Stuff You Should Know - The Hindenburg Disaster

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

Hard to believe we haven't covered this one yet, but here we are. Why did the Hindenburg crash and burn? We still don't really know.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. of IHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. And this is stuff you should know. This is one of those ones, Chuck, that I'm really surprised we haven't done already. Yeah, for sure.

And actually, boy, talk about a segue. This is about the transatlantic voyage of the Hindenburg. But before we get into that quickly, we want to remind everybody, or maybe if you're hearing this for the first time about the Stuff at Sea voyage that we're going on in partnership with Virgin Voyages.

We're taking to the great seas, right? We are, not the skies, the seas. And we are actually headlining a very special voyage called Stuff at Sea, and it's us doing our thing, including a live podcast on board. And then some of our other colleagues, too, including the stuff

they don't want you to know guys are going to be doing their thing, too, on this, I think it's a five-night voyage. That's right. October 2 through 7 from New York City to Bermuda. Like I said, this is through Virgin, so that means it is a kid-free luxury experience. And there's also going to be interactive sessions. You're going to be meet and greets. They're going to be themed activations. Whoa, wonder what that is. I also saw it described as a culture-soaked description.

where pink sand paradise meets curious minds. I don't think anything else needs to be said besides that. Yeah, I mean, you get it, folks. If you want to come hang out on a very large boat with us in the middle of the ocean and hear us do our live podcast along with other things, then this is going to be your only chance to ever do that. Yeah, very nice. You can go to virgin voyages.com slash stuff, and that's in October.

Cool. I don't know that this was the best episode to put that in, We did what we did, you know? Well, it's not like this, it's the Titanic episode. Oh, that's a great, yeah, that's a good point. That would have been really bad. Because we're taking to the skies now. Right.

Talking about what happened on May 6, 1937, when the Hindenburg dirigible crashed, burst into flames over Lakehurst, New Jersey. And I am also surprised we haven't covered this. This is, you know, I didn't really know much about it. I knew the Hindenberg crash and I'd seen the footage and heard the stuff, the commentary. But I was like, yeah, man, they built that thing and they tried it out and it crashed. I didn't know that they had successfully flown this stuff a bunch and that there were even worse airship disasters than this. This is just the most well-known for reasons we'll get into. Yeah, it was pretty shocking to see and it was really well documented.

But yeah, I think including me. Well, never mind, there it is. What? Those are the reasons. Oh, yeah. But including me, though, Chuck, I thought it was the maiden voyage, too. I didn't realize it was just part of a larger thing either. And I think the Hindenberg itself had already been on a three-day publicity tour

and a round trip to Buenos Aires and back from Germany before the unfortunate incident happened in New Jersey. Yeah, it had flown a bunch. Yeah. So let's talk about this because the Hindenberg was known as an airship, which was, also known as a dirigible, which you mentioned a second ago. And there's actually specific criteria to be a dirigible, and the Hindenberg just checked all the boxes. That's right. Derigible means it is powered, so it's not just floating around up there like a hot air balloon.

But hot air balloons and derogibles are the same things as far as being lifted by what's known as LTA gas, lighter than air gas. in this case, in this case, we're talking hydrogen, but also helium was almost used, and now it's pretty much exclusively used. Yeah. And then it means it's steerable as well. So you can tell it to go in a certain direction, tell it by way of working the rudder, and powering those engines, and it'll go in that direction. All you have to do is shout, dirigible, go there.

And it goes there. I didn't know that it was actually an ad, can be an adjective as well. For steerable, dirigible means steerable. So, like, this car is highly durigible because it's got great responsiveness. Yeah, just try using that word like that, though, and see if you don't get pushback. I would think there would have to be an auto journalist who's used it here or there because they're just so sick of using the same terms, you know? Yeah, like car and driver magazine, like the snooty writers.

Yes, exactly. So there's three forms that dirigible come in. And it basically all has to do with how the structure, the blimp part is well structured, I guess. The B word? Yeah, I know you're not really supposed to say that, but it's true. I mean, I think it's pretty accessible to say blimp, you know? Yeah, we got, you know, the Eastlake Golf tournament is right near my house. And so when we're hanging out at the house during the tournament, oftentimes that Goodyear Blimp is

directly over my home. It's very cool to see. Didn't you say you're trying to angle for a ride in the Goodyear Blimp and that your in-laws have ridden in the Goodyear Blimp at our Akron show? Yeah, I have never done that. You know, obviously Akron is the home of Goodyear, and I think the blimp still. And my father-in-law, Steve, has at one point rode in that Goodyear Blimp, but I have never done it. So if anyone can take me up and you, I mean, you're invited, you know. Oh, sure, sure. I assume that.

If you're interested. I don't know if I am or not. My dad went on a hot air balloon ride, and I was like, I'm not getting in that thing. Yeah, I mean, after reading this, I mean, it's a different deal now, but it definitely gives pause. Right. So let's get back to what the balloon-like envelope, aka the blimp part, how that describes what type of dirigible there are. There's three of them, right? Yeah, there's non-rigid, semi-rigid, and rigid.

non-rigid is more like a high-air balloon. That means there's no structure on the inside, and it's just the pressure of that gas keeping everything puffed out. Yes, and hot air balloons are what make New Mexico's license plate so nice. Oh, yeah, agreed. Semi-rigid is kind of like non-rigid, except there's like a keel.

There's like a structure for the keel, the part that runs along the bottom of the envelope, right? Yeah. So there is some structure to essentially the bottom, but then I guess it flaps over. So it's basically like a chef's hat, like the Swedish chef's hat. Yeah. But it flies.

Right. And then rigid is the last one. There's like a skeleton-like frame usually of a really light but strong material, maybe aluminum. You sent a YouTube of colorized photos of the Hindenberg, the interior in particular. And they said that its skeleton was made of durillumin. Have you ever heard of that before? I had never heard of it. So, of course, I had to look it up.

I'm sure you did, too. That's an aluminum copper alloy, right? That's as strong as soft steel, whatever that is. Yeah, I don't know what that is either. But if it's not exactly what it sounds like, then somebody messed up naming it. It's a lot lighter than soft steel, obviously. And in the case of the Hindenburg, and I learned this all from that YouTube video, it's pretty cool to see those pictures as well.

There are 15, as they describe them, Ferris wheel-like rings. that gave this thing the shape in between those rings, and this is something I didn't know, there were 16 separate balloons between those rings, and that whole thing was covered with Goodyear Latex, and then a cotton, like, canvas fabric outer shell. Yeah, so the outer skin, the envelope, was not what the gas was filled in.

Like it was in these basically bladders inside the envelope, right? Yeah, yeah. How many were there? Like 14, I guess then? I think 16 balloons. We all should mention that cotton canvas fabric was coated with a protective coating because that will come into play. Yeah, it kept the sun off, essentially, so that the sun wouldn't heat the gas inside and so that the UV rays wouldn't break it down into useless. I don't know what you'd break hydrogen down into, I guess, ions.

I don't know. So the other thing about the rigid one, and I had no idea about this either, is that the passenger and crew usually are inside that envelope, inside the blimp. And if you look at the Hindenburg, there's like a little, you know, what's called the gondola attached to the bottom of it. And that seems to be, I think, the cockpit, where if you were a passenger and you were hanging out in the Hindenburg, you were inside that blimp. I had no idea about that, did you? Yeah, I did because, like, where else would they be? Because, I mean, once you find out that there are like 25 cabins and a bar and a restaurant and all that stuff, it's obviously not going to fit.

I mean, you know, you could hang out there. In fact, I think they encouraged the passengers to hang out in those two, that double-decked area because that's where all the windows were. Right. But I also learned that from watching the trailer to the Hindenburg movie when it showed a lot of action inside that shell. Okay, gotcha. So I just thought that the gondola was just that dwarfed by the blimp itself and that it held all that stuff. I had no idea they were inside the blimp. I find that much more claustrophobic.

Yeah, for sure. And I could see how you would think that because once you get a little bit, and we'll talk about the size of this thing, but you need not only look at pictures of the Hindenburg flying over New York City to see how gargantuan this thing. was. It was enormous. So that good year blimp, it depends on which one you're talking about. I've seen that the Hindenberg was more than 800 feet long, almost as long as the Titanic. Yeah. How does it compare to the 747? Where is that? I think it's like three times as long as the 747 and twice as tall. Yeah. I mean, seriously, like go look up, just type in like Hindenburg over New York City. And it's, the scale is really kind of, it drives at home for sure. Yeah.

It's really impressive. One of the other things I saw, too, is that it had a gas capacity, so of the hydrogen it held, of 7,062,000 cubic feet of hydrogen gas. And to put that in perspective, that's the gas equivalent of 7,062,1 cubic foot bags of topsoil that you get at the garden center. That's how much hydrogen gas it held. It's a lot of gas. And, you know, of course, that's what keeps it aloft.

As far as those engines, it had four diesel engines, and it moved pretty quick. I mean, as far as travel of the day, it could get across the Atlantic in two days. Yeah. The fastest ocean liner trip took five, and it still, it had the sister ship, the LZ130. They're still the two largest aircrafts to ever take flight off the ground. Yeah. So this is a pretty impressive ship for any. to see. But it also was not like the first of its kind. It was the point that they had reached in the

development of dirigible up to that point, which had really been kind of going for almost 100 years at that point. I think it was in 1850 when the whole dirigible craze kicked off in Paris, thanks to our friend Pierre Julien. Yes, that's right. The first one, I think, was in 18, yeah, 50, like you said. The next one, and that seemed more like a little like, hey, everybody, check this thing out.

In 1852, you got the first full-sized one. Thanks. It was really the French and Germans leading this charge. It was a French engineer named Jules Henri Giffar. 143 feet, pretty big.

Sure. Can't sneeze at that. He also traveled 17 miles around in his first flight of his airship which is, again, nothing to sneeze at. He was puttering around at six miles an hour. Literally around, right? Yeah, yeah, in circles, essentially.

The first few airships just basically traveled in circles. The next one was 1884. This was considered the first round-trip flight. I'm not sure what Gaffard was doing, but the French Army Corps of Engineers, like 30 years later, took their dirge ball in a round-trip flight, again in a circle. This one was just four to five miles,

and it had a nine-horsepower motor, and that is the same size motor of a really good push mower, lawn mower. Yeah, I mean, you know, you're up there in the sky, so you don't have to give it a lot to get it going. And, again, they're not going very fast, six to ten miles an hour. All of these so far have been non-rigid, by the way.

The first rigid one came in 1890, courtesy of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. That's where that word and eventual band name would come from. Yeah. Yeah, Zeppelin basically became the leader in designing and developing airship, Sturgeables at a time when it was like, this is the new thing. Like if you wanted to get from one continent to another, you took a luxury liner. Like you said, they were kind of slow.

Zeppelons could go way faster. And it was like the promise of airship travel was just limitless at this time. when Zeppelin came along. Yeah, for sure. And as far as the band, I can't remember who said it. This is off the dome, but somebody said something about them going over,

they would go over like a Led Zeppelin. Yeah. Obviously, that's two contradictory terms. Sure. And that's what they meant. They were being sort of cheeky. And of course, you know, it was, the Hindenberg was on the cover

of their first record, of their debut album. One other thing I looked up, the LZ in any of the Zeppelins. So like the first, rigid airship was called LZ1. And you mentioned... Not for lead. No, I thought probably it was.

Yeah. But it's a Luftschiff or airship in German. So airship Zeppelin 1 was the first rigid airship. The sister ship of the Hindenburg was LZ130. You know? That's right. So, yes, I think as a rule of thumb, anytime you're taking advantage of a new technology that carries you away from Earth,

or it carries you long earth at really fast speeds, do not go in any models that are still in the single digits. That's just a good rule of thumb, I think. All right. So if the new plane comes out and it's the, oh, I don't know, AirMax 7. Just wait until they get to 10. They're going to get there fast because those next three are not going to stay around very long. You're right.

That's good advice. So 1910 was the first commercial passenger flight. This baby went, I think it carried 23 people plus nine crew on a sightseeing loop. Yep. But it crashed. No, get this. So this was LZ7, still single digits. Yeah.

Ran out of fuel. It was blown off course, and it had engine trouble. And it crashed into some trees. But the fact that nobody died is pretty, well, happy, I guess. Yeah. 18 years later, we got our first transatlantic flight. And this is what they were gunning for. This thing went from Germany to where the Hindenburg would go, Lakehurst, New Jersey.

It's sort of suburban Philadelphia, like east of Philly. Okay. 111 hours and 44 minutes. But this is what they were, you know, they were looking for, you know, the next wave of, like, taking people. It wasn't just like Walser stuff or, hey, like, we tried it once. They were like really trying to compete with ocean liner travel. Yeah. I say we take a break and we come back and get into that a little more.

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Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. Well, I thought he was going to write. I thought you were going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo, rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, so like you were saying before the break, the Zeppelin development had gotten to the point where it's like we can get across the Atlantic.

We can get down to South America any time we want. Like, no problem. We've reached that point. Let's just start creating dirigible that are meant for transatlantic travel. Like, let's really put a dent in the ocean liner industry. We're just going to create a new travel industry. And that's what they said about doing. So the Hindenberg, LZ129, was the part of this larger planned fleet of

specifically transatlantic luxury zeppelins that were going to essentially change the world and make it much smaller. Yeah, for sure. It was, you know, it was luxury in the sense that it was an airship that catered to rich people. If you look at the pictures, it looks nice, but it's still not like anything you would get on board like the Titanic or anything like that just because it was an airship. So they couldn't, you know, their obvious weight limitations and size limitations. Like the cabins were really, really small, but they, you know, they were good, good looking enough for the, for the crowd that they were catering to, which is really rich people, because I think it costs like, in today dollars, like $10,000 compared to about half that for an ocean liner, transatlantic ocean liner voyage. Yeah, those are one way, too. Not like our voyage in October, which is round trip.

That's right. They're bringing us back, right? Yeah. Okay. They're just going to leave us stranded in Bermuda. I mean, they could drop us in Atlanta on the way home, I would think. Oh, that's a great idea. That's a wonderful idea.

Chuck will ask. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, it was expensive, but it was also very new, right? So you can imagine, I mean, luxury ocean liners have been doing this for a very long time. By the time they reached that cost of about $5,000 for a luxury liner. So you can imagine that, like, the Zeppelin company had their eye on bringing costs down. eventually so that more people could afford it. Yeah.

But in the meantime, to start, I mean, that's kind of what you do. You attract everyone's attention by getting the richest, most famous, most powerful people that come fly on your friendly skies and then newspapers write about it. Like, oh, my gosh, did you see Mrs. Astor 800 feet up hanging from the outside of the Hindenburg? It was amazing. You could see right up her dress. That's what newspapers want to write about, you know, and so that's what they were doing. Yeah, and today Mrs. Esther's equivalent, I guess, is Katie Perry.

That's exactly right, Chuck. What a time to live in. That was amazing. So I mentioned hydrogen and helium as the LTA, lighter than air gases, used to power anything like this. And they had a real decision to make early on with the Hindenburg, like what to use. And the original design was hydrogen. But then they said there was a crash in 1930 of the British, airship R-101, out of the single digits, still crashed.

Survived impact, but everybody died in the hydrogen fire because hydrogen turns out super flammable. So Hugo Echner said, you know what, let's go to helium. It's way more stable. It's a little bit heavier, so we're going to have to design a larger envelope so we can keep that same payload. But then there was a U.S. helium embargo, and the United States was the only maker and seller of helium at the time.

And so they said, all right, you know what, let's go back to hydrogen and let's just cross our fingers. Yeah, there was a helium act of 1925 that I never heard of that the U.S. is like, this is a natural resource that we really need, so we're just going to keep it all to ourselves. We did a podcast on that at some point, right? On helium. No, we definitely talked about it because there was a shortage and it was all, everybody was really worried about it going away. And then all of a sudden we found a huge new vein of.

of it in the United States, and now there's no problem with helium anymore. Stuff like that makes me feel like we're definitely in a simulation sometimes. You know? Yeah. It happens a lot. Like, people are like, oh, we're hitting peak oil or, you know, like, we're going to run out of helium and all this horrible stuff's going to happen. And then nothing happens.

Like something comes along and just completely does away with that randomly. Yeah. At any rate, that was not the case for the designers of the Hindenberg. They had to go with hydrogen, like you said. And because they had made that envelope so much bigger to accommodate the more helium that they were going to need, they were going to now have to fill the whole thing with hydrogen. So they added a bunch more passenger cabins to basically, well, make more money, but also to make it heavier so that it would do all the same things it would have had it been helium.

Yeah, so it wouldn't float away. Pretty much. Pretty much. We went over some of the sizes. I think we should probably mention the cruising speed with 76 miles and hour with a topper of 84 miles per hour. Yeah. In total, you've got about 40 flight crew, 10 to 12 stewards and cooks, as we'll learn,

there was a bartender as well. Mm-hmm. And then 50 passengers in 36 and then up to 72, I guess because they built those extra cabins, right? Right, right. And that was 1937 season. And I think 1936 was the only complete season in the Hindenburg service. One other thing that I was trying to get to the bottom of that was surprisingly hard to find was its cruising altitude.

Oh, yeah. Apparently, its usual cruising altitude or normal cruising altitude was like 650 feet or about 200 meters. Man, that's impressive. It is impressive, but they would usually fly lower to basically fly under clouds rather than through or over them. So, yeah, I mean, these things, I saw somebody say, like, they were flying at the height of, like, you know, the tallest trees in the world. Like, it wasn't that high up that they were flying. Yeah, I mean, also, and I don't know if that any do with it, but you want people to see this thing if they're trying to drum up business.

Sure. And, again, those pictures over New York City, that thing is pretty low. It is, like, kind of concerningly low, actually. Yeah. Yeah. So, Chuck, just a little more about what it looked like inside and what it was, you know, like aboard the Hindenburg. Remember, these were luxury, like state-of-the-art luxury accommodations in the mid-19.

But they also had to adjust for weight and stuff like that, like you were saying. It seemed like there was formica everywhere. Like it looked like the walls were made of formica even. Yeah, totally a lot of formica. But that jibed a little bit with sort of the Art Deco look that seemed like it ran throughout. Yeah, for sure. They dressed for dinner, like you would think. There was an aluminum piano made specifically because a baby grand would just be too heavy.

Yeah. And they had, of course, incredible meals in this incredibly cramped dining room. Yeah. And then there was a smoking room, which at first I'm like, well, of course there's a smoking room. It's the 30s. And then I was like, hydrogen dirigible. That is actually pretty remarkable. Yeah.

It had a double airlock. Apparently there was one lighter, so they didn't trust people to, you know, just to bring their own lighter. So there was one lighter that would light everyone's cigarettes, I guess, or whatever else they were smoking. Pipes, I imagine, cigars. Blunts, who knows. The bartender was, I can't remember the guy's name, but they talked about him in the YouTube video, and he seemed to be a pretty popular guy. And there's one story of a famous passenger who created a drink, or I guess rather his wife did. British author Leslie Schoteris, who created The Saint franchise.

His wife, Pauline, was aboard, and apparently they ran out of gin. like probably pretty fast. A lot of gin-based drinks back then. Sure. So she created a martini made from Kish Fosser, which I looked up, which is like some sort of a cherry thing. Yeah, it's like a cherry brandy. It's really good.

Oh, you've had it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, remember when I was like super into making cocktails? Yeah, I mean, I've used like the cherry, like the Luxardo liqueur and stuff. Is it sort of like that? No, it's much lighter and not, it's not nearly a syrupy and heavy. It's more of a spirit than like a syrup.

You know what I mean? Yeah, well, because the, yeah, Luxardo is a liqueur, but the other one is like a legit, 90-proof, you know, kind of thing. Yeah, where you're like, whew. But it is very good, and it's like a cherry flavor, so she used that instead of gin. And apparently, did the bartender die? because supposedly the rest of the ingredients are lost to history.

I mean, I guess Pauline must have died, or else she could have just probably told everybody, by the way, like after this tragedy settles, I created a whiz bang of a drink up there. Exactly. Remind me to tell you about the hymn-and-moor cocktail I came up. But I saw somebody surmised that the other ingredients were probably dry vermouth, which would take it a martini,

grenadine, and not like roses greenadine, but like the real pomegranate. syrup and a lemon peel. Yeah, that sounds nice. Sure. I would try that. So what else? They had that piano.

Oh, the cabins had running hot and cold water. They had a little fold-down desk, but they were small. The crew cabins were just like you would expect a crew cabin to be very small. It looked like those beds were a couple of feet wide. Yeah, and there were bunk beds, too. Yeah. So with an art deco ladder, no less, too. Pretty, it was kind of cool looking.

I'm not a huge fan of the 1930s aesthetic. Ooh, I love it. I like the ladders. Yeah, yeah. For the bunk beds. I'm big into Deco. Maybe you can get one of those off of eBay or something. Oh, man.

Like a Hendonberg ladder? It's probably dead or gone, up in flames, I would guess. Well, some of that stuff survived is in a museum. True. So you couldn't buy it, but maybe we could, you know, bust it out. Yeah, if we could break into the Smithsonian. Get that ladder for you. Just pass everything else by and go straight for the Hindenburg ladder.

That's it. That's all you want. And I'd be like, I'd get it home and be like, I don't even have bunk beds. So this is all getting lots of press. Like this is a big deal. Remember, the Hindenberg was part of a playing transatlantic fleet. So this is big news. One thing that a lot of people forget is that the Nazis were in charge of Germany at the time.

The Hindenberg was a German ship. It was a civilian ship. but it still had big, fat swastikas on its tail fins. And as everyone knows, the Hindenberg went up in flames, I think it's no coincidence that its tail went up in flames first because why wouldn't it? Right. That's a good point.

I didn't think about that, actually. So the Nazis were like, hey, we're trying to get everybody alike us to psych them out. And let's send the Hindenberg on a three-day publicity to her around Europe, essentially. That was its maiden voyage in March of 1936. Yeah, they did a lot of these little propaganda flights. And apparently the one that lifted off on May 6 had some engine trouble, but they had to skip endurance test because of one of those propaganda flights, right? Yeah.

They were like, it'll be fine. They apparently think that they would have found the engine troubles. But the Hindenberg made its first passage to America in May of 1936, which is confusing because it was May of 1937 when it had its last voyage to America. So almost exactly a year later in between its first trip to America and its last trip to America. Yeah, it got me all throughout researching this. Yeah, for sure. Wait, what? How are these people alive?

and then... Right. Yeah, they completed 34 flights in 1936, which included some of those propaganda flights, one of which, very famously, at the 1936 Olympic Games there in Berlin, and then, you know, round-trip flights to America and then the one to Brazil that you mentioned.

And they had, you know, they were catering, like you mentioned, the Aster's, you know, Nelson Rockefeller, the head of Eastern Airlines, TWA, Pan Am. Like, I think they were kind of rubbing it in the face of all these early airlines saying comply on this super slow but kind of awesome thing. I wonder also if they were like, hey, don't you guys want to start your own airship division? We'll sell you the airships, you know.

Yeah, I bet. It could have also been a little of both. Yeah, I bet you're right. That Millionaire's flight, you mentioned Eddie Rickenbacher was also on that. And he's the American flying ace from World War I who took down the Red Baron. Yeah, yeah. So I'm sure it was a tad awkward around the other German military Nazi leaders who were on that Millionaire's flight too.

Yeah. Well, this guy. Right. So that was 1936. It was a triumphant year for the Hindenburg. And it had six more successful flights in 1937 when it started. I say we take a break and come back again and things just start to go poorly for the Hindenburg. How about that? All right. We'll be right back. I'm Ruby Carr, the host of the podcast, Encore.

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You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. I thought he was going to write. I thought you're all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. I was confused by the May stuff as well, because here we are in May again.

One year after the first commercial passage in 36, all those successful flights later, the seventh one of the new year on May 3rd, 1937, Captain Max Pruss was at the helm, and it lifted off there in Frankfurt, headed toward Lake Hirsch. There's a naval airbase there, by the way, which is why they kept going to suburban New Jersey. Yeah, which is kind of shocking. They were letting the Nazis land blimps at a naval air base in New Jersey. Yeah, I mean, this was still, I mean, this was just before they probably would have said no, right? Right. Yeah. So they got all the way there.

They flew, and that's sort of the cruel tragedy of this is, or one of them is, you know, if there were any nerves, they're like landing in New Jersey. And they're like, this is great. We made it, everybody. We're all sort of drunk. We put out our last cigars. It was a storm that was a storm happening. So they sort of delayed the landing. They flew out over the ocean for a few more hours.

I imagine everyone got even more liquored up. And then finally at around 7 p.m., they descended in high winds from about 500 feet down, down, to a little under 300 feet. And they actually dropped those mooring ropes, which turned out, spoiler alert, could have caused this whole thing. Yeah. And they secured those ropes at 725. they secured those ropes to the ground with their winch system, and in less than 30 seconds, it was all over. Yeah, but the ropes, bear this in mind,

the ropes had been dropped and touching the ground for at least four minutes by this time, right? Yeah. So, yes, it took, I think I saw 34 seconds from the time when the flames erupted to the time when the entire thing was destroyed and crashed on the ground. It went that fast. Like I said, the stern, the tail of it caught fire first, and the flames just kind of blew through the envelope and came out the nose. And what's just mind-boggling is that as it landed on the ground, because it was a light skeleton, but not something you would want to land on you. And in fact, one of the ground crew died from the skeleton landing on him.

people, once they hit the ground, people were running out of the flames and survived. They were running for their lives, and they actually made it, which is crazy. Yeah, I mean, we'll go ahead and go over the numbers. Two-thirds of the people basically survived. There were 97 people on board, total, 36 passengers, 61 crew,

and only 36 people perished. 13 passengers and 22 crew, and then the one ground crew person that you were talking about. And very famously, it was called live by a Chicago radio reporter named Herb Morrison. Yeah. And I think we should either – I'll either read it. Well, I'll read it. But hopefully we can replace it with the real thing.

Like, surely this is within the public domain, right? I saw uncertain, according to the Library of Congress. All right. Well, shall I do it then? Yeah, do it. Can you do a great Herb Morrison impression there? I'll do my best. Wait, can you do it as Jim Morrison?

Maybe I should do it as Sammy Davis Jr. Just to give it some light. I would love to hear that if you're okay with it. No, no, I can't do that. That would be even that this decades later, it would be disrespectful, I think. Yeah, I guess it hasn't been 100 years. No. All right, so here we go.

This was Herb Morrison's call, and this is what was played and literally played in movie theater newsreels like the next day. So it's all over the place. It's fire, and it's crashing. It's burning, bursting into flames, and it's falling in the mooring mast. This is the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world. Oh, it's crashing. Oh, four or five hundred feet into the sky, and it's a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. There's smoke and there's flames now.

And the frame is crashing to the ground. Oh, the humanity! And all the passengers screaming around here. I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honest is just laying there a mass of smoking wreckage, and everybody can hardly breathe and talk. Honest, I can hardly breathe and talk. breathe, I'm going to step inside where I cannot see it. That was excellent.

If you listen to Herb Morrison actually doing this, he's in between a lot of these sentences, like, oh, oh, he is just completely overwhelmed. It happens immediately. The moment he sees those flames, he's just completely overwhelmed. Go listen to Herb Morrison calling that because it's just quite stirring. And he's the one who gave us that phrase, oh, The humanity. Yeah.

Apparently, that's where that comes from. I just kind of wanted to do a straight reading. I didn't want to do all the moaning. No, no. I mean, no one expected you to do that. Well, I didn't want to arouse anybody. Oh, yeah. You've always got your eye like three steps ahead, man.

I hope so. But yeah, oh, the humanity. That had never been said before? Is that true? I don't know. I don't know if it had been said, but certainly Herd Morrison was the one who popularized it. It seems to me like everything that he said was just

pouring out of him without thinking. Yeah. So I would guess that it was just off the cuff for him. Man, it's amazing. So again, only 36 of the 97 people aboard perished. Immediately, there were about 1,500 U.S. Navy personnel there that were, you know, all of a sudden doing not much of a search, but just rescue attempts. And like I said, it was all over the news the next morning. It was on movie theater newsreels within hours.

Both American and German investigators were there. and immediately theories started coming out kind of left and right. Yeah, so this is the 30s. Everybody's already starting to get wise to what the Nazis are like. There's also communists running around, maybe even old-school anarchists who like to throw a bomb. So the idea that it was an act of sabotage was bandied about very quickly. One of the first people who had their eyes set on them was a guy named Joseph Spay.

Have you, did you see his professional name? Oh, no, I didn't. I saw he was an acrobat, but what was his name? He was an actor. He appears in Marathon Man. Apparently, he's the guy who dies in the car crash that starts everything off. Oh, wow. His professional name as an acrobat was Ben Dova.

I'm not kidding. Oh, wow. That's amazing. Yeah. So he, I'm just going to call him Bend Over from here on out. Sounds like a Bart Simpson call into. most avid It totally does.

He was deemed suspicious by one of the stewards, a German steward, aboard the Hindenburg. And apparently, the German steward told the authorities who were investigating this that he found Joseph Sphebendova

quote, unsympathetic to airship travel. Like he wasn't just overjoyed or blown away by it, apparently, which is spoken like a true everyday fascist POS. if you think about it. Yeah.

But he might also have been like, I'm Bendova, you think? Like, you should see what I've seen. Exactly. Well, that was one of the other things, too, that when he was being investigated, they were like, he's also an acrobat. He could probably climb around

inside the skeleton and plan a bomb. So apparently they found zero evidence to that of, like, supporting him being a bomber whatsoever. Yeah, I have not seen the film from 1975 with, what's the guy's name? George C. Scott and Anne Bancroft, among others. But it seemed from the trailer that they fully like just fictionalized and that it was, it was a bomb and it was sabotaged. And that was the movie. Oh, really? I didn't know that. That's lame. Yeah, that's what it looked like to me. And apparently it was a $15 million

movie at the time, which was a lot of dough in 1975 for a movie. Sure. What was going on with blimps and disaster stuff in the 70s? Because there was also that movie Black Sunday. Yeah, it was just the the peak, it was peak disaster film, so they were, they were looking at all angles, I think. I got you. I should have guessed that. There were other people who were considered for sabotage, anti-Nazis, sure. There was one that said the Zeppelin Company and or the Nazi party blew up the ship for insurance money. Yeah, that was one. It was, I think it was covered for $15 million, and according to West Egg, that's about $355 million today. Oh, wow. Do not think the Nazi party would not have considered doing that.

Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, bombs being fired at from below, from above. The one thing they do know for sure is that the hydrogen was what, like, caused it to go up in flames in like 30 seconds. Right. There is no controversy about that. How that happened is still not, like, for sure known. Witnesses said that as the ship approached, it appeared to be glowing before the fire even

started. And so at the time, scientists heard that, and they were like, oh, okay, well, it gathered an electrostatic charge because of these storms that were going on. And that there was probably like a hydrogen leak, and that's what ignited the whole thing. Right. The thing is, is like that electrostatic charge, if it had, like, sparked, it would have had to have sparked exactly where that hydrogen leak was. And across an 800-foot dirigible, the chances of the spark and the leak happening at the exact same spot are. are pretty low, right? Yeah, I agree. So there's other theories that are, that try to basically, basically everyone agrees there was,

it was, there was a electrostatic charge. Somehow the electrostatic charge sparked. Somehow that spark set off the hydrogen explosion. Almost everyone agrees on that. But within that, you can, you still have a lot of room to maneuver around and figure out, you know, what exactly led to this disaster. And what's amazing is that we still don't know today. Yeah, I mean, there have been a lot of books written about it over the year.

There was one in 1962 called Who Destroyed the Hindenburg by A.A. Hurling. And they blamed a ground rigor named Eric Spell, who was actually on the crew. He was in inside the blimp. And apparently blew it up to appease or to please his communist girlfriend. But I don't know if he survived or not, but that doesn't make sense. And I don't think there was any evidence at all about it. that. No, and now that I see Michael Mooney, he wrote a book called The Hindenburg, and that movie was based on the Hindenburg, and he basically used that theory. So that's why they would have made it

like a bombing. Yeah, he must have been the character in the movie that I saw that was running around up to no good. Ben Dova is a character in that movie, but he goes by, I think, Joseph Spiel, I think. Oh, this is a missed opportunity. Oh, for sure. Yeah. There's also a theory about incendiary paint, which is basically a scientist from NASA named Addison Bain, who his career is based on creating hydrogen fuel propulsion systems, right, using hydrogen as fuel. Yeah, so he's pro-hydrogen. Very much so. He had an idea that, no, the hydrogen was, that was secondary.

That was really ignited first and then eventually ignited the hydrogen was this coating on the outer shell of the envelope, which we talked about, that, kept the sun rays off, and that that ignited. And he really went to town on this. Apparently, he had a television special and had to really work at getting an actual piece of salvaged envelope from the Hindenburg. He burned it on TV, but he really had to bend over backwards to get this thing to light. So essentially, his own demonstration proved to critics, like, that theory is not, doesn't hold high. Yeah, it was debunked. Boy, you were just flying all over the place with these jokes in double entendres. Very impressive.

Thanks. I appreciate you noticing. The giant capacitor theory, there was just like five years ago. There's a Caltech professor named Constantinos Giapas. Not sure where he was from. But he offered a different take on the ignition source. I think there was a PBS show, Hindenberg, colon, the new evidence. and here was a deal. There was, you know, that outer skin that we were talking about, but that skin wasn't directly wrapped on the frame. It had these little wooden spacers, like hundreds. I would imagine thousands of these things,

spacing it out so it didn't actually touch the frame. And his proposal was that when the ship dropped those ropes that we talked about, and I said to put a pin in it, that the space between the ship's skin collected a lot of positive electrostatic charge during that storm so that the air. the area between the skin and the metal frame collected electrons when the ropes hit the ground, and it turned it into just a big, basically a giant bomb, a big energy-storing capacitor that was dotted with these little capacitors, like ignition points essentially.

Yeah, so that's what he, his, that's where we were saying that the ignition point, the spark and the hydrogen leak being at the same spot was very unlikely. And what Gopas basically said was like, No, all those spacers became capacitors themselves. And they were all storing all this energy, negative on the frame, positive on the skin. And all it took was one spark for all of them to start sparking. And if you have hundreds or like you said thousands of little capacitors sparking at once, it's going to blow up a hydrogen dirigible.

And it's going to do it pretty fast. And I said that there was four minutes in between the time when they dropped the morin cables to the ground. and the time the Hindenberg blew up. And in one of the tests that Gioppas ran for Nova for this program, he basically ran essentially the same situation that the Hindenberg would have gone through under his theory, and it took four minutes for it to build up enough of a charge for the capacitor to spark.

Yeah, this sounds pretty good. Yeah, I like this one a lot, too. Yeah, and it's the most recent one. I guess the others have been debunked, so. Yeah. you know, I'm bandwagoning, admittedly. For sure. So one of the things that a lot of people aren't aware of is that the Hindenburg, when it went up,

not only did it immediately put an end to the idea of transatlantic airship flights or airships in general, aside from Goodyear who braved on. That was it. Yeah. It put the kibosh on hydrogen as a fuel. That's why people like Addison Bain in the 90s were coming up with these things trying to defend hydrogen. They're saying, no, it's safe. And people are like, did you see the Hindenberg? Yeah.

You're a fool. And apparently it is safe in some ways compared to like gasoline. Yeah. I mean, there are new airships happening. And there's, you know, there's people working with hydrogen again. So it's like enough time has passed to where they're looking into this kind of thing again. I think the Pathfinder 1, Google co-founder, Serge Brin, is the sort of brainchild behind that one. Yeah.

That thing is 400 feet long, eight feet long. And I think is still like none of these things are commercialized yet. They're like still in testing phases and development phases. Yeah, and they all run on helium, not hydrogen, too. Yeah, I mean, hydrogen's being used for other things. But yeah, they're still, I don't think they could ever use hydrogen again for something like this. We've talked about the Hindenberg before. It must have been on like one of the videos we did.

because I remember a saying that none of the people who jumped, no, none of the people who didn't jump died, that it was only the people who jumped from the Hindenburg who died. That's not true. That is a urban legend, and we kept it going, but this was 15 years ago, so come on, give us a break. Okay, yeah. If you want to see parts of it,

I told you that, you know, some is in the Smithsonian, Some of the pieces of the ship, some of the luxury stuff, you know, kind of like the Titanic, survive. The National Postal Museum has some stuff. Obviously, the Air and Space Museum have some stuff. And that's where you can see it. Just keep your eyes. Keep your eyes off that ladder.

That's for Josh. Thanks, man. I appreciate you looking out for me like that. Since Chuck is looking out for me with Smithsonian artifacts, that means, obviously, it's time for listener mail guys. Nice. This is just a really nice email for Michael in Columbus, Ohio. Hey, guys, just want to give you thanks for being one of the most consistent aspects of my world for almost two decades. I started listening when I was 10 years old.

On and off, of course, at first, but in the last couple of years, I've been listening to new episodes every week. Such a gift you've given and are still giving to this world, sharing your stories, perspectives, and jokes, and rants and spectacles with us. I truly hope you, too, and Jerry and all the people who help behind the scenes, are able to recognize the benefit, an impact of having consistent worldly discourse, being able to turn on a podcast and learn about landing on the moon or the wonders of the world, or anything in history really inspired the learning in me and continues to spark my curiosity every week. Josh, Chuck and team, you guys rock. Thanks from a 27-year-old kid trying to figure out this world.

Hope remains alive, and that is Michael and Columbus. Man, alive, that was really great. Thanks a lot, Michael. Yeah, that inspires us. Yeah, I'm inspired to go another 18 years, Chuck. I hope I live that long. You better, man. Well, I plan on it.

Okay, well, if you want to be like Michael and send us just a really, gee whiz, that's super nice email. We love those. Love them. You can send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit The IHeartRadio. Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, Portlandia fans.

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