking for that. And the Americans too, they had imperial ambitions in the Philippines. Of all those failed attempts to realize the full potential of airships, it was those imperial rigid airships, heavily developed in the 20s and 30s,

that came the closest to actually changing the world. In an airship, you have a metal framework and that houses gas bags that lift the ship. Those gas bags are arranged in the metal scaffolding like peas in a peepod. And then a cloth cover is stretched over that and that cloth cover is not air tight to protect the gas bags from weather. Underneath the fabric cover are not just gas bags. Because it's not a pressure vessel, they're able to build things inside the airship. Like crew quarters, dining rooms, lounges,

all built into the metal framework. So people move around inside the thing that you might think of as the balloon, but it's not really a balloon. And that structure enables an airship to travel faster than a blimp because the force of the wind, for example, would deform the nose of a blimp, and it also allows the ship to be built much, much bigger. You've maybe heard the term, Derigible, which is the French name for an airship,

or Zeppelin, which is a German company that makes airships. Zeppelin is like the Kleenex or Band-Aid of the airship world. But the proper term, as generic and boring as it sounds, is airship. The most promising, most opulent, rigid airship of its time, and I'm talking about the 1920s here, was Britons R101. The R there stands for Rigid. The rise and dramatic fall of Britons last-grade airship is the primary subject of Bill Hammock's new book called Fatal Flight.

Spoiler alert. When it comes to the dream of airships dominating the skies, the catastrophic and very public Hindenburg disaster may have been the final nail in the coffin, but it was the crash of R101 that built the coffin. R101 was supposed to connect the global British Empire. It was designed to fly from London to Karachi in five days. That's ten days faster than by sea. Taking a plane that distance took sixteen days because planes had to stop so often to reveal. Airsthips could also carry 30 to 40 times the cargo of airplanes.

Airships just made so much sense for an empire whose reach exceeded its grasp. So Great Britain built R101 and R100, which was its sister ship that was supposed to go to Canada in back, as the first two rigid ships in a fleet that would give the crown dominance over the skies to match its centuries-long dominance of the seas. In airship is conceptually quite simple, but it's still an engineering marvel. It's a gargantuan cigar-shaped math equation, balancing lift on one side of the equation and weight on the other, minimizing the weight of the airship was always a challenge.

There's that rigid metal framework and that is one of the most difficult parts because that has to be lightweight yet strong. Yet R101 was supposed to match the sturdy luxury of a high-end ocean liner. I mean, I can just picture this white china that was trimmed with royal blue and silver saltcheggers and crystal glasses and small butter dishes.

But to allow for those essential refinements, everything else could only have the thinnest veneer of opulence because they needed everything to weigh as little as possible. One person described it when they touched the ceiling as like a piece of stage scenery. All the walls were actually fabric. The pillars and the lounge were made from balsa, covered with metal. The tables were also a balsa, and the chairs were made of the lightest cane. So it was really kind of an illusion,

the solidity of the ship, because you just couldn't afford to lift tons and tons of stuff. On the other side of the equation is lift. You get lift from pumping and gas, that's lighter than air. In the case of R101, the gas they used was hydrogen. Well, flammable hydrogen seems like a very poor choice. It was for a commercial airship the only choice. You use hydrogen instead of helium, which is non-fimable, because the purpose of a ship like R101 was to transport cargo. And helium is both heavier and provides

less lift than hydrogen. What you're interested in is the payload that you can lift. So if you subtract all of the weight that you have to lift, the rigid ship, the gas bags, the water, the personnel, in a ship like R101, if you filled it with helium, you would not have enough lift to lift the ship. The flammability of hydrogen was indeed a concern in airships. But flattin engineers filled it with helium, you would not have enough lift to lift the ship. The flammability of hydrogen was indeed a concern in airships, but flight engineers and crew were habituated to its dangers, much like we're habituated to the dangers of combustion engines today.

They felt that you just take the proper precautions. One engineer pronounced you don't light a match and look in your gas tank and your car when you're driving around with something highly flammable all of the time right now, you get the proper engineering solutions and controls to do it. The other reason why helium wasn't an option on commercial airships was the cost. Helium at that time was produced in the US.

It comes from natural gas that's required expensive distillation plants and most of the helium is in places like Kansas and Oklahoma and Texas. So they would have to pay for it to be imported into Britain. Instead you can make hydrogen on site very cheaply. Almost one one hundredth of the cost of helium. So that was never really, you know, an option, never really considered.

The gas bags that contain the hydrogen are their own engineering marvel. It's interesting to me as an engineer to think about the materials they had to make these gas bags because you have a problem in that hydrogen wants to permeate, the small molecule that likes to go through things. So you need something that's very strong, that is impermeable to hydrogen or largely impermeable and that is lightweight. And so they tried things like rubber, gelatin, glycerin, something called viscoose, which is a synthetic fabric, it's coated with latex. But they all

failed when we were another, like the viscoose, if you crumpled it up, you could not uncrevel it, we just crack. So they used, and this stuns me to this day, the intestines of an oxen. And specifically, the oxen intestine, it's lined with a very fine membrane. It's called the seacum. And it's very thin and flexible. And hydrogen siepes only slowly through it. Oxen intestines are nearly the perfect material except for the size. The seacum of an ox is about 30 inches by six inches, so a little over a square foot. And yet one of those gas bags, if you laid it out, is 30,000 square feet.

And so to create one of these gas bags, you would use 50,000 of these entrails or so. In fact, there's about a million and a half oxen and test lines that were needed to create the 15 gas bags for R101. And it was fairly grisly work. They delivered from slaughterhouses in Argentina, at least some of the animals,

barrels of these guts, and then they would scrape them and go through this long process to prepare them and eventually to glue them together. And to answer your question, 50,000 oxen testants, even once cured and treated to make them into gas backs,

do kind of stink. They did. They did. Apparently, if you were up in the airship, you would smell kind of an animal smell did? They did? Apparently, if you were up in the airship, you would smell, you know, kind of an animal smell, a muskety smell also because the cloth cover didn't allow light in. R101 had a few test flights in and around its hanger outside London to great fanfare. In fact, Bill Hemmick surmises that the focus on PR and fanfare,

rather than more rigorous and deliberative testing, led to the tragedy that was about to come on the ship's first attempted flight to India in 1930. It had left on October 4th, about 6.30 at night, about 54 people on board. Most of them worked for the Royal Airship Works, but some were observers and some were dignitaries. So, traveled across England,

traveled across the channel into France, and there were these bruising winds. Wind so fierce that ground speed was only 30 miles per hour or so. And then a few minutes passed too, it was about 40 miles or 64 kilometers north of Paris. And it kind of chopped through the turbulent air flying at about 1200 feet but moving up and down a couple of hundred feet and the top cover ripped open. The top cover was weak, it was one of the weakest parts of the ship. Then at that point the gas bags which are made of these very thin intestines were exposed to rain, the rain pelted the gas bags, there was some decrease in lift, maybe dropped to 500 feet or so, and the control car, and no one knows why, today, signaled for the engine power to be cut off, and of course it lost all dynamic lift at that point,

and it drove nose first to the ground, it slid into a grove of hazel and oak trees, and it burst into flame. There's some debate as to why it burst into flames. Wilhelmic thinks the fire might have been caused by calcium-phosphide flares that were kept in the control car. Those ignite when water hits them. And of course that ignited the hydrogen. At that point, just everything became charred. Only six people survived it. The ground was littered with these, you know, very sad everyday things. I mean, suitcases, fird-lined boots, shard-saving brushes, ten of cigarettes, and there was a taking watch still there, and tens of plums with its juice leaking. And then it was very quiet, and all you could hear was the hiss of the rain as it hit the hot metal and it evaporated.

The wreckage had barely cooled when the British government halted their airship program for good. It was almost immediate. R100 had flown two Montreal and back, and it was in a shed, and it never flew again. They eventually steamrolled R100, sold some of the parts for scrap, sold some of the people who wanted souvenirs. Even though our 101 was completely destroyed in the French countryside, the burned remains did float in the sky once again, at least for a little while.

Well, the wreckage of that ship was cut up into pieces, shipped back in December to Great Britain and it went to somebody who takes scrap metal. And then apparently, according to a newspaper account, it was sold to the Zeppelin company and they used part of that metal to make the hand in work. Because of the romanticism wrapped up in airships, their flexibility when it comes to moving huge cargo, and the fact that it requires very little infrastructure to support their operation, the hope that airships will make a return

has never gone away. I mean, I get a question a lot. Our airships gonna come back and with new materials. Part of the reason why they don't come back is this fiery disaster-filled legacy, which I am perpetuating right now. What politician wants to vote in an airship and have a crash and somebody said, well, you know, didn't you know about the Hindenburg, right?

No, this isn't quite fair. If you look at something like the Grafseppelin, which was a contemporary of R101 and a predecessor to the Hindenburg, it was in service for nine years across the Atlantic 144 times. 16,000 flight hours, 590 flights, 13,000 passengers, the first aircraft ever to exceed one million flight miles. And circumnavigated the globe in just 21 days. So there is, you know, another history back there

that says that these things can be made and can be made well. At this point, the airplane has had a centuries worth of development and efficiency, speed and safety so that the need for the airship has been largely eliminated. But it passed as precedent. Some enterprising engineer is an arumphant of entericapolis right now trying to convince them

that giant airships are the solution to some pressing world problem. In the meantime, the airship will continue on in science fiction stories as this quick and easy visual cue that were in a world that's like ours but somehow more wondrous. One of the most memorable pieces of audio of all time and my favorite video by the engineer guy right after this. and my favorite video by the engineer guy right after this. When the Hindenburg crashed and burned in a New Jersey field in 1937, a reporter from Chicago radio station WLS named Herbert Morrison was there. His real-time reaction to the disaster that was unfolding in front of him became one of the most memorable recordings in broadcast history. A couple people on staff here had never heard it before which totally

shocked me so I wanted to play it here. You might not be able to make out all the words but Morrison's emotions come through loud and clear. running the rain again, the rain has cracked up a little bit. They packed motors with a ship, are just holding it just enough to keep it from... It's right in the flagging. Get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it all the folks between the deserts terrible, this is the one that works your task of being in the wild, they always see this as like 20, all 400, 500 feet into the sky. If a terrific grace, ladies and gentlemen,

is smoking, it's slaves now, and they claim it's rising to the ground, it's not quite to the morning mass, all the humanity, all the furniture, it's screaming at us. I don't do it. I tell the entire people,. I don't do it. I tell them I'm talking to people. And they're all there.

I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honestly, just like they are now talking like they do. And everybody can hardly breathe in the pocket. They're screaming, lady, I'm sorry. Honestly, I can hardly breathe. I'm the devil inside, while I cannot see it. I'm totally unstable. I can't. I can't. I can't. I'm going to have to stop for a minute because I have lots of opportunities.

I've worked together, I've ever worked with it. That radio recording was later paired with newsreel footage of the disaster. 36 of the 97 people onboard the Hindenburg died. When you see the footage of the burning airship, the fact that 61 people survived seems like a miracle. As I mentioned in my introduction to Bill Hammock on YouTube, he's known as Engineer Guy, and I would be remiss if I didn't point you toward his fantastic video on the ingenious design of the aluminum beverage can, which is for my money, the greatest video on YouTube. It is 11 1.5 minutes of everyday design

and engineering glory. I love it. Here's a little audio sample. Why is there a tab on the end of the can? It seems a silly question. How else would you open it? But originally, cans didn't have tabs. Very early steel cans were called flat tops

for pretty obvious reasons. You'll use a special opener to puncture a hole to drink from and a hole to vent. In the 1960s, the pole tab was invented so that no opener was needed. You can find links to Bill's videos and his book on the R101 on his website, engineerguide.com 99% invisible is Avery Trouffman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sharif Yusif, Taren Masa, composer, Sean Rial, digital director, Kurt Colstead, senior editor, Delaney Hall, senior producer, Katie Mingle, and me, Roman Mars.

We are a project of 91.7KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We are part of Radio Atopia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all a podcasting. We are supported by our listeners, just like you. You can find 99% invisible and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI or one Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too.

But we have very fun pictures and diagrams of the airships on our website. They're even more amazing than you can picture in your head at 99PI.org. Radio Tapio. From PRX.