Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Zeppelins

Episode Date: March 2, 2021

Airplanes were not the first type of aircraft. Lighter than air airships were flying decades before the Wright Brothers flew their first airplane. Of all the airships, there was one company that became so successful in airship development and construction that their name became synonymous with the rigid airship. Learn more about zeppelins on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Airplanes were not the first type of aircraft. Later than air, airships were flying decades before the Wright brothers flew their first airplane. Of all the airships, however, there was one company that became so successful in airship development and construction that their name became synonymous with the rigid airship. Learn more about Zeppelins on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the performance. parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thuline podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Masterclass. If you've ever wanted to learn something new, wouldn't you want to learn it from the very best people in their field? Masterclass is exactly that. Online courses where you can learn from the very top people in the world. world. You can learn how to cook from Gordon Ramsey. Learn science from Neil deGrasse Tyson,

photography from Annie Leibowitz, filmmaking from Spike Lee, Magic from Pennanteller, and tennis from Serena Williams. And that list only scratches the surface. You can start learning from the world's best for only $15 a month. Just go to Everything- Everywhere.com slash masterclass or click on the link in the show notes. The history of human flight didn't start with airplanes. Not surprisingly, it started with hot air balloons. On September 19, 1783, the Mongolia brothers took the first human flight in a hot air balloon. The balloon was tethered to the ground, and they got about 85 meters or 275 feet into the air. The problem with hot air balloons was and is that you have no control over where you go.

You're totally dependent on the direction the wind blows. Throughout the 19th century, hot air balloons had a limited usage, but they couldn't really be called a form of transportation. You couldn't reliably go from point A to point B in a hot air balloon. balloon. Moreover, it wasn't until after World War II that the modern hot air balloon with an onboard heat source was invented. Prior to that, the first hot air balloons had to be inflated with fires from the ground. It wasn't soon after the first hot air balloon that the first hydrogen balloon flight took place. It flew on December 1, 1783, just two and a half months after the first hot air balloon flight. Not surprisingly, the hydrogen-filled balloon went much higher than the first

hot air balloon. Jacques Charles, Anjan-Rober, and his brother Nicholas Louis Robert, took the first hot air balloon to 1,800 feet or 5,500 meters, and the flight went over two hours and traveled over 35 kilometers. After the balloon landed, Jacques Charles went back up again by himself, having jettisoned the ballast of two other people,

and shot up to 3,000 meters in just a matter of minutes. For decades, this technology, however, was just a curiosity. The story of the creation of actual airships, which could be used as transportation began during the U.S. civil war. A young Prussian army officer, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, was sent to the United States to be an observer to the Union Army during the war. Many European countries sent observers to both sides of the conflict to get an appraisal of fighting tactics and military technology. After the war, the Count went on

a trip to Minnesota, where he canoed on the Mississippi River, traveled to the shores of Lake Superior and visited the state capital in St. Paul. There, he met a German balloonist who took him on his very first flight. That flight lit a spark that would stay with him his entire life. He returned to Germany and led a distinguished career as a military officer. However, he never forgot about that flight he had in Minnesota. In 1874, he wrote a diary entry that outlined his idea of a larger rigid-framed airship with separate gas bags. The basic idea which he would implement, years later. In 1887, the La France, an airship created by the French army, became the first aircraft to be launched and travel a predetermined route and land back where it started. The airship

was a non-rigid ship with electric motors. Zeppelin wrote a letter to German officials to point out the strategic importance of the technology and to highlight the fact that Germany was falling behind with no airship industry of its own. In 1891, at the age of 52, he resigned from the military to devote himself to realizing his dream of creating airships. He hired an engineer and began work on designing his rigid airship that he had planned so many years before. Here, I should take a bit to explain some of the terminology surrounding airships. A blimp is a non-rigid airship. The old Goodyear blimp is an example.

It was literally just a bag of gas like a balloon, only it had a gondola and it could be controlled. The shape of the blimp is set by creating higher pressure inside the gas, bag than in the atmosphere. A rigid airship has an internal skeleton usually made of metal. The shape is determined by this structure, not by overpressuring the gas bags. Rigid airships can be much larger than blimps, and they're usually called Zeppelins, named after the man who first built them, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. Zeppelin went to work on the creation of their first prototype. As with most startup companies today, their first years were taken up with fundraising, filing patents, and getting government

approval. It took nine years, but on July 2nd, 1900, the first Zeppelin, the LZ1, finally flew. The LZ stood for Luft Shift Zeppelin, or Airship Zeppelin. The LZ1 was the first real Zeppelin. It only flew for 20 minutes on its first flight, and it didn't really go anywhere. It had a second flight where it did beat the performance records of the La France, but it didn't perform well enough to convince investors to put in more money. The company was liquidated, with all of the assets being purchased personally by Count Zeppelin. The dream of airships wasn't dead, however. A lottery was issued to raise money,

and Zeppelin invested everything he had, including his wife's estate, into the project. In 1906, the LZ2 was ready to fly. This too wasn't a success. It only flew once and crashed. They savaged all the parts of the LZ2 to make the LZ3. With the LZ3, finally, the German military was interested. However, they had a requirement before they would make a significant investment.

They needed to prove that the airship could operate for a full 24 hours. The LZ4 managed to fly across Lake Constantine and go all the way to Zurich. Along the way, it garnered enormous public attention and tens of thousands of people saw it fly. It was in all the newspapers. It managed to go 240 miles, demolishing every airship record. Unfortunately, it crashed and burned. But it had captured the public's attention. donation. Donations flowed in from everywhere in Germany. Over six million marks were sent to the

count which allowed him to start a new company, the Luftschiffelbal Zeppelin Company. From here, the company began producing Zeppelins in earnest. They began offering tours to the public, most of whom have never flown in the sky before. Many of the Zeppelins managed over a thousand flights and carried many thousands of passengers. The biggest problem they still faced was high winds, which they usually couldn't overcome given the state of engines in the early 20th century. country. During World War I, Zeppelins were used for both reconnaissance and bombing. The bombing missions were mostly for propaganda, as they couldn't really carry a large payload. It wasn't anything even remotely close to the type of bombing you'd see in the Second World War. Nonetheless, Paris,

Antwerp, Warsaw, and even London were bombed by Zeppelins. This was a totally unique form of warfare that had never been conducted before in world history. Dropping bombs from the sky had just never happened before. It required the development of countermeasures such as blacking out cities, using searchlights to spot zeppelins, and developing anti-aircraft weapons. The main use of zeppelins, however, was for naval reconnaissance. They could be thought of as an early form of radar to let ships know what was just over the horizon. The war greatly accelerated Zeppelin technology. Engines got better, zeppelin got bigger, and they were able to fly higher and faster. At the end of World War I, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles explicitly

stipulated that Germany could not develop airships and that their remaining airships had to be handed over to the Allies. Prior to the final siding of the treaty, the German military scuttled most of their Zeppelins. Count von Zeppelin died in 1917, and after the war, the company was put into the hands of one Dr. Hugo Echner. Echner was a big believer in airships as a tool for peace. He wanted to find ways to circumvent the treaty to keep building zeppelins. He eventually found a way when his company won a contract from the United States Navy. The Zeppelins would count towards payment of Germany's war reparations. In 1924, the LZ-126 was launched, and it became the first aircraft to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

When the U.S. Navy took possession, it was renamed the USS Los Angeles, and the hydrogen gas was replaced with helium. With the loosening of treaties, the company began to make its next and greatest ship, the LZ 127, which was renamed. was dubbed the Groff Seppelin. The Groff Seppelin ushered in the golden age of Zeppelin's. It was the largest Zeppelin ever built at 236 meters or 776 feet long. It was designed to be a commercial passenger ship. It operated from 1928 until 1937. And believe it or not, it had a perfect, spotless safety record. During its lifespan, it flew 590 flights, had over 17,000 hours of flight time, and crossed the Atlantic Ocean 140 times. It was the very first commercial passenger air flight across the Atlantic.

It ran regular runs from Berlin to Brazil in the 1930s. In 1929, it circumnavigated the globe. In 1930, it flew to the Arctic. It was far and away the most successful commercial Zeppelin in history. In 1933, Germany changed dramatically when the Nazi Party came to power. Hugo Echner was one of the most outspoken opponents of the Nazi Party. When they came to power, he was one of the first people on the list to be arrested. However, given his position, he was actually left alone.

He was, however, stripped of his position when the Zeppelin Company was nationalized, and it was mostly used for propaganda purposes after that. The next Zeppelin built, after the Graf Zeppelin, has become infamous. Originally given the code LZ-129, it was later named the Hindenburg, named after former German president, Paul von Hindenberg. The Hindenburg remains to this day the largest flying object ever created in human history. Originally, it was supposed to be inflated with helium, but the Germans had no access to helium. The United States had the majority of the world's supply, and they refused to sell to the Germans, so they were forced to use hydrogen.

It was destroyed in a very spectacular and public fashion on May 6, 1937, after completing a transatlantic voyage. The Hindenberg disaster is interesting enough for its own episode. but it will be suffice to say that it marked a very emphatic endpoint to the age of Zeppelin's. With the onset of World War II, Zeppelin served absolutely no use. They were too slow, and they were sitting ducks to the new faster aircraft with incendiary ammunition. The last Zeppelin ever created was the Grof Zeppelin 2, which was launched in 1938, and it was in service for less than one year before it was grounded. In 1940, all of the remaining zeppelins were scrapped for material for the German war.

effort. Cugo Echner, believe it or not, survived the war, despite being an outspoken Nazi critic. He died in 1954. The Zeppelin Company still exists today. It was revived in the 1990s and today make semi-rigid airships, which are much smaller than the Zeppelins of old. The flagship Zeppelin N.T is currently used by the Goodyear Corporation for their entire fleet of blimps. There are a few airships still in use, mostly for promotion and occasionally for industrial use. However, the age of lighter than air passenger travel is probably gone, never to return again. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com.

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