Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 49: hindenburg

Episode Date: December 20, 2020

today we talk about rubber fetishes mia's youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_OttpBEWWzSUlZbk5qmhSA our curiouscat: https://curiouscat.me/wtyppod slides: https://youtu.be/chlF5oubFHU patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp

Hey, listen, you know, I just you're my pal and I would love to not insult your human dig today more than I already do. Now you're good awesome. Yes. All right. Well, welcome to Alice sucks. Yeah, the bonus episode is just me. It's a big picture in my face. Yeah. And you just fucking go off. We're doing roasts now. Stop getting us canceled on. My favorite thing is when people tag us, like snitch tag us. So I'm just like, I'm not going to do anything. You're going to call me in for a supervisory meeting and you're going to tell me you're going to put a note in my file.

The closest thing I've ever done to that is messaging you to make sure you are OK. And if you needed anything, I'm very sweet. I don't know if we're if we're recording right now, but I want to tell everybody that that in the event one of us goes, you know, it has some problems. We'll handle it. We're adults. We can talk to each other. That's right. Snitch tag me. I know I've already seen it. I get notifications. They're on. God, you have notifications on for my tweets. I'm so sorry. No, I turn them on and off depending on what mood you're in.

Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Because sometimes you rapid tweet shit that I just don't even understand. And I'm just like, yeah, she's fine. I'm going to go back to reading about space flights. I like the I like the concept of police officer, Alice. Oh, God, you do. Then you could do whoop, whoop. That's the sound of the police whoop, whoop.

That's the sound of a lease. Oh, my God. For a lease. Tortured. Absolutely tortured. We do our best here. Let's record a three hour podcast about the dumbest method of transportation invented until the hyperloop. Let's record a podcast and I will try not to go off my meds

and say insane stuff that gets me canceled. I feel you, buddy. I I think every day that I am now on an anti-psychotic because otherwise you'd be getting unregulated. Oh, yeah, you do not need that. Oh, I've seen unregulated limb. Yeah, you have, bud. The shot be full of a bunch of mood stabilizers.

And I had and I came home and I was having a good old time. I didn't know where I fucking was. I can't believe they released me in that condition. I feel like I've joined a good society of people here. Oh, very much. Yeah. Yes, we are. We are a mentally and socially hygienic and healthy organization here. Yeah, this is why we're going to talk about a degenerate blimps.

It's the most pure of all methods of transportation. All right. So so welcome. Welcome to well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters. And it has slides. I'm Justin Rosnick, my pronouns are he, him and the person who's talking right now. All right, go. I am Alice Caldwell Kelly. I'm the person who is talking now.

My pronouns are she and her. No, I'm not going to be a fucking cop. Stop asking. I was crazy. You tell about. Sometimes people suffer from a thing called mental health. And when you have mental health going on, you say things you don't mean, like, I'm going to redact it, the president or things of that nature. File it in that column.

Fuck you. I've got you. I've got you. I got there was there was a person we know who shall remain anonymous because I don't want to give them the attention who just posted a picture of my profile where it says a cab. And it's like, I'm sure the other hoes of well, there's your problem. We're going to handle this.

And I'm just like, yes, actually, you don't motherfucker because I'm 29 years old. And I, too, have mental health issues. But you handled it by the expedient of being friends with me, which is like a little bit too care for our brand, but genuinely is what happened. No, no, no, no, no, no, because people are starting to like the group therapy with Liam, I charge one hundred and fifty dollars an hour as well. But I'm not going to do it to reward to reward your worst instincts.

I mean, you you probably will on some level. Oh, yeah, I will. I will. Listen, having done whatever 15 years of cognitive behavioral therapy, I can tell you it doesn't work for Liam. That's all I got. And I passed the mic, the one mic we're all sharing to Mia, the one mic. Yeah. Hi, my name is Mia Mulder, my pronouns are she, her and I'm here now.

I'm home on this podcast to talk about, again, the most worst of all transportation methods, really, because we made fun of Norwegians on a podcast last week. Today, we have a Swede. Yeah, yeah, no, we will assume that the the same thing and just infuriate Norwegians further. Yeah, I mean, it's it's worth noting that Norwegians smell bad and are dumb people and people like me, who is a Swedish descent?

Who is cool? Shout out to the guy who thought that snooze was Norwegian, by the way. I have not forgotten you. Well, that's that's that's unconscionable. It is a Swedish pride person. I can just hear the two of you having a conversation in your heads that's going, is it called a blood eagle? It's called a blood eagle.

Yeah, yeah, we can do that to that to that guy, this snooze guy. The snooze guy. How dare you? Congratulations on only joining the EU with your exemptions for your wonderful tobacco or carved out. I feel like people talk a lot about the UK having like special exemptions from the EU, but here we are. We we eat and drink and put things into our mouths

that the European Union simply does not want us to do it. And we just we just keep we just keep doing it anyway. Sorry, I can't hear you over our world leading life expectancy. No, you're not allowed to just eat that much salty licorice. It's like a plastic chemical. One of my favorite things about by snooze.com. Seriously, get at me, boys. Was that they also sold you Swedish candy and I got the licorice

and I'm just like hunched over and I gave it to my dad because I was dying. He's just like, oh, I remember this and just pops an entire handful into his mouth and then like stares like he had been in that at the end of the scene of apocalypse now. It's like, you want to go you want to go conquer Norway? A Swedish fan of ours sent Trashfuture some candy and they mailed some up to me at no never again, never. But OK, what kind of licorice are we talking about?

Because there's normal licorice, then there's salted licorice. Fully salmiaki stuff. Oh, that's like that's a good stuff. That's the good stuff that makes him pepper into for some reason. I have had snooze that tastes like samoyaki. And I got to say at some point Sweden went too far. At least you're not doing the finished thing. We are just like carving off bits of tree bark and gnawing on it.

Yes, Cassie, that's good for you. Yeah, just to relieve your own. What do you think cinnamon is, Alice? I don't know how they make food. You are. You reveal yourself to be extremely English. I was about to say. What you do is you take the food and you boil it for 16 to 17 hours.

And then you get a nice corned beef at the end of that. Yeah, that's right. You make a nice aspect. Delicious. How about instead you rot about food instead? Yeah, what if we just buried it and forgot about it for a while? Yeah, delicious. Speaking of burying things, zeppelin speaking of zeppelins.

Yes, today we're going to talk about zeppelins. We're going to talk about the most famous zeppelin, but we're also going to talk about a whole bunch of other zeppelins because zeppelins are funny. I'm excited Mia suggested this topic. I had a lot of fun researching this. Yeah, blimps inherently funny, inherently funny words. Like, yeah, rigid airship.

It's a rigid airship, Alice. The two genders of zeppelin here are blimp and dirigible. And both of those are funny words. I regret to inform you. My entire knowledge of this comes from the blimp episode of Archer. Just like slapping the cigarette out of a man's face. Blimps and airships are both dirigibles, though. No, no, no, your dirigible is the top level category.

Every single word here is so funny. You've heard of the airplane guys. Now get ready for dirgeables, guys. You say dogeables. I did. I meant the word. I don't know how to say the word. I don't know. Let's do the news. Steamhams. Oh, shit.

Oh, fuck, that's not the right drop. Oh, fuck you. I keep mapping the button to different things. Sometimes it's going to be sometimes it's going to be a hand. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I make a valuable contribution to the text spent in the car. Let me make

when you like more of an albany expression. Oh, God. The big telescope in Puerto Rico fell down. Yeah, because a fucking James Bond dropping Alec Trevelyan onto it, right? It's unfortunate, but yes, I mean, at some point they had to do it in real life to make sure that the film would also work. That's why they did it.

So what actually happened, right? Like, one of the big retaining cables holding the actual like telescope platform over the thing just fucking snapped, right? Eat it, right? Yeah, it was it was in bad shape for a while. They just didn't do the maintenance they had to do on it because, you know, it's Puerto Rico. Oh, Jesus Christ, I think he meant because of the hurricane.

No, I'm saying because of systemic disinvestment in Puerto Rico. Yeah, which is I feel makes sense. But was it like in I heard like mixing things about whether or not it was intentional or not, but was it like it was a disaster? I thought it was that it was planned to happen anyway. And it just sort of whoopsie daisy sort of regardless. Well, like an early demolition. Yeah, yeah, there was a it was it was, you know, some folks took a look at the thing

and they're like, yeah, this is going to go. It's it's too far for us to be too far gone for us to reasonably do repairs. So they were like just sort of monitoring it, you know, and then while they were doing an inspection, it just decided it was time to go. Well, they had a drone up, right? There's footage of if we can get fucking YouTube videos to work within the YouTube video that we make, we would post it slow down. Yeah, that's a bit too much.

Mm hmm. Well, what have we learned from this other than that? All human scientific endeavor is doomed to failure. Oh, it's doomed. Yeah. The Chinese have a nice fancy telescope like this now. It's all like shiny and stuff. Oh, so that's the that's the end result. That's where the final destination of all of Western science is going to go.

We're just going to be owned by the Chinese version. That's China. China, China, China. You got to do it in that voice to do the Trump voice. Yeah, it's so fucking satisfying to do Trump voice about anything, really. Like you just find yourself slipping into. I'm going to miss him. I know. Oh, wow. No, give me this much.

Right. He's America's in many ways, worse and in also many other ways, funniest president. He is by far the funniest president ever. Yeah, it's funny. President. Yeah. Oh, God, I'm going to. I'm going to vomit. We're going to be looking into this very strongly

and certain other things in relation to telescopes. The power of nuclear is uncapable is so strong. Stronger than you can ever think. Yes, I love the the question. They asked the 2016 debate, which was like, what's the most important part of the nuclear triad? And he just, you know, shit in his own mouth.

And I had an answer prepared, which was you say the planes because planes can turn around. Hmm. Hmm. I simply misunderstand the question. Revealing himself as a Natsik guy. And the timeline you're at is at Liam Wank and like the profile picture has you in a suit and like shaven. You work. You work for lawfare.

Yeah. Ben, where is your piece of shit asshole? I will say I do like the National Security Law podcast. And I do listen to that. Steve Vladek, if you're listening. Good podcast. Yeah, that's good. Just it's because like, I, you know,

I think a lot of it is that people don't understand the laws that the government's shitting on every time they just take a guy to Cuba. So and, you know, it's important to know, although it doesn't matter. And one day this will all be nothing. And at least our podcast will have done better than their podcast. Yeah. But it's of interest to like see the speed markers go past. Yeah. You know, just to be like, oh,

they're ignoring this law now, too. Oh, that's not good. All right. In other news also. Steve Hems. Residents. Did you see Josh Barrow tweet that of he couldn't think of a higher level U.S. federal government position saw this where it was more useful

that somebody be able to speak Italian, which Pete Buttigieg claims to do as Secretary of Transportation because the trains are cheaper because you could go to Italy and find out how they built stuff so cheap. The answer corruption. Yeah, yeah, there's no laws. Yeah, it's like it's not like we have a good example of an Italian road bridge just collapsing onto a city, right?

I mean, Italian trains do famously run on time. It's true. All I'm saying is America should get ready for a lot of mysterious acts of God's love. Anyway, we see here, Pete Buttigieg climbing the fence to go take over Venezuela. He is now he has now gotten the DOT position and it's like, oh, God. Well, I mean, this is better than Ram. Yeah, he's better than Ram.

He's not but he's not good. He wanted he wanted US ambassador to the U.N. So this is a step. I think it's funny that they just shoved him in DOT and they're like, oh, go fuck yourself. Play with your fucking trains up. Go get owned by the people who care about transportation. I asked in a bunch of other extremely online people who are just going to shit on you for your entire time.

He's going to have a lot of train posting in his mentions for years to come. And there's a lot of people who are just like, he stood up to homophobia and this and that. I'm like, I don't care that he's gay. I care that he's a soloist, a Kinsey career. Somebody posted, like, can you imagine being a gay boy and realizing that you could grow up to be the secretary of transportation? The height of LGBT culture. I really could not imagine that.

Secretary, secretary of trans. I was talking. Yeah, there you go. I'm afraid in order to get this job, Mr. Boosage, you will need to be force-femmed, stare into the spiral. Oh, my God, Alice. Is that how it works? Yeah, you stare into the spiral and you uncover a deep obsession,

which trains an estrogen. That's right. Jesus Christ, y'all. You want to complain about getting cancelled? We'll get us cancelled three times in the first 20 minutes. It's fine. I'm not typing on my loud keyboard. It's fine.

I love you, Ross. It's fine. Sir, please look into the light. Oh, thank you. This is what the thing for men in black actually did. You know, we found out of a perfect. And what's the what's the word? Amnestic device. Yeah, it just turns them all trans.

All right, that's fine. I'm just saying, if it works, it works. Green light. Yeah. Listen, if we can do a remote viewing, we can do. Yeah, the CIA is a type of anything. Yes. You know, the CIA has like a deep bunker somewhere where they're experimenting with the exact correct amount of dosage of estrogen.

Do this. I'm positive they did do this, that there were like sneaking estrogen into Castro's food. No, they didn't try. They tried to make a gay bomb. Yeah, the game. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I always imagined that just being like somehow like aerosol, MDMA, that just makes people horny as hell.

That was basically what it was. Like the idea was to like lower inhibitions enough that like you could make people then be gay, which to me seems like the highest order of projection. Yeah, it was just like, Matt, well, I would fuck all of my co-workers if I didn't have inhibitions. So we got to get some MDMA in them. I'm just saying, with enough MDMA on the front line, you can do anything.

That's how that says how the Christmas truce happened. All right, let's talk about. Steam games. No, no, we're talking about balloons. OK, so lighter than air transportation, right? So some of the first recorded lighter than air balloons. Well, balloons are lighter than air. But what are some of the first recorded balloons?

Hot air balloons were the Kongming lanterns, which is, you know, basically just a candle and a paper balloon. This was invented in China in the 220s AD. China and China. China. Cool. China. Right. And so this was used for military signaling, but also decorative use. You know, they're nice and pretty, right? Yeah, they're nice and pretty.

How do they work for military signaling? Because you can be like, if you want to attack, send up one balloon. If you want to retreat, so that kind of thing. Well, I was like different colors, but I suppose they could have one of my land. Two of my sea land. Learn your American history. You could put like different colored shades, I guess, probably. It's snowing pretty heavily. Ross, I'm going to come over there and kick your ass in the snow.

You're going to wade through a foot and a half of snow to go and kick your ass. Just me, like the middle one is just shuffling like Joan Henry, trying to play our part on the side. So that's American. After this. Yeah. Yes. After this civilization degenerates. Yeah. But then then the Enlightenment happened, right? Lots of empirical laws were discovered describing the behavior of gases, right? Like Boyle's law, pressure times volume equals a constant.

Yeah, that's where we get the term boiling. Yes. Is that so? No, no, no. Or Charles's law, volume over temperature is a constant. You know, a man named Henry Cavendish discovered something called inflammable air. I thought I was convinced. I was convinced you were going to say Henry Kissinger. He's been around for a while.

He tried to use this to bomb Cambodia for some reason. Yeah, it's just napalm. Alice, yeah. So you really could just call everything like whatever you wanted back then. You could just be like, yeah, I've discovered this thing. I call it flogiston. Fuck you. You're like, wow. How's it for you, sir?

That's right. I have infinity money. Yeah. So inflammable air, we now call hydrogen, right? And he figured out how to produce it in quantity. And Jacques Charles, who invented Charles's law, theorized that you could fill a big bag with this inflammable air and it would float, right? So he set out to prove it. So in plastic victories in Paris, right? OK. Yep. Yeah.

I was there a better way to pronounce that. It's fine. It's fine. OK. It's my Vique trois. Plus the Vique trois. In Vique, in Victory Square. Yeah, Victory Square.

The French love their names. Yeah, August 23rd, 1783. You really want to piss him off, say it in German. Seagrats. Seagrats, Paris. Yeah. Paris and Platts and Gork Gork Gork, I was reading the note. They filled the first hydrogen balloon

by dumping a quarter of a ton of sulfuric acid onto half a ton of scrap iron and fed it into a silk balloon with lead pipes. Back then, you could do. She says, Christ. Science, however you want it. It was so dangerous to be around you. Anything. Oh, my God.

This is what this book, the before big government, put regulations on science. Yeah, all of these guys look exactly like Don Blankenship. So Jesus Christ in the method described, they filled the 13 foot wide silk balloon with this horrible toxic gas. It lifted off and traveled 21 kilometers. They chased it on horseback.

It was destroyed by angry peasants when it landed. This is from the devil. It smells like shit. It is evil. Science. It comes from the sky. Yeah, that's praxis, actually, is to destroy some rich, weirdos toxic balloon. This is what would happen if Elon Musk

actually was treated like a normal person. Yeah, this is one of the stranger features of capital is sometimes the bourgeois dumps a toxic balloon on you. That's what you're echoing. I'm not sure why. That's Liam. It's Liam's headphones. Is it? Is it? Is it? No, I'm wearing the other open back.

Hang on one second. Let me turn my let me turn myself down a little bit. Oh, thank God. It's not my fault. Any better. OK. Yeah, thanks so much. Yeah, I have no echo. OK, we're good. All right, about that. So no worries.

Benjamin Franklin was in attendance and was said to be impressed. Of course, he was. He was fucking everywhere back then. Yeah, I'm fucking everywhere. And getting high on everything. Yes, and also possibly being a serial killer. What a fucking king.

Dude, so much going on. I can barely get out of bed in the morning. And here's Ben Franklin fucking milfs going to France, fucking French milfs, inventing a glass organ, possibly doing a series of murders and like watching the invention of the balloon. Holy shit. One of our boys.

He gets around. Gets around the Kool-Aid, man. Yeah, I know. Yeah, probably was the Kool-Aid, man. Yeah, I'm just a serial killer known as the Kool-Aid, man. Ben Franklin just bursting through like a I don't know, some poor peasant shack and just be like, I'm off to go green digging again.

Here I go killing again. He invented Kool-Aid, eventually. Yeah, that's right. So nonetheless, despite this balloon being destroyed, lighter than air flight was proven to work. So then we get the Montgolfier brothers who figured you could just instead of using inflammable air, you could just use hot air, right?

I mean, we don't need to dump the sulfuric acid onto the iron and lead. Yeah, we don't have to make a poison toxic bomb. We can just like boil some water and we're fine. Yeah, you can just like fire. Yeah, you're fine. And and they were right. So on October 19th, 1783,

after several balloon flights where they sent up sheep and chickens. Cool. Chicken finally flies. Yeah, exactly. A small dinner. They lit a fire for the to send up the first manned balloon. To globe aerostatic looks very fancy. It is very much like a rich person project.

I got to decorate like that. So the faces on it, the kind of freak the hell out of me. Oh, you don't like skin like average egg. It turns out that the only time the only balloon material you could get at this time was human skin. So those faces are just all there. The one that really fucks me up is that there are books bound in human skin. Oh, yeah.

I just oh, yeah. Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. It's good leather. Yeah, thank you, Mia. It's a very Viking tone there. What I'm just saying, I'm Viking. I have a history degree. I know some weird fucking facts.

If it works, it works. Yeah. You're dead. You're not using that skin anymore. Well, a lot of the like a lot of the human leather books are like scholars, right? They're like monks who are like, no, I love books so much. I want to be one once I'm dead, which metal. Exactly. Yeah, that's very metal.

I guess the equivalent would be if you could somehow digitize my skin after I die and make me into a YouTube video. Yeah, 200 years later, somebody is watching the YouTube video and they get kind of a creepy feeling and they look up the head and it's like, oh, this is my skin. Oh, gross. Yeah. So the Montgolfier brothers first flight was tethered to the ground,

but they did a second untethered flight shortly afterwards. Once they figured they wouldn't die, you know, that has to be terrifying, though. For the first time ever, you're just going to be in like a balloon floating around. Yeah. Yeah. Plus when you land, you might get murdered by peasants. This is true. Yes. Well, they had they had had people tailing them on horseback. No, they traveled just over five miles and twenty five minutes.

They carried a gun with them, just like the Soviet like cosmonaut survival gun. Just a case of hostile territory. You got to scare off some peasants. I have a story about that, actually. We'll get to that in a second. Oh, boy. Oh, my God. So, you know, they traveled five miles and twenty five minutes. They had a lot more fuel. They decided to land early because they weren't sure where they were going to go.

Landed successfully. Ben Franklin was once again in attendance, said to be impressed. Again, he was probably fucking them afterwards, too. Yeah. Jean Pierre Blanchard went on to pilot a balloon across the English Channel, which these wind currents were more understand, then came to America to pilot a hydrogen balloon. Right. They decided, let's try this inflammable error thing again. They did it from the courtyard of the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia.

Giving a bunch of guys ideas for escapes. Yeah, exactly. Play the helicopter song. So Ben Franklin once again was in attendance. What the fuck? He has like a Google Alert set up for every single type of balloon. Watch his own design goes off when somebody is fueling up a balloon. Well, better get on a better ship across the across the Atlantic.

It's going to take me three months to get there. But I got to be there. I can't miss out on these social events. There's going to be some hot mills in attendance. George Washington was also in attendance. So, you know, the military value of balloons was understood fairly early on. But there was no real transportation value, right? Because you couldn't really direct them.

They could sort of just hang in the air, right? And that's about the best they could do. So, you know, unpowered ballooning was still very dangerous. And, you know, just all they really use it for is military reconnaissance, right? And, you know, that's, you know, ballooning is still around today. Here's the Lexington Balloon Festival, which my granddad used to help organize. There's some nice balloons. There is a balloon.

There's a balloon in my town where I live right now. There is only one balloon in the local balloon club. And it is a huge picture of Shrek. So every spring and summer, you have you run a very real risk of just hearing just a dash of wind looking out the window and seeing Shrek really up close, really big and thinking that he's about to bore you. I really need to see photos of Shrek in the process of being inflated. I can't provide that, but I'll see if I can find some of him and just hang in in the air.

Cool. The Lexington, Virginia Balloon Festival, right? It used to be regularly attended by this, the Remax Balloon. Remax is a real estate company in the United States. Their symbol is a balloon. So they give you a chart at the Balloon Festival that says these are farms you can land on. These are farms you cannot land on. Nice peasants. Angry peasants. Yes. Yeah. So the Remax Balloon encountered a problem

probably about 10 years ago, and they were forced to land on an unfriendly farm. Boy, an enemy territory. There were no survivors. The farmer came out with his tractor and threatened to run over the balloon if they didn't get it the hell off his land. Once again, dudes rock. It's a man with a pendulum, Franklin. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, the the the Remax Balloon has not since returned to Rockbridge County. It's traumatized. It is, yes. That's some that's some Lexington, Virginia lore for you. Anyway, now we're 30 minutes in and four slides in. Let's talk about the Gifford Derigable, right? This is a man named Baptiste Jules Henry Jack Gifford. Oh, Jesus. Too many names.

Hey, those are four people. You've got a double barreled last name. I've got a double barreled last name. That's true. People don't know that you've got a double barreled last name, though, because you was just introduced yourself as Liam Anderson. I know. It's a secret. A secret hidden name. Liam Franklin Anderson.

Yes, that's yeah, I have been at every balloon launch in the world. Actually, B and B. Frank's chilling, Frank's fucking French milfs or whatever. It's just serial killers. Not being serial killers. Maybe it was serial killers. Bench, that bench at University Council. I fucking hate that bench, dude.

I fucking hate that bench. So he's a freshman, like, oh, my God, I got into pen. And it's like, A, should have gone to the good Ivy League school. Be fucking off. You know, Penn tried to get me to go to pen. Like there was a that would have been really funny. And then we would have met and then we probably. Yeah, oh, no, that was.

Yeah, no, just missed opportunity. But yeah, there was a guy from the Ivy's who like came to my school to like try and recruit, which tells you how fancy my school was. And he was like, yeah, no, you should go to Penn. Come to Penn. It's good. And, you know, if I had done that, I would have started an engineering disasters podcast like five years earlier. And then we all record this in a room as opposed to in several rooms.

Yeah. OK. We just have we have three separate recording stations. The mic, the mic feed is just untenable. I mean, I will continue to argue that Philadelphia and Glasgow are the same city. Yes, geographically displaced. They're the same place. It is a sort of a CP situation where it is there. It is it isn't a superposition of both places at once.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like the city and the city. You know, you look around and you're in Philadelphia and then you look background and you're in Glasgow. Yeah. So all you all hate London, we hate New York City. And that's right. You know, that's all you need. OK, but we're talking about balloons, right? I'm going to bring us back to balloons. So this guy, Baptiste Jules, Henry Jack Gifford,

invented something called the steam injector in 1852. That allowed locomotive boilers to be refilled with water while they were under pressure, right? But using his device, he invented a miniaturized steam engine and he built a steam powered balloon. In that same year, 1852, filled again with inflammable air. Just inventing stuff by accident, a classic tradition. This is a model.

This is one of the only known photographs. So this is a three horsepower steam engine that drove a propeller. He had a manually operated rudder. The whole thing weighed about four hundred pounds. And, you know, he was you could navigate it to basically any destination as long as the wind was OK, right? If the wind is high, you die instantly.

Oh, yeah, you go. You know, you just you just go slowly backwards. So and he proved it worked. He managed to fly from Paris to a point slowly outside of Paris, where he said he was going to go. Right. He did what he said he was going to do. Then he did.

He did some doughnuts around the landing site to prove it was under control. Making the brother of no one to do that with his mouth. He did some dive in the air. No, I didn't hear him at all. He couldn't go back, though, because the winds were too high in the opposite direction. That's a shame. So, yeah, he.

But, yeah, he has the first piloted dirigible flight. And then, you know, after that, he went back to doing that much of anything as eyesight started to go. And in 1882, he killed himself. Oh, yes, because of declining eyesight. Yeah, reach out to your people. That's one hell of a reason, really. Well, I mean, they had glasses in 1882.

They did have glasses. Was he just like, no, I will never wear stuff on my face. I want the contact lens or contact lens or nothing. Yeah. Yeah. He chose nothing. I need laser eye surgery. I'm trying to save up for laser eye surgery, because I can kind of feel like the way he's feeling. I'm just like, yeah, fuck wearing this bullshit on my face all the time.

But I don't know that I would kill myself. I mean, it's 1882. You may the times are shitty all over anyway. Oh, that's true. The fault is pretty low. They feel like you could you probably have like a monocle or something. You could look sophisticated back in the day. Oh, that's like a monocle, yeah. You could get away with that stuff.

Maybe the ultimate flex is to get laser eye surgery and wear like a blank glass monocle anyway. I'll do that. Yes. Maybe he maybe did wear glasses, but he he couldn't wear them in the in the big blimp thing. Oh, yeah, because you got to wear goggles over. You can't wear goggles over glasses. Yeah. Well, you're only going like 10 miles an hour.

Like it's a pretty leisurely place in the pace in these early. Yeah, but you're up in the air. You might get hit by like a bird or a bug or something. Oh, my God. You just a bird flies straight in your eye. Yeah, bird strike meant something very different back then. That will that will make you have declining eyesight. Yeah, you know, the bird flies in your eye and scores you.

So God damn, dude. In this intervening in this time, there's not a huge amount of progress in the ridgible technology, right? You know, the materials weren't there. Trains were a lot faster. Yeah, this is this is a theme as it turns out. Exactly. Exactly. But we have to talk about another ridiculous Victorian character.

Uh, Ferdinand von Zeppelin. Oh, hey. Oh, what's up? Is this the guy for whom the Zeppelin is named? Perhaps. As it turns out. Wow. If it's not, that's not even more interesting story. Massive coincidence. So Ferdinand von Zeppelin was born July 8th, 1838, in the Grand Duchy of Baden. And a town called Zeppelin, maybe.

It's like Leonardo da Vinci. It's just like Leonardo, that guy from Vinci. Yeah. Yeah, I always liked that. And the town of Zeppelin only has one P, though. Oh, so he's a misspelled Zeppelin. Oh, it's a sham. Yes. Probably got laughed at at all. By all the other Zeppelins at Zeppelin school at Zeppelin High.

He was he was a count. He was he was a count, though. I mean, he had a. He could just have a guy executed if he wanted. Oh, and I mean, nobility loves misspelling stuff. Oh, I guess so. Yeah. He went to a polytechnic university in Stuttgart.

He became an officer in the Prussian army in 1855. And like all Prussians of that period, you know, like Peter Joseph Osterhaus, August Willick. Also, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels almost decided to take a leave of absence from the military to go observe the American Civil War and just go on vacation to see a bunch of dudes get their legs shattered by Minneapolis. It's a good entertainment at the time, to be honest.

At the time, you know, there's no Netflix. There's no Twitter discourse. All you can do is go to sit on a hill and watch people gets legs blown off. Or you could do any fair is still better than housing. Yeah. Yeah. But that happened, though. The first battle of Bull Run, it was close enough to DC that a ton of DC residents came and yeah, had a picnic.

Well, you sit on the hill and watch the battle. Yeah, assuming that, you know, the good guys were going to win and the good guys didn't got overrun and you just had union troops stream past your picnic site. Not great. Not great. And that's so good. That was very common to like people would do that all the time. People didn't stop doing that until like actual footage from war

started coming in and people could watch from the homes and realize that, oh, this is actually horrifying. Yeah, you wouldn't like go to the Somme to spectate. But like before that, when you win this game, well, I mean, I'd I'd love to. Well, I mean, I don't know. I mean, you could probably just still do it. Like, is there a strategic purpose in like shelling the picnickers? I guess there might be, like, spires in which we're going to offer anybody.

Yeah, Joseph, paint, point to the how it's towards the picnic. Your goers, the spice that observes the enemy. They boo boo, I'm going to show their picnic basket. Oh, that's good. And set a picnic, except the ads are in fact shells. So. All right, so a nice day with my family, watching guys get their legs blown off with cannonball. And I can't do that because now I'm being my my champagne is being shelled.

So this is this is Zeppelin in front of Fairfax County Courthouse right here. Oh, boo. Yeah, he's he was he was a union boy. Don't worry. OK, he's a union pressure. I was actually I was at a building in Fairfax County. Is he wearing a fangible? Is he wearing a fucking pickle hub in? What is a pickle hub? The pointy hell. Oh, yes. Yes.

No, no, I have a higher resolution. That's like a normal. OK. Oh, that's a goddamn pixel degree notion. Nobody in that picture is wearing a normal source of hat. They're all wearing at least these different styles of hat. Yeah, studying the art of war. Yeah, they look like they're steady. This looks like the setup to a low budget.

You know what? No, moving on. Yes. So. Oh, during the Civil War, in addition to observing the army, the Potomac Ferdinand von Zeppelin went on an expedition with a few other Prussians to find the Northwest Passage. Just to fuck around. I'm doing an extramural thing on my extramural thing. Yeah, we're not we're not we're we're we're I really like I really

likes this van Stan Rogers song. Yeah, I go. I will raise the frowning phrase out to the sea. I would take the Northwest Passage. Also, when you see a flower. I got the tardiest explorer, holy shit, dude. This is an episode. All right, so anyway, he made it as far as St.

Paul. Oh, that's very far from Minnesota, right? That's very far from the rest of the Northwest Passage. Yeah, he's got a hundred to go, man. Yes, but, you know, it took a long time to get places because they didn't have Zeppelins yet. So another German, John Steiner, took him on his first balloon ride up there in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Zeppelin was like, this shit's fucking great. When he came back to Prussia,

having not found a Northwest Passage on account if it not existed, he, you know, he came back. He was still a war officer in the Prussian military. He did a whole shitload of war in order to unify Germany. Yeah, classic Russian activity. I know, right? Well, you know, what else are they going to do? I know, right?

There's nothing to do in Germany at this time. There's nothing to do in Germany, except for invaded Denmark. Fuck with France. Yes. Invent communism. Yes. And that's it? Yeah. Which in fairness would also have involved unifying Germany? Also, sure.

Oh, yeah. So a very different way, though. And he founded a company called Luschschiffbau Zeppelin. OK, old airships. Luftschiffbau Zeppelin. We love to bow a Luftschiff, don't we, folks? And we're going to love to, you know, Luschschiffbau Zeppelin in my house, dude. So I live with two other people and it's just like I said,

it's like living in a frat house when I'm just waiting for someone to hit me in the face with a fire extinguisher. So Zeppelin retired from military service in 1890 at the age of 52, right? He started trying to design bigger and better. He's done five minutes worth of actual work. He went on to retire. Well, listen, like if you were if you lived in Prussia, you were just kind of a military officer by default anyway.

And you just kind of did that all the time. So yeah, this like engineering was basically military service until like the 1920s. Yeah. Yeah. And even then, even now, when you think about it. But like we make a lot of jokes about Prussian militarism, but like basically everybody in Prussian society had like an analogous military rank or like a full one just for doing their regular shit. So honestly, yeah, we should have ranks on this podcast.

Let's get real. Yeah. I'm going to be a captain of something. It's the coolest rank. Sounds dashing to me. Yeah. Captain's a good rank. I want to be a I want to be a Brigadier sometime. We're Admiral. We're Admiral.

Absolutely no service consistency throughout the podcast. We cover diversity. Cool. That can be captain of the Space Force. All right. So how do you make these balloons bigger and better? And Zeppelin comes up with the idea that what if these balloons were contained within Richard Frames? Right? No one had thought about that before. And I know what I thought about.

It had been thought about to my knowledge, but I didn't write it in the notes. So he patented something called a. Oh, God, like bars, look for. So it's a hair and hearing that. And it repaired repaired the track. He passed it. He passed it on.

Like bars, look for to make me run into another and get on it and track up and a steerable airship train with carrier structures arranged behind each other. Yeah, that's what he said. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I said. This was LZ one. That's a picture of it right here. It's been it's an enhanced photo.

You can see how someone went with a pencil and threw in the top of the airship because they didn't know what exposure was. They're still working some stuff out. They've only been doing photographs for a few months. They're they're figuring it out. This was this was airship made with a frame of extremely expensive 1890s aluminum. And it's 1890s aluminum was a luxury material, right? Like the Washington Monument has an aluminum cap

because that was the most expensive material they could get at the time. They just built a separate out of the equipment of like diamonds because they could. Yes. Yeah. And then they found out aluminum could actually be very cheap afterwards. Missed the timing. Womp, womp. So LZ one made its maiden flight on July 2 1900. This was this ship was four hundred and twenty feet long. Nice. Nice.

Nice. That's the weakness. Had 69 diesel engines. A lot of diesel had had two diesel engines. Oh, do we have the picture of the two Daimler engines right here? That's this guy. Oh, these fucking things. One of them were 14 horsepower. They both drove two propellers each. What's the displacement on these?

I it's a full full big block. Yeah, I was about to say that's like probably like four liters each. There's no replacement for displacement. Ross and I were once at the National Air and Space Museum and they had a captured, I assume, BMW V12 aircraft engine that made like a hundred and thirty horsepower. And I was just like, oh, so my GTI, Ross was saying my GTI could have propelled one of these airships

like by orders of magnitude faster. It's one hundred and thirty horsepower is the size of a room. Thirty horsepower V12 engine, the size of a room. That's a great massive like room size computer can hold upwards of a megabyte of data. Holy shit. Wow, this changes everything. All of the porn I can keep on this room size thing. I can see so many fucking etchings of ladies ankles right now.

Is about to say I need to replace my series of tape drives in the basement. Big upright tape drives, obviously. So. LZ one is another hydrogen airship, another inflammable air airship. Beat the airspeed ship airship speed record set by La France, which was a previous non rigid airship. But it did not attract investors, right? So Ferdinand Zeppelin was forced to liquidate the company.

Well, I mean, no one actually wants to invest in this. Yeah, and it's especially in Prussia in like the 1890s. Prussia in the 1890s trying to get an investment. You're talking to a bunch of guys with like fencing scars who are like, where do you put the bayonet? I cannot see the big cannon on the end of this. I do not understand. I do not. How can we kill?

How can we kill as many French people as possible using this fly? Yeah, it to me, it seems as if it is missing about five hundred thousand pounds of structural steel. Does the other come on later? Is it built by five inches of wrought iron steel that would then drop on the Russians on the front? Is it filled with napalm, perhaps? Is it filled with pure?

Have you tried feelings is belongs with concrete? To what is it? Startillery fire. Oh, is it the gas? Oh, I see. Is it? I am reminded that it's filled with mustard gas that it feels in the end. Over the blade, sir. All right, so this is no pressure bullying.

I mean, if anyone to bully him this time, it's the Prussians. Yes, yes, they can they can bully back. So Zeppelin does Zeppelin managed to do a crowdfunding campaign. He got some. Some roofs who were who were interested in national pride. And he's like, hey, give me some money. We're going to have some airships.

I don't know, we'll go on the French or some bullshit. Right. It'll look cool. It's fine. Don't worry about it. Oh, OK. Yes. Here is a set of millions of marks. Yeah, yeah, here is this. The bombs will go. And you say it will hurt the French.

It's just feelings. OK. Yeah, all I have to do is donate a hundred Reichmark to the Govand Reich. Yeah. Oh, this is going to be a disaster. Tapping funded the Govand Reich. Ferdinand von Zeppelin built LZ2, which made one flight in January, 1906, had some engine failures

and emergency landed in the Alps. And the winds swept it away later that day. Beautiful. Then he built LZ3, made of the remnants of LZ2. This is a capable ship, but he was trying to market it to the German military at this point, right? The German military wanted an airship that could stay aloft for 24 hours straight,

which LZ3 didn't have the fuel capacity to do. So LZ4 was designed to meet this criteria. And during the first 24 hour trial, suffered a mechanical problem, had to make an emergency landing and then was swept away by a storm. Then that one fell into the swamp. But did I give up? No. So despite despite these problems, the Govand Reich kept bringing in money.

Despite the fact that it's a complete and utter failure at every single stage of development. Yeah, I mean, it's just like Kickstarter. Yeah, is this genuinely one of the first like subscription funded engineering projects because it feels that way? It seems like. For only ten Reichmarks a month, you two can have a small distinction on the side after the lead settlement.

I'm just dropping a series of bombs onto Paris followed by a note with a list of my Patreon backers. It's like this was made possible by the generous contributions of. Friedrich von Heifenberg. Yeah, von Heifenberg, standing standing on von Heifenberg. Thanks so much for subscribing to my Govand Reich t-shirts will be mailed out soon. Thank you so much. They will be there will be bombed on top of you via airship as well.

Yeah, my make up tutorial channel will be launching very soon. You can hit me up on on socials. I am at Glorious People's Zeppelin Republic of Nazi socialism. I just I I too many syllables. Sorry. Yeah, I fucked that up. We've lost control of the government. Sorry. Yeah, I fucked that up. We've lost control of this bit.

We're going to have to make a controlled landing. But no, the way I don't control landings here. I have sent you messages on the Twitter, Patreon and Govand Reich. I think the airship would work better if it were heavier. Shut up. For only two times in the Reichmark, you two can propose design solutions to all my problems. The RSS feed for the Govand Reich is not working.

I know that you control apple pie. Where can I purchase a Prussian secret service card? All right. All right, let's let's move on to the more zeppelin. All that comes off. This is this is this is only going to get worse. OK, so Zeppelin got six million remarks from Prussian morons, right?

The German army, despite seeing the failure of LZ for, they bought LZ three and LZ five, which is a duplicate of LZ four. I appreciate that. It didn't work. And they did bought it anyway. No, no, the third one. The third one didn't meet their specs, but it did work. OK, so this is OK.

It's fine. We'll we'll buy it. But we don't it's not working. That is I like I appreciate that a constant thread throughout history, as militaries are just the dumbest system, just the dumbest fucking people on earth to sell anything to. Jesus. Yeah. So Lucia bow Zeppelin's future was certain. So let's talk about the prewar Zeppelins.

This is pre pre World War One. So Count Zeppelin started Delag. Deutsche Lucia farts. Lucia farts, gets to part to the the German Airship Travel Corporation, right? Deutsche Lucia farts action, Gesell Schaff. Yes, I don't speak there. You know, the what's an animal from Germany?

You might have to narrow that down a little bit. Do you guys have mongoose over there? You know, I actually don't know if Germany has mongoose. I don't think they do, but I have no clue. They're so close to me and I have no idea what the hell is in Germany. You're just like looking over the border like what are they doing over there? Oh, we're cousins. Yeah, across the water. You got to get a got to watch out for those guys.

So. All right. So they start building more airships, right? And they build airships for pleasure cruises. That's the German Airship Travel Corporation's reason that reason to exist, right? So LZ six built in 1909, destroyed by a fire in 1910. Hey, sir. LZ seven, Deutschland, built in June 1910, crashing

some into some trees and was destroyed. So I'm just a 100 percent loss rate is looking fucking great. L LZ eight, Deutschland, two. March 30th, 1911, damaged beyond repair by wind. May 16th, 1911. They're all lasted like a month. If that like disposable airships. LZ 10. Too loudly.

That's going to be the new startup. Oh, no. Single use airships. I want to see Elon Musk build some airships. That'd be funny. I'm doing it. It's very yeah. All good. That's right. Oh, is that the drone thing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's Photoshopped. That's not that's that's not a real image yet. Yeah. Well, yeah. I I don't believe Amazon can build an airship if Count Zeppelin can't build an airship. Amazon. There's also the US military's new one where they just like have a static one

for like Elon stuff in Afghanistan. I don't know if that's still there, but they had it. I do not believe anyone can build a workable airship. It's like an autonomous vehicle. Oh, you're just you're just about you're just a true thrower. I'm like that there's a blimp in Afghanistan and you're like, no, that doesn't exist. There's no. There's no.

It's physically impossible to build a forced airship. There's the only ones they are owned by good year and for advertising. Like I got to tell you, I wasn't expecting to hear Roz go full. There are no blimps truth or ink today. Yeah, fair enough, though. I've seen the Zubaloon and I want nothing to do with it.

They took it out, man. Did they take out the zoo? I thought they replaced the Zubaloon. There's no Zubaloon anywhere. Took it out. What on earth is the Zubaloon? Zubaloon. It's a very fun thing to say. It's a balloon at the Philadelphia Zoo

that used to be able to go up and and go about about a thousand feet in the air and then come down. It was on a tether. It was neat. I liked it. I I never got to go up. You don't know. Despite having worked at Roz. I worked at the zoo.

I never went in the Zubaloon. OK, I'm sorry. I worked at the zoo. Yeah, he did. I was a man. Many comments as an animal. I was a supervisor for a roof replacement. Oh, also an intern.

That's that's that good. Philly said it said he's shit. I was never and I was supervising the project. Yeah. So LZ 10. The Schwaben, right? Oh, boy. First flight June 26, 1911, managed two hundred and

eighteen perfectly safe flights. Huh? That would have destroyed in a gale of 28th, 1912. Two hundred and sixty seven days, right? They had almost gotten the hang of this thing. Almost. They got their one year streak and then they got cocky. Yeah. Yeah.

Then W.W.1 broke out. I think we got to talk about the baby killers. The baby killers. Yes. So you're in W.W.1. Zeppelins. They're terrifying. They're inspiring. They're frankly embarrassing. Right.

The German army and navy both operated fleets of Zeppelins, right? So there were navy airships. They were used in reconnaissance. There were army airships. They were used mostly for bombing, right? Except they hadn't really developed good bombs yet. So they just dropped artillery shells. I mean, that was true of planes, too.

Like you would just like have to try and shoot at people with a pistol. Or like there was one guy who threw bricks out of his plane. So the only bombers are just like weird biplanes where people throw hand grenades out of the plane. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're an altitude. I'm actually going to care about like a cinder block that a guy like heaves out of a car.

That's what I'm saying. The red baron flies over you with a big red brick. These these these these these Zeppelins, the early ones, especially, could not carry many bombs. They couldn't really accurately strike targets, which I guess is still true of modern bombs. And they could, you know, one of the problems with the early Zeppelins is if you had a pistol at ground level,

you could just take this thing out, no problem. Walking calmly out into the field with my red rider BB gun and sighting this big motherfucker up. Stopping the entire bombing campaign on the Western front to doing so. Yeah, and yet niceicle falls in your eye anyway. You'll shoot your eye out. You'll shoot your eye out. You know, I thought I was going to make it all through December

without having to hear a Christmas story reference. God damn you. All right. So they were also blown off course a lot of times. They otherwise missed targets, like in a lot of people were killed in mundane training accidents with these airships, right? So there's things like the Yohanneshthal air disaster, which was the entire crew of LZ 18 was killed

when the airship sucked its own hydrogen into its own engine and exploded. You don't want that to happen. That's the worst thing you want. You don't want that to happen. That's this guy here, Zeppelin. We create solutions. Again, not a slogan that you want a German company to use. No.

I thought we had the same thought on that, though. I just instantly was like solutions. Germans, Liam, Jewish. That's so good. So what one extremely successful Zeppelin raid, right? Three Zeppelins dropped 4,000 pounds of bombs on Paris in March 1915, right?

Only one Zeppelin was lost in that raid, right? And they wounded eight people and even killed a guy on the ground with these 4,000 pounds of bombs. Good Lord. And then only one more Zeppelin crash landed on the way back. These are like helicopters. Like although I will point out that like I was reading a history of like German naval aviation because I'm weird.

And about the same time a guy in a plane tried to bomb Paris. He wasn't in the army or anything. He just like had a plane and some bombs because you could just buy bombs then. And so he does have some bombs. He was just too German. And so he just decided to like be more German by flying over Paris. And what he did was he dropped these bombs and then an insulting note in which demanded the front surrender.

That guy's fucking dope. I want to be that guy. Jesus Christ, man. It's World War One. It's less problematic. They're the kind of cool Germans. It's like if it was bad, bad war anyway. There's no good sides.

Don't you just want to bomb Paris like every once in a while? No, I feel like I would bomb me so I would absolutely bomb me. Oh, for sure. As a European, I feel a great fire within me and like desire to bomb various European cities. Leon must be destroyed. You know, just wakes up like it and also like I know what I must do. So this is this is a picture of the LZ 31 or LZ 32 wreck.

No one actually knows how many did they go up to with the numbering? Just getting destroyed every time. It's very German, though, to like name every Zeppelin, just one number higher. Yeah, you don't get attached that way. They have the exact same shit with you boats in the next one and this one. Right. So like you have like you one, you two and so on. Yeah, I fucking hate you, too. Just steering his shitty submarine.

Stop it. Stop it. They did it with tanks as well in the Second World War, which made it super easy for the allies to just determine how many tanks they had built. They numbered each and every tank numerically in order. So they're like, oh, cool. This is tank one hundred and eighty four. So they built at least that many. Yeah, I think.

Yeah. What if we made the tanks in a strange order to confuse the allies? No, we will make the tanks in order. It is better for the bureaucracy. Only for order. It looks better on the paper, I promise. I don't want to do the paperwork. Look at all these neat organized rows of tanks.

Now, look at all these papers. Look, each and every single one has its proper paper. Fuck now, go out to the east in front to go back to you. Now it's just racking up. Come on, mildly interesting. Oddly satisfying. 90 panther tanks destroyed by 90 bombs. Yes, this is very efficient.

We may lose the war, but at least we're the fucking efficient. Did they ever make these things good? No, the Germans started making moderate improvements to the Zeppelins. They had the peak class in the art class. This is the art class right here, right? These were developed to do raids on London in 1916 and 1917, and they were able to drop up good chunk of bombs. Suddenly, the things started looking like a threat, you know, because they were

dropping big bombs, started killing lots of people. Yeah, they were still pretty incapable, dumb, ineffective weapons. But difficult to shoot down by this point, though, is the thing. Yeah, this is they were hard to shoot down at this point. They had enough redundancy and they were, you know, terrifying because it's like, oh, there's this big thing hanging in the air. It can just dump a bomb on me at any time. Like we had to invent all kinds of fucking exploding bullets and shit.

And the first guy who shot one of these down was a Royal Navy like fleet air arm pilot, and he chased it into Belgium and shot it down on a convent school, which killed two nuns. And for this, we gave him the Victoria Cross. So. Oh, my God. Once again, Howard, the RAF was like that before there was an RAF. I will be right back. I got to use the bathroom.

Sorry, everybody. OK. All right, I'll grab another beer, too. And I'll be right back. I'll take this this opportunity. Yeah, cool. It is in recess. I'm going to grab a waltz up. OK, if we're taking a break, I'll take a fuck back in a sec. Yeah, you have to do the podcast.

And we're back steamed hams. Did you ever even introduce like why I'm here or does it even matter? I don't think it matters. I mean, you could, if you want, but like, it's up to you. We were deciding whether we wanted to introduce our guest an hour into the episode. Oh, we never did that. Hi, Mia. How's it going? Hi, it's going great.

I mean, it's fine. Like, I just realized that we hadn't done it. I think I think people like as long as people say as long as as long as we make it clear that I I do history, then people are probably I'm here for I'm here for the history angle and making fun of German. Are you here for comedy? Absolutely not. I've never made a joke. Get out. Get out.

The next three hours of this episode are going to be sources and footnotes for the previous hour. Exactly. You've got to be efficient. I've returned. Oh, did he also do the bathroom? Yeah, I did go to the bathroom. Yeah, we all went to the bathroom. Update.

We haven't done a bathroom update, though. Whenever, whenever there is an opportunity to go to the bathroom, make use of it. I. Yeah, that is. I'm constantly, you know, oh, I'm recording this from the toilet. That's right. Yeah, IBS. Very efficient.

I I did learn that from from the man himself, Justin Rosniak, just if you ever travel with Roz, if you ever have the the honor to go on a big dumb trip with Roz, when he pees, you pee. You will learn. You are not smarter than Roz in terms of bodily functions. Always use the bathroom when you have an opportunity to do so, even if you don't think you need to.

Even though half the time you're just like, no, I don't need to use the bathroom. And then it's 10 minutes later and you're like, I need to pee. And I'm just like, are you fucking joking me? It's a good lifestyle advice. How do you pee in a zeppelin? You just go over the side. You just go over the side.

Yeah, probably the early ones, definitely. Just lights on fire anyway. Imagine you're in Paris, right? You're just going about your business. I'm sorry, you're in Paris. A bunch of bombs miss you and then a stream of German piss. Oh, oh. Oh, Alice, come on.

I'm so garlic. I didn't know he was running. One Parisian holds up a battery. Well, I mean it. One, one, one Parisian holds up a battery. The electric shock goes up the stream of piss. It blows up the zeppelin. We got to invent the technology to piss back up there.

Did you not? Did you not like my wee, wee joke? Are you fucking kidding me? Very good. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mia. So here we are.

You're in Paris. Oh, oh, oh, if you got, you got, you're in. That's right. It's three hours of P jokes, folks. Subscribe to our channel. You want to be optimistic and say we're going to keep it to three hours, huh? We, we, we are no better than Comtown at this point.

All right. So, you know, during the, during World War I, zeppelin technology improved a lot, right? Not enough for them to be actually good, but seriously. So World War I ended, you know, America won obviously. Yes, you're welcome. America won the First World War. That's right, that's right.

That's the first one. Yes. We all know this. Something, yeah, Bellow Woods, the Marine showed up and everybody else was so scared that the Germans went home. Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen a t-shirt with the Swedish flag that says back to back World War Champs, all of you frality champs.

Oh, I'm sorry. Like back to back World War Champs. No, no, no, we have that shirt, but instead of an American flag, it's just a one big brick of Nazi gold. Which we would like back at some point, please. Along with all the art you stole. Oh, I'm going to cut the stock home. And I'm going to get all the snooze.

And I'm going to take the ancestors gold back. Yes, I am. I'm going to put some Rembrandt on the shirt. It's one big brick of gold and one big brick of like a steel ingot. I get to get back to stock home and I go into the the fabled Anderson vault and there's nothing there but gold plated snooze for some reason. Hundreds and hundreds of like pallets full of gold plated snooze. Yeah, he seemed to have been subscribed to a periodical called by snooze.

You know, what was up with that? It's really like buying snooze. So after America won the First World War, Woodrow Wilson went over to Europe. He got the Spanish flu and in a state of delirium, he decided to go ahead with the most punitive sanctions against Germany. Possible. Right. Stealing their blimps. Yeah. Nothing else.

That and getting outmaneuvered by Lloyd George and Clemore. So it was just embarrassing. Yeah. Well, I mean, it was the war was obviously Germany's fault when Kaiser Wilhelm shot Franz Ferdinand. That's right. Yeah, the Kaiser gun. Yes. So Germany was forced to pay a whole bunch of reparations and was also banned from having a standing army. Ferdinand Zeppelin had died late in the war.

And you think because Germany is now banned from building Zeppelins, his company would be in a bit of conundrum, but. But luckily, luckily, the Allies were highly impressed by the ability of the rigid airship. Oh, my God. The airship to not only just to crash or be blown off course, but to occasionally deliver a payload of bombs. Right. Occasional.

They demanded very occasionally demanded Zeppelins as war reparations. Now, listen here, y'all and Jerry, you have to hand over your Zeppelins here. Never doubt the power of the Americans to strap bombs to any dumb thing. But it is a good thing to note that it's not just a German military, his stupid shit. Oh, no. This is the salad days of the American military being stupid as shit. Yes. So. OK, so we have to start by introducing sort of the Goodyear Corporation here, right?

So very bold of you to fly the Goodyear blimp on a year that has been very bad thus far. Yeah. So when are we going to have another good one? I have no idea. So the bad year, a long time. Folks, folks from the West, who came over to the New World and slaughtered the neighbor native and had nets were unable to replicate how they were able to harden natural rubber. You know, wait, wait, wait, hold on. Hold on.

Well, does that mean that had Columbus been blown off course, you would have seen Iroquois Confederation Zeppelins. Yes. Oh, my God. No, this is the ultimate fiction I need. It probably would have been Aztecs. But, you know, so they would they would have done a human sacrifice. I've played some certain variation, I get it. Yeah. So.

Folks from the West are unable to replicate how Mesoamerican peoples were able to harden rubber, right? They knew Sulfur was involved somehow, but no one knew the exact process, right? The story goes that the process was discovered by Charles Goodyear in 1839. He had been experimenting with what later be called vulcanizing rubber, right? And, you know, he was doing this at the expense of having a job provided for his family and his wife.

His wife was fucking fed up with him, right? You better not be fucking vulcanizing rubber in there. I'm fine. Yeah, I'm always the same fine. I'm looking for a job, I promise. Yeah. So. So one day, his wife was coming home and Charles Goodyear was trying to hide his experiments with his wife.

He has a text that's like coming home, do not be vulcanizing shit. And he shoved the entire experiment in his stove to hide it. That's the last place my wife will look is the stove. It's the stove. Well, this is a heating stove, not a cooking stove. I was just like, he's progressive, the eight because he does all the cooking in my alternate universe where Goodyear becomes a world-renowned chef. Chef Goodyear. Yeah, the Goodyear guide, the restaurant's a spy. So the the stove made a horrible stink and he was found out.

But it turned out he had discovered the secret to vulcanizing rubber. I don't think the story is true. The secret to vulcanizing rubber, be terrified of your wife. Yes, have misogyny, be scared of wife. Discover rubber. Yes. So now Goodyear patented this vulcanized rubber, but he never he never really commercialized it. He made a lot of money, but he never the Goodyear tire and rubber company

was not founded by him. It was actually founded 50 years after he died by a man named Frank Sieverling of Akron, Ohio. So he didn't even get to name the company. It's just named after him. Who's just named after him? Yes, I take that because I thought it was a bad name first when you said that his name is was Goodyear.

I was like, oh, that's a bad name. But I, you know, I guess I guess if you named it after himself, that makes sense. Why would you name? Bad name for all time. Manufacturers are named after guys. Jack Michelin, the BF Goodrich, Harvey Firestone. I can't think of any other ones. Also, I made all of these up.

This may not be true. Oh, yeah. I was about to say, I was thinking like Firestone. Ah, he was a guy known for rolling over. That's another episode. So the Goodyear tire and rubber company, you know, perfected this vulcanization process in 1898. This is again, 50 years post facto and also notable for making the first interchangeable rubber tires for motor cars.

Right. And he Seberling looked for new markets for rubber, one of which was airtight gas sacks for Zeppelins, right? Because apparently no one's making anything a rubber and they really got to scrape the barrel of the industry. Fessages haven't been invented yet. So there was only so much you can do with that. This is true. Yeah. Everyone had a very conventional sex life.

Yeah. So almost no rubber consumption until, of course, 1956, when the kink was invented. That's right. Again, by the Germans. They really would. Also, but also by Germans and rubber. Germans really carrying material science forwards. Well, the thing is,

the thing is that they still call rubber Gumi. So you can't be like, yeah, it's a Gumi fetish. She's like, oh, no, don't call it that. We do that in Sweden, too. It's called Gumi, Gumi, Gumi, Gumi. I love to fuck with my Gumi. Yeah, welcome to the Deutsche Polytechnik for fetish material research science.

Hello, you will experience a Gumi like you've never experienced it before. I've got to throw up. Inexplicably, every German university is like this. They have the Humanities Department, the STEM Department and the King Department. That's right. The interdict. A lot of interdisciplinary studies right now speak.

Yeah. So. All right. So the Germans couldn't make zeppelins legally, but German Americans could. So Goodyear Zeppelin was formed in 1924, and they built several zeppelins for reparation purposes. And they were paid, paid handsomely for it, right? And we're at this point, we're past the Great War. The League of Nations was going to ensure world peace, right?

No wars are going to happen ever again. British administration of Palestine is permanent, just, fair and good. Sanctions on Germany will never come back to bite us. And furthermore, airships are the way of the future, right? So militaries begin ordering the largest airships. Goodyear Zeppelin can provide and Goodyear Zeppelin provides them, right? So and Goodyear Zeppelin also had a couple of dalliances outside the airship field.

I have to adhere. This is the Comet built for the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. Great trade. Yeah, this is a Boston to Providence commuter train. Some kind of a land ship, if you will. Yeah, well, a rail zeppelin. Looks like a goose. It does. Oh, my God.

Like a goose. Honk. Honk. That's how it sounds. Every other train goes like normal train sounds. But this just goes honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, honk. It's a lovely day on the New York, New Haven. And you're a horrible goose train.

Go back to Canada. Canada geese, I'm fine with them on a good day. But I sometimes I go back to Canada. Yeah, I go back to Canada. Yeah, so this guy will. This is just an interesting one because I added it in here. So the Empire State Building, people say it was designed to have a Zeppelin station on the on the top, right?

And this was attempted exactly once. You see a picture of it up here. This is actually a Goodyear blimp. This is a proper blimp, not an airship. They they moored it to the mast one time. They realized this is a fucking terrible idea. They never tried it again. There's some there's some images of a large

as US Navy Zeppelin, maybe US Army Zeppelin, docked to the to the tower. Those are Photoshopped. They're 1920s Photoshopped, but they're Photoshopped. I'm also imagining that it's possible that like a blimp like edged close to it. It was like, oh, there's a good photo opportunity and fucked off. Imagine you just edging in my blimp.

Oh, my edging with my goomy. You people are monsters. I'm sorry. This is what happens when you get to trans women on your podcast. Yeah. Oh, my airship is rigid. All right, I am very durable. Take a leave of absence and throw up in a trash can. Yeah, Liam is on sabbatical.

Sorry, I could not take the the eroticism. That's right. Our engineering disaster podcast. All right, so they haven't eroticism in the Zeppelin. The it's just a big phallic. So the so there's there's there's a big problem with airships, right? Which is that they're just dying. Yeah, and they're just bad in every way. So because their ships, they constantly bump into things.

Wreck are blown off course, you know, take out smaller vessels, right? They're abandoned in heavy weather or go down with all hands. But the thing about a regular ship is an incredibly durable, solid hunk of steel. An airship is, you know, just a big balloon, right? Yeah. So let's look at. Let's look at some base of reparations airships. All right, so here's here's the USS Los Angeles.

Oh, boy, you can see here. Oh, that's a couple of issues. Yeah, just a couple of issues with docking to this tower, right? Something is wrong. This is why you just slide safely down to the ground. I think they managed to somehow get the ballast back up to the tail. I have no idea how I'm actually crawling and over and on the interior of this thing. So another one is Dick's Mund.

This is excuse me 72. Dick's Mund is definitely a word that a German came up with to sound American. Well, this was given to France as reparations in 1923 on route to out from Algiers to France, wrecked into a mountain in Sicily and killed 52 people. That's also impressive, because Sicily is like not on the way from Algiers to France, unless they're going a very long way around.

They were rehearsing for Galadio, I guess. Yeah, and a time displacement accident hit that airliner at Ustica. Yeah, this is the USS Akron up here. This was a good year Zeppelin ship. This was a prototype flying aircraft carrier, right? The idea was you would have little tiny kerosite fighters, they called them that would, you know, that seems safe. Be hooked to the side of the Zeppelin.

I love these fly off off the Zeppelin. Go go shoot some stuff and then you have a harness that you could fly into and get back on the Zeppelin, right? It sounds like a great idea. Very safe, very practical, very, very, very safe, very practical. Never worked. It was stupid. Is the dumbest idea I think anyone's ever thought of

and actually brought to completion, right? So, you know, this was the largest helium airship ever built, right? And it never really worked as a parasite aircraft carrier, as a flying aircraft carrier, but it was useful for stuff like, you know, stationary aerial platform, right? So, they set off to calibrate some radio stations off the Jersey Shore on April 4th, 1933. And they got hit by a derecho.

This is a really strong thunderstorm we get on the East Coast. And it broke up, it killed 73 people. It was the worst airship disaster ever. Jesus. Wow. They're all disasters. Some of them are just worse than others. Yeah, but this was all troops, so no one cared, right?

Oh, yeah. Back in the day, you'd be like, yeah, fuck the troops, which is funny. Like, how much the, you know, support the troops, expressions of well-being and support, so fucking novel that back in the day, you could just be like, oh, all five of my sons have been murdered by the Germans. Oh, well. Oh, well.

Well, I'll just look it up. Fuck them then. Sucks. All five of my sons have been murdered by a training accident. But I feel like also this, like this aircraft carrier thing, when it crashed, it was crashed like pretty, like in the middle of nowhere, like some remote, like it didn't just have remote radio stations.

Just, yeah, it was in distant remote New Jersey, yes. I don't know America. It's just, it's all corn, right? It's, no, it's all pine trees. It's all corn and airship accidents. Yes. That's what I think about. It's just south of New York City.

This is the most densely populated state in the country. I'm a historian. I'm not a geographer. Okay. Okay, so another one is the R-101, right? British this time. Yes. This was built fully by the British Air Ministry.

And this was a prototype for civil airship service for service to Australia, India, and distant and exotic Canada, right? And it crashed en route to Karachi, having just made it past the channel. Almost made it. 48 people. Almost made it.

We crossed one body of water. Got scared. So actually, of these airships pictured, the Los Angeles air having a docking accident is the only one that never crashed. It is in fact the only US Navy airship that did not crash. Yes. For a lot of people.

What? Not a single. So it's the only one that wasn't like decommissioned over time? No, this one, this one did not crash. They actually retired it. Oh my gosh. They actually were like, well, wow, we thought you were going to crash.

We're going to have to decommission you now. The guy just solemnly comes up to it with a big pin. Just playing pass. I was like, oh, yeah. Meanwhile, that's like fart noise. That's like a big whoopie cushion. A solemn occasion. Very solemn.

Oh, laughing. All right. So while this was going on in 1925, something called the Locarno treaties. They were signed in Locarno in Switzerland, right, which said that Germany would never invade Western Europe in exchange for they could invade Poland whenever they wanted. Once again, a classic Poland mood.

You get this feeling. It's not paranoia if everybody else in the room is saying, yeah, no, you can fuck those guys up. And in addition, they could have a military and build airships again. Well, you got to invade Poland somehow. With a massive fleet of airships. This is a red alert action going on like over Poland. So Dr. Hugo Echner had become chairman of Luszyba Zeppelin

since the death of Count Zeppelin and Delag, right? And he wanted to build some large airships, which were capable of transatlantic flights, right? And after a long campaign of convincing everyone that Zeppelins were the future and heavier than aircraft were a stupid idea, finally got the company to go ahead and build LZ 127, the Graf Zeppelin. That's right up here.

The big boy. This is one of the big boys, right? And this is Graf Zeppelin. Graf is German for count. Oh, it's named after the guy, after Count Zeppelin. Yeah, it's named after Count Zeppelin, Graf Zeppelin, right? So in order to name it that, you've got to be pretty fucking confident this one's not going to blow up.

And you know what happened? It didn't blow up. Yeah, so Dr. Hugo Echner was now chairman of the Zeppelin Corporation and the airship company. And he was also captain of the Graf Zeppelin. So Captain Chairman Dr. Hugo Echner first flew this thing in 1928, right? He flew the Graf Zeppelin on the first intercontinental aircraft flight of any kind.

He flew it around the world. He flew it to the North Pole to meet a Soviet icebreaker up there. Oh, no, that's a highly dude's rock moment. I know, right? It's almost like they finally have a somewhat competent airship. Yeah, they have one airship that seems to work pretty good, right? That's the one, though. Don't get cocky. By 1932, it was flying a regular transatlantic schedule

from Frankfurt to Rio de Janeiro in three days. It was pretty good for those days, honestly. Yeah, they couldn't do a North Atlantic trip because the winds were too high. Otherwise, they probably would have done New York City or something. So they needed Frankfurt to Rio de Janeiro. You know, the company was making a bunch of money. They were, you know, public. They had a lot of public.

What's the word? Interest and. People love this. That's good. They were a symbol symbol of German pride. They soon began construction of. Oh, my God. The pride of Germany.

Then not. The pride. Yet. Very soon. I also find it interesting that it's the pride of the German. It's the pride of the German nation and German culture. They have one that that works so far. Everyone else.

That's one more than everyone else. So they start to begin construction of LZ 129, right? Name to be determined. Um, you know, Echner was one of the most popular men in Germany. He was a symbol of progress. German engineering. Sort of an Elon Musk character. A German Elon Musk.

Yeah. Not that much of a leap. Yeah, I know. But one thing that makes him different from Elon Musk is he fucking hated Hitler. He did not like Hitler. We'll see about that. Did he, did he hate Hitler for like based reasons

or for like the regular kind of Prussian reasons of like, this is this Austrian man is very uncouth. Is very rude to me. He speaks like a fucking farmer. He doesn't really want to just restore the monarchy like a true German. He keeps talking about invading Russia instead of invading France, which is the things that I want to do.

That true German only wants to invade France constantly. I just want to have the battle of Sudan every week for the rest of my life. And he wants to do something with the racial hierarchy is unacceptable. Ask me about the Lincoln Project. He was floated as a candidate to run against Hitler in the 1932 elections by the Catholic center party.

Oh fuck off, KPD or nothing. Yeah, I know. I'm on the same one. But yeah, the pole von Hindenburg was chosen instead, right? As we know, he's a man of integrity who would never allow Hitler to gain power. Of course, definitely the correct choice here. All right.

So yeah, the the the Catholic center and the Social Democratic Party nominate Hindenburg. The Communist nominated another guy, Ernst Thalmann, because electoralism is for assholes. That's right. The Nazis nominated Hitler, of course. I tried to make a comparison for Americans who don't understand the historical context here, right?

Imagine if the Democrats were all Catholics. Yeah, right. And they and the DSA, who in this situation are an electoral party. I'm on the SPD here. I don't know where. Nominated if they nominated Echner, it would be like if they nominated a much better version of Elon Musk to the presidency.

And then they were the competition was Hitler. I'm really commissing to this metaphor here. Right. Yeah. And then we also had a Communist Party in the United States, which was also had had some strong elections, right? For a hot second in the 20s. For a hot second.

For just one hot second. Yes. And that's that's your best comparison for the 1932 elections. I can think of in America, but also like these comparisons are obviously bullshit. The political moment is entirely different. And also the Soviet Union was on the rise and was supporting the Communist Party.

That's another it's another part. Basically every Communist Party all over Europe is basically getting getting a little hand up from Stalin or getting murdered. Yeah. And I mean, also one thing I will say is if you had talked to any educated person of the 1920s and told them that by 1930, well, by yeah, like 1932, one country in Europe would be the vanguard of communism. And the other one would be about to like decline into fascism.

And you told them that it was Russia and Germany that way round. They would have laughed in your face. Everybody everybody expected Germany to be the center of world revolution. Either that or France. But France was also one of these these places that could be like if you had told someone in the time, like as you say, like, hey, a country is going to become like really racially obsessed really soon and going to start a world war.

Everyone would have said France. Yeah. That's the French, right? Yeah. Of course, it's the French. This this this this coalition, the Catholic Center and the Social Democrats nominated Paul von Hindenburg. He won that election quite handily.

Compromise works. Compromise it works. Then someone set the right stock on fire. That's the big German parliament building, right? And Hitler was like, hey, you know what you should do? You should have banned all of the communists. Hey, it's a communist. Hey, I'm Italian.

Hey, crucially, not Mussolini, but an entirely different man named something like Adolf Hitler, a dude. Giuseppe Hitler. Giuseppe Hitler. I don't know. Oh, we're going to get canceled. Hey, Hindenburg. Hey, why don't you curtail some civil liberties?

Oh, yeah, sure. You know, it's like, all right, what's going to happen? OK, Hitler is going to purge the communists, then we'll go back to normal, right? This is this is not a problem. Well, it turns out they did not go back to normal. Oh, beans. Who could have foreseen this happening? Yeah, it's not like Hitler ever said he was going to do that

and like wrote an entire book about how he was going to do that. Oh, it's fine. If we just give him power, he'll calm down and he'll be fine. If we just give him the power to do everything he wants to do, he'll just stop doing it. This makes perfect sense to me. We have achieved peace in our time. I don't know why I did Neville Chamberlain as Kennedy, but.

That was effective. Yeah, so. All right, so Hindenburg, you know, after giving Hitler a whole bunch of powers to curtail civil rights, Hindenburg called some elections. The Nazis won a larger share of the parliament. And then Hindenburg died. F. Yeah.

And then Hindenburg. Big Fragtor F. Yeah. A big Germanic printer F. The Nazis hated Fragtor. That's that's a weird one. Well, they went back and forth on it. At first, they loved Fragtor because it was German.

And then they decided that they hated it and it was like a Jewish conspiracy. So. We'll get you, motherfuckers. So Hitler got some bullshit passed after Hindenburg died, which is like, well, I'm now in charge of everything. Right. Labeling act. Yeah.

No, no, no. Okay. Yeah. I'm in charge of everything. Suddenly he has inherited all both sides of the checks and balances, which is a wonderful system. Yeah. And German Libs are like, you can't do that. There's a balance of powers.

Checks and balances in here. What's the constitution? You have to actually like, you select someone else. You can't just select yourself to be the right Chancellor. Nine. Doch. Nine. Nine.

And then, and then, and then much larger share of German liberals were like, well, at least it's not the communists and we're fine with it. Well, listen, he's not going to start a war or anything. And like, he has a very brash language, but he's just going to like, he's just going to be a bit edgy for a while. He might invade Poland, but like, maybe Austria, maybe, maybe Czechoslovakia, but no, like, it's fine. Yeah. Invading Poland is fine.

You got a waiver. The treaty says you can invade Poland. You can call whenever you want. It's fine. The pose just like, wait, what? So just take up a permission slip like, and it just says like, I can do whatever I want. Okay, I have a permit. It just says, I can do whatever I want.

I made that joke. Yeah, still steal my joke. Hey, settle down, Sweden. Here's back our gold. God damn it. Do you want to buy some steel? In the interim, captain, chairman, Dr. Hugo Echner was left in charge of Luschevao Zeppelin, when he was able to fly his Graf Zeppelin across the world, but he was now required

to have swastikas on the tail. Gross. But this is an arresting one, only on the left side of the tail. Not on the right? No, not on the right. Ironic. Which he used to is advantage when the Graf Zeppelin visited the Chicago World's Fair, he circled clockwise, so the swastika was never visible to fair goers.

I mean, to be fair, on the one hand, that's good. On the other hand, that is a like a fucking lib ass resistance thing. It's to be like, well, we've got the giant swastikas on there, but like... We can't remove them. Can't see them. Yeah. As long as we just go in a way so they can't like look at them, it's fine. But we can't take them off.

That breaks the rules. That's right. That thing mad at us. This is a theme of Eckner's career under the Nazi administration. One other thing is he refused to allow his Zeppelin hangers in Frankfurt to be used for propaganda rallies, because the Nazis are like, hey, can we have a propaganda rally in the Zeppelin hangar? He was like, no.

Okay, that's not cool. You can't do that. You can't do that. They're mine. It's kind of in a chat mood to just say no to the Nazis, though. Right? Just like, no, no, you can't do that. Like, can we hold our massive armed propaganda rally here with hundreds of thousands of

armed people? And you're like, nine. 01:46:27,820 --> 01:46:27,820 01:46:27,820 --> 01:46:27,820 01:46:27,820 --> 01:46:27,820 01:46:27,820 --> 01:46:33,660 Well, Dubuakue says that I own it, and I can't say no if I want to. It's just a swastika that under it is a frowdy face.

It is very close to the Ann Cap's smiley face. Here, just like, well, you know, they may be fascists, but fascism means that they respect my private property. That's how it works. That's right. The Nazis, the Nazis eventually get fed up with Hugo Echner, right? Dr. Captain Chairman Hugo Echner. Met him many times.

So, this is, this is, I, I hate Illinois Nazis. So there's a sort of agreement among the Nazis that like, OK, we got to get rid, we got to get Dr. Chairman Captain Hugo Echner out of this Zeppelin corporation, but they can't just arrest him and murder him because he's a national hero, right? Hindenburg personally intervened to stop him from being arrested the first time around. So, and the other thing is, he knows how to run the Zeppelins reliably, which no one else seems to know how to do. Like this guy is the only guy who can run a Zeppelin reliably.

You got to make yourself indispensable. Even the Nazis can't get rid of me, though. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, Joseph Goebbels, one of the, Joseph Goebbels minister of propaganda, right? One of the Zeppelins for propaganda purposes, even though Herman Goering, who is a minister of aviation, thought they were the dumbest things in the world. Goebbels was a fighter pilot, right? He was a plane guy and he loved his planes.

Yeah, he loved his fucking planes. He hated Zeppelins. He thought they were stupid. Anyone who had ever seen a fucking plane would know that a plane is just inherently superior to this fucking big ball of exploding gas in the sky. Once again, it's a case of he hates it for the dumb reason. I mean, I feel like that's always the case with Herman Goering. Whatever the worst, most less intelligent option is, that is what Herman Goering will do.

So, they do the Nazi version of nationalization for Delag and the Zeppelin corporation, right? Oh, you mean the Nazis were left-wing? Oh, yeah. It's in the name. I mean, it turns out, I don't know, you know what? I hate the Jews. It's a core part of my ideology. You can't be a socialist without hating.

Why did I come here? I'm going to get some counsel on Twitter. Don't belittle your own people. All right, so as soon as it stops snowing, I'm going to kick your ass. Hey, do you want to buy some steel? I propose nothing. I have a lot of iron. So, the Nazi party nationalizes the Airship Airline and the Zeppelin corporation into the

Deutsche Zeppelin Rderrei. Now, mid-racism. Yes, the DZR, the German airship line in 1935, right? This is a joint venture between the Department of Aviation, Lufthansa. God damn it. And Lufthansa Brau Zeppelin, who is essentially forced into the situation. A man named Ernst Lehmann was put in charge.

But Dr. Chairman Hugo Echner was left in a symbolic position, right? As chairman, right? Kind of far. Too popular. But he can't actually do anything in that position either. This is this is the flag of the Zeppelin airline right here. I thought it was some sort of like meme Chicago flag for Nazis. But that's actually the symbol for the Nazi blend company.

God damn stars and bars. Yes. So, under this new administration, they set to work on finishing LZ 129, the big kahuna, right? Is that what they called it? Yeah, official name. It would be der Große Kahuna. Der Große Kahuna. I just wanted to make a joke too.

Sprecken Sie Deutsch in Wat? All right, so now keep in mind from here on out, like everyone who's given accounts who survived was really, really trying to insist that they were not a Nazi, right? Oh, sure. Yeah, sure. Yeah, it's like a huge part of like the human, the lived experience of working with the Nazi regime is afterwards saying, I wasn't a Nazi. Just all my friends are Nazis and I just happened to be there.

What are you talking about? Exactly. Like, are you going to question someone's lived experience? I actually can't question myself identification as a non-nazi. Look, I was not a Nazi. I just happened to work with them and live among them. If there are 11 Nazis at a table full of 12 people, the 12th person is a Nazi. Look at your way, Walt Disney.

That's right. Get his ass. All right, so. Get Walt Disney's ass. He's due for calling it on this disaster podcast. He probably, you probably can't get his ass because only his head is. Get his head. Get his head.

We'll put him on. He's like a football. Yeah. I'm guessing his neck would be like his ass. That's a good point. Yeah. The ass of a head. You could kick him in his ass so hard that he would feel it in his teeth.

Thank you. He relatively easy. It's true, actually. Promising proposition. So, all right, LZ129, Hindenburg. Okay. So Chairman Dr. Hugo Echner, Chairman Dr. Captain Hugo Echner, demoted from captain. So the title of chairman, he had limited influence over the company,

but work on LZ129 goes ahead. It was, you know, this is a monster of an aircraft, 800 something feet long. You can see like these tiny people, right? Against this huge airship, right? Oh, wow. And you can, you know, he managed to name it Hindenburg instead of after some Nazi fuck. And of course, you know, the hottest frasher, which the Nazis don't like.

Right. So, you know, it makes me happy. They're both protests. Yeah. We love our norms. Also, check out the Olympic rings on there because of Munich 36 rings, baby. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Missing, missing two of them, apparently, because it did fly over the Munich Olympics. It might just be very, like, faded out because of the color. Yeah. Yeah. You can see him on the left there. Yeah. Not Munich, Berlin. Oh, Berlin Olympics.

Wait, does I say Munich Olympics? Yeah. Yeah, Munich was 1980 something. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, it's in Nazi Germany. Yeah, they're both still in Nazi Germany. Basically, yeah. I mean, I look, I mean, Germany is Germany.

Germany is a problematic country, as it turns out. That's right. Nazi Germany is problematic. Hot steaks. As it turns out, yeah. This airship was constructed over five years from 1931 to 1936. It was made with something called Duraluminum, right? It's an aluminum copper alloy.

We would now call 2000 series aluminum, right? Wait a second. Didn't we hear about this in the Le Mans episode? No, that was a magnesium alloy. That's a different series. So when you when you start getting into alloy series, that's when you know that you've gone too far. All yeah, everything you know is just fasteners in their share

strengths. I browsed the McMaster car catalog every night for fun until I fall asleep. I got drunk and ordered 700 feet of steel tube stock. We've all been there. I know, right? So. All right. So you can sort of see the framing of the Zeppelin here.

You got these sort of trust frames sort of outline the exterior of the airship. You know, and that's covered with a sort of fabric skin, which is painted with an iron aluminum paint, which will become relevant later. By this point, not a lot of Zeppelin disasters had been caused directly because of hydrogen or inflammable air, right? But Chairman Dr. Captain Hugo Echner was thinking, you know, it'd be a good idea to fill this thing with helium instead, right? Helium is an inert gas that does not react with anything.

Yeah. And it has basically almost the same amount of living power. It's very close. I mean, you do have to do some weight reduction. 01:56:36,060 --> 01:56:39,740 But it is enough certainly to get in the air, right? But the problem was the United States of America controlled every significant source of helium in the world.

And, you know, helium, it's very difficult to produce just from ambient air, right? Unlike hydrogen or something like that, because most of the helium that exists in the atmosphere immediately escapes the space. So what the? Hang on. We're escaping into space. Sorry. No, my phone decided to connect to Bluetooth.

I think my girlfriend just turned her car on. And, Ross, if you remember the issue where your car or your phone would just start broadcasting to other people's car stereos, I just had that problem in real time. That was funny. Yeah. Sorry about that. Sorry about that. Liam's van stereo system had an issue where once I connected to it with Bluetooth,

my phone would randomly connect to other cars with Bluetooth and just start broadcasting on their stereo. Sorry about that, everybody. Yeah, you don't want to know what kind of music I listened to. It's it's bad, folks. It's Broke Contrary and Taylor Swift. It's Swift. Taylor Swift and Taylor Swift. Yeah, Taylor Swift's new album, Levermore, out now.

I bet Taylor Swift at the why I'm missing Walmart once. That's my that's my cool celeb encounter story. All right, back at it. Let's do it. Right. So we're talking about zeppelins, right, if we remember. So the United States controlled all of the industrial helium supplies because you could really only get them through oil and gas extraction.

You can only get helium that way. In 1925, the Congress passed the Helium Act, which prohibited the sale of helium to other countries. And this is a zeppelin project, not a good year zeppelin project. So with no domestic helium supplies, they had to use hydrogen. So it's America's fault. Yes, of course. And hydrogen is not a terrible choice for an airship.

It allows for some extra lifting power. They were able to shove eight extra cabins into the into the airship. And they allowed let them shorten the airship by 20 feet so I could fit into Lakehurst Naval Station's Big Hanger, which we'll talk about in a second, right? And the Helium Act was only repealed in 2013. But in such a way that they have to sell off all of the helium in the National Helium Reserve as soon as possible. Are we running out of that?

Yes. Okay. Thanks. Yeah, helium is going to get really, really expensive pretty soon. It's one of those things that people are heavily investing in right now because the price is going to go up so quick very soon, along with water. Yes. It's going to be helium water.

I can live without helium. I can't live without water. Well, you're going to have to try there, baby boy. They're going to be a bunch of helium. My voice is going to go really high and I'll be starved. I'll be like just dying of thirst. Well, that's your problem. This soundboard plays for itself, really.

So, Hindenburg was put in service with hydrogen, right? After some flight trials, Hindenburg was put into service as a Nazi propaganda piece, right? This is in a series of flights across Germany called the Deutschlandfahrt. Okay. Joseph Goebbels just had to think flying circles around Germany, right? Just doing donuts in the parking lot, got it. Yeah. Dr. Captain Chairman Hugo Echner was demoted to just Dr. Chairman Hugo Echner.

Ernst Lehmann would pilot the Hindenburg, right? He had previously commanded both army and navy airships. He was the first man to kill civilians from an airship. All right. Good first one. Yeah, he dropped a bomb on some people in Antwerp. Then he moved to Sweden. Then he moved to the US in preparation for airship routes from New York to Chicago,

which never happened. He became a vice president of engineering at Goedger Zeppelin. He was in the process of becoming a US citizen when Herman Goring called and said, hey, come back and pilot this Zeppelin. Then he was like, okay, yeah, I'll come back and pilot this Zeppelin, right? That's an offer you can't refuse. It's one of the good ones. They became director of DZR and captain of the Hindenburg.

He flew the Graf Zeppelin about 100 times, never had an accident, right? On the Hindenburg, Dr. Chairman Hugo Echner always thought Lemon was a little reckless with the Zeppelins, but he had no power in the organization. He's a maverick. He's buzzing the tower and stuff. Yeah, exactly. They had five miles an hour. Five miles an hour.

God damn Zeppelins thrill boys. Just drifting in dangerously close to the ground. One of the first times he took the Hindenburg out, they canceled a bunch of test flights so they could bring it out for a propaganda rally, right? Lemon brought it out of the hangar and then managed to just break the tail. Dude's wrong. Yeah, exactly. I was blown off by some wind.

We'll see a picture of it in the next slide. And despite this, Lemon was able to pilot the Hindenburg successfully across the Atlantic several times, right? Mostly, they were mostly demonstration flights. The Hindenburg never flew in a regularly scheduled service, but it was like demonstration flights between either Frankfurt and Rio or Frankfurt and Lake Hurst, New Jersey. You sound like you don't have a favorable view of Lake Hurst, New Jersey.

We tried to go to where the Hindenburg ate it, but it's on a naval base, so you have to go with permission, which we didn't have. And I haven't forgotten that in Dignite. Well, it was that. That was when you had, what car were we in at that point? We had the van, dude. No, we had the Mazda. It was in the Mazda.

That's what I thought was in the Mazda. And that was when, you know, we drove to Lake Hurst, New Jersey. You want to see the Hindenburg Memorial, right? And we're like, you have to go on base to see it. And it's like, I don't want to deal with MPs right now. The last thing I want to deal with on any given day is military police. Hard to say. That was when we also ended up at Tom's River.

And we went to that awful bar. Do you remember that? All right, all right, move it along, move it along. No, we didn't. We didn't go to the bar. We went to the Wawa. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, we've all got homes to go to.

I'll see, I'll see, I'll see right to the window. You will see the Wawa. What is a Wawa? What is a Wawa? How dare you? Oh my God. Welcome to Pennsylvania convenience store discourse. Yeah, it's a convenience store that's not as good as sheets.

Moving right along. Oh my God. You know, I'm right in my heart in your heart. You know, I'm right. No, I think that's true. Yeah, unfortunately. Thank you. In your guts.

You know, he's nuts. Anyway, you can see here where layman hit the. I did a tail strike on his first run. It's missing a little bit. All right. So the Hindenburg was the largest and most luxurious airship ever built. Because of course, this is an airship that doesn't mean that much, right? So you can see here's the dining room.

You can see these, these partition walls here. Oh, wow. That's that's luxury, baby. Cheers. It's like it would be loud, right? Would be loud as hell. Very much like a two star restaurant sort of deal. Oh yeah.

But it's like constant buzzing from the engines too. Like the food is like knock first. Only knock first. Knock first at lager breakfast, lunch and dinner. I'd be fine with that. Yeah, me too. You don't even like a nice German sausage, you know? So that was like a nice Polish sausage.

I also like a nice Polish sausage. What's long and hard that a Polish bride gets on her wedding night? Anybody? A new last name. Thank you. Very good. My joke, Liam. Sorry.

So, you know, this is a relatively cramped thing. The passenger compartments are sort of within the body of the Zeppelin, right? And they're only, they don't extend too far. So there's a lot of cabins. All the cabins are on the interior. You don't have any windows. Oh, that's a bar. Super fun to be in then.

There's a bar. There's a little underground bunker button, but in the sky. Put it in the sky. Yeah. There's a bar, which is nice. There's a smoking lounge with an airlock so you don't ignite the hydrogen. Cool, right? Makes sense.

But, you know, this is a three-day transatlantic journey. And the only thing you have to entertain yourself really is booze and Captain Layman's accordion. I throw myself out of the gondola. Yeah, no, but this, I'll take my chances in the Atlantic. Apparently, you like to do, you like to do a bunch of Wagner on the accordion. Oh, of course, he's entertained passengers. Only Wagner. This is my life.

I've done for 77 hours. Once again, catch me simply jumping over the side. You'll be too. Take me back to the outside. Windows open. You've got to find out. This is the ideal vacation for me. This is what I need.

This is an ideal trip for America to me. It's three days with booze and an accordion. I can drink myself into a stupor and fall out in New Jersey somewhere. Oh, yes. Over here on the left, you will see the Lucy Elephant. The stupid Americans have built a building to look like an elephant to meet violence. The Berlin Zoo. We have actual real elephants down here.

You can see the Cape May Light. It's a lighthouse. It's fine. Two slides off from that land. 02:08:03,420 --> 02:08:03,820 All right. 02:08:03,820 --> 02:08:05,180 I'll try to see accent.

Continue, please. Okay. He is fairly pretty good at the accordion. There are two decks within the airship. The Hindenburg service history, again, mostly propaganda flights, transatlantic demonstrations flights, 17 of them in 1936, mostly with laymen at the helm. They flew over the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. At some point, there was a special lightweight aluminum grand piano installed in the lounge.

That's actually pretty tight. Yeah, because people got sick of layman's accordion. You're not doing that being on your feedback hard. They leave you. We hope you enjoyed your stay. And it just says nine accordion, all caps. If I have to get this thing back to Germany, I'm going to throw the accordion off of the fucking side, followed by myself.

You know what? I hope we crash. Just lighting up cigarette after cigarette. Try pressing them to the ceiling. Try to make something happen. Come on. Just trying to make this more accordion. Do something.

Super annoyed passenger just taking his accordion, smashing it against the wall, laymen just opening a cabinet to find eight more accordions. Yeah, as part of a weight-lightening program, we had to lose six of the eight accordions. It's okay. We got two more. Okay.

How do you guys like Broom Hilda? 1937 season for the Hindenburg. So they made one flight to Rio and back in March, right? And then they left Frankfurt for Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 3rd, 1937, right? And they were due to arrive on the 6th of May, but there was a strong thunderstorm approaching. This is something we would now call a derecho, right? It's a sort of strong squall of thunderstorms we get on the East Coast occasionally,

once or twice a year, right? Usually you get sustained 60 mile an hour winds. You get like a really, really intense rain. It's short and fast. It causes a lot of damage. It goes away real quick. As a result of this, the ship's landing in Lakehurst was delayed by several hours, right? So...

Because Lehmann promptly understood that maybe this time... You don't fly directly into the thunderstorm. Yeah, exactly. He's learned from the mistakes of the 48 Zeppelins before. Yeah, exactly. He's like, maybe we shouldn't do this. And Lehmann was only observing. This was a...

Lehmann was now advising a new captain named Max Proub. That's an asset. No, I know it's Max Proust. I just thought it'd be funny if I said Max Proub. Yeah, short for Maximum Proub. Maximum Proub. Hello, I have Maximum Proub. I come to you with all of my gummies.

Ladies. So, Max Proust, right? He had to sort of stall for time. He sort of took the ship over a sort of lazy route. He flew over Manhattan. You can see here the Hindenburg on its final flight over Manhattan. You can see here's a ship. I was going to be like, how was that taken?

Because I forgot that planes exist. Yeah, they also had planes. This is like a big deal. You can see like, what's it? Something exchange place. You can see, fuck, this is the building I like, and I can't remember its name. Forty Wall Street.

Forty Wall Street, right. Trump owns it now. Yeah, he sure does. He was very pleased when the World Trade Center got knocked out because of that building. Right, because yeah, it became the tallest building in lower Manhattan, yeah. So, you know, he took him on a tour of Manhattan, right?

And then it was like, well, this still hasn't cleared up in Laker. So he decided to take them on a tour of the Jersey Shore. Yes, it's my time to shine, baby. Finally, it's time for the Jersey Shore. So this is Lucy's Elephant. You see, in America, they do not have elephant. So they must put up a building in the shape of an elephant,

and Americans come far and wide to see this elephant. In Berlin, we have a zoo with an actual elephant. This is all going on being accompanied by an accordion. But these Americans, these hogs, she's fine. Let's see a building that looks like an elephant. Roz, we've seen the elephant. You made me drive 40 minutes out of the way to go see it. It is cool.

Yeah, I really want to see Lucy the elephant. This is Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City. This is home of Silverville's largest pipe organ. But next year, Zephyr will install a larger pipe organ at the Berlin Philharmonic, which will play Wagner all day, every day. A company that calls with more accordion. And what? God, the Nazis already had to be stopped.

This is the lighthouse of Cape May, New Jersey. Here in America, they still rely on primitive visual navigation. But in Zurich, we have advanced radio navigation. This is the casino of Ashbury Park, New Jersey. We are still in New Jersey. Don't forget that. Well, Roz and I workshopped these jokes for a... Oh, it shows.

Could see the Atlantic City steel pier. So named because it's made out of steel. Wow. Which we can't have in Germany. The most beautiful type of building material. So, yeah, you took the passengers on a tour of the Jersey Shore. This is an actual thing that happened while stalling for time. Just to give it a try.

We'll see you in the town of Avalon, New Jersey. Why do you have to stall for time? Just tell them what people like hate. And you could go to the Verspa in the world. The Princeton. This will be bombed. Attended to a very lovely beer garden. Across the street, it's a rocky chair.

Zeba for old people, which is fine. Food's not so bad. I think the reason they had to stall for time is because when Germans are stalling for time... Oh, that's true. Yeah, they would so be like... We are half of one minute late to the lay cast. You know, World War II was really...

Starlin' for time, if you've heard of it yet. Ah, it's very funny. It's very funny. I mean, I hadn't heard that before. That's very good. Oh, shut the fuck up, Alice. That was great. Say it again.

Say it again. You could say the Germans were really... Starlin' for time. Hello, fellow Dutchman. It's not so good. Not so good. Very good. So, okay, yeah.

So Max Bruce had to take him on a tour of the Jersey Shore and explain about all these wonderful landmarks. And then they had the final approach to lay cursed later, about four hours late. Right, so you can see here's the big hanger at lay cursed, right? This is still air. This building still stands. Not that we would know.

Most of the Zeppelin infrastructure is actually still air. Could bring them back any time. They've used it, haven't they? Since, like, I feel like they've used it recently, but I could be wrong on that. They still use it for aircraft. I mean, they can store a lot of aircraft in there. There's not like aircraft that fill the whole volume,

but you can just put a shitload of small planes in there, you know? Ah, this is me and my 95 Cessnas. Yeah, I am the Cessna collector. Good boy. If someone tells you they collect Cessnas, they've done some more crimes. This is true. Yes.

So the Squall Pass and they got to get to Lakehurst Naval Base, right? And this is this is a naval base, a naval air station, right? Basically built for Zeppelins. So you can see here, here is the Hindenburg. Back here is the USS Los Angeles, which we saw earlier, right? So the idea is you land here, right, and you as the passenger, you either take a train or a cab up to New York City, right? Yeah, the Central Railroad in New Jersey stopped right there.

It doesn't anymore because, of course, we don't have trains in America. I've heard this many times. Yeah. Though we have a couple. Well, two of them. You could get the Blue Comet here. That sounds like a real uncomfortable fetish. Yeah, my Blue Comet is made out of gummy.

I wanted to hear of me at Alice. The exact same thoughts, too. Oh, yeah. It was a luxury train between New York City and Atlantic City on the Central Railroad in New Jersey. Of course, it goes on Atlantic City, yeah. Yeah. Well, that looks nice.

I do like Atlantic City. I've only heard of Atlantic City in terms of like movies and TV shows, and all I hear about it is that it's a dirty and it's full of gambling. Yeah, it's nice. It's a very lean necessity. Yeah, yeah, just, yep, that in New Haven, Connecticut. Those are my people, god damn it. You come into Lakehurst, the airship lands,

you either take a train up to New York City, but because you're an asshole that can afford a Zeppelin, you probably take a cab up to New York City, right? You get lost in the Pine Barrens, you crawl on your knees and die of exposure at the sight of what is now Woodrow Wilson service station. Well, that's one working toilet, yes. Yeah.

So, one of the things is because this Transatlantic Zeppelin service is such a new thing, lots of people came down to Lakehurst to watch the damn thing land, right? There's nothing else to do in this time period yet. Yeah, there's no battles going on, so you've got to take what you can get. Thank you, Freddie, foreshadowing. Civil war is over, so we have to at least watch this thing

and hope it crashes. It's the same people, it's the same reason people watch NASCAR. Yes, yes. I like NASCAR, and I don't watch it exclusively for the crashes. It's exclusive for the crashes. Fifth Amendment. I watch it for the skill of watching people go around in the circle over and over again.

I'm sorry, do you want to try to drive a race car at 205 miles an hour with no brakes, Ross? You don't even know how to drive a regular car. Although, if you believe the state of Virginia, you do somehow. Well, that's going to expire in a couple of months. Oh, you've got to get that fixed. That's about to say. Let's take a passport.

So, the derecho, which had prevented the Zeppelin's landing, the Hindenburg's landing, it only just passed. And now, one of the things is these weather conditions were well understood at the time. And if someone tells you to land your airship early for the good of the rike, don't do that. But Max Bruce was like, yep, we're going to try and land this thing, right? For the good of the rike.

For the good of the rike. You know, they don't want to be too late, right? You know, that's a propaganda thing. So, they got to maintain. You don't want to disappoint Nazis. Goes up to the boring mass. He drops some lines and then suddenly... Oh, the humanity.

Steamed hands. Yeah. All right, so... God damn it, Alice. Seymour, why is there smoke coming from your gas bottles? Because there was a large crowd gathered, right? So, Herbert Morrison of Connellsville, Pennsylvania, down just out of the Pittsburgh.

32 years old, he covered the Hindenburg landing for WLS in Chicago. So, well, they had a three-lesser IDENT. Yes, and today that's a Rush Limbaugh AM station. How the muddy have fallen. Well, they used to cover the socks and the bowls and Notre Dame football, but today it's just Rush Limbaugh. To be fair, I'd rather listen to Rush Limbaugh than hear about fucking Notre Dame anymore.

Yeah. So, assisting him was Charlie Nelson, who was a sound engineer, and this is the famous radio broadcast. There was also a video broadcast, but that was separate from the radio broadcast, which is more famous. How do I click this thing? Oh, boy. Oh, geez.

Can I get a... No, that's not what I want. Solemnly wheeling in the overhead projector. If we had an overhead projector, that would be a lot of ease. We have such a community college vibe, which is fucking great. Somebody in the thing, in the comments at the last one of Bifid Dolphin said, I just started my engineering course and it's not the same. The professor doesn't talk for 40 minutes about

Wawa and then get up and use the bathroom. All right, I think I figure it out. Let's see if this works. Oh my god. Whatever. Look, you've heard it before, right? You know how it sounds. It's starting to rain again.

The rain has blacked up a little bit. They packed motors for the chip, but just holding it, just enough to keep it from... It's bursting into flames. Get it started, get it started. It's crashing, and it's crashing. It's crashing terrible. Oh my, get out of the way, please.

It's burning, bursting into flames, and it's holding on the morning fast. And all the folks between it, this is terrible. This is the worst of the worst chip-dasterings in the world. It always seems like it's crashing 20, oh, 400, 500 feet into the sky. And it's a terrific race, ladies and gentlemen. It's smoking its flames now. And the flame is crashing to the ground.

Not quite to the morning mass. All the humanity, all the fans, it's just beating around here. I don't even... I can't even talk to people and friends who are there. I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honest, it's just laying down mass and smoking ruckus. And everybody can hardly breathe and talking, screaming, lady, I'm sorry.

Honest, I can hardly breathe. I'm going to jump inside while I can. I see it starting. That's terrible. I'm going to have to stop for a minute because I've lost my voice. This is the worst thing I've ever witnessed. What has happened here?

I cannot hear a fucking thing. No, you need a car. I can hear something in the far distance. This sort of sounds like the movie Trolls 2, when they say, like, they're going to eat her. They're eating her. And now they're going to eat me. Oh, my God.

It sounds like that. I mean, if I just played the trust, the process over the humanity thing, I'm the worst person in the world. Oh, no, you did do that. Oh, shit, okay. Yeah, you didn't back do that. Oh, boy. We could try to play it.

We could probably play it a second time, so everybody could hear it. Fuck no, it didn't work. Just edit it over it. Oh, my God. There's this thing called editing that we can use to our advantage here. Which we do, goddamn you.

You did forget to edit out the thing you said you were going to edit out last episode, though. No, I asked Liam about it, and he said, hey, don't do it. Okay, so I decided to leave it at the end. Morrison, right. So Morrison and Nelson stayed there for the entire event. They recorded several hours long broadcasts about the disaster, right?

Again, you didn't hear the broadcast. When he was talking about his friends, it was kind of like, this is propaganda flight. There's a lot of reporters on there. Good boy. This is a small community at the time. So it's like, this is like an actual traumatic event. For, I mean, the other thing is, because it's 1930s recordings,

his voice is a little faster than it would have been in real life. Although if you ever heard it slowed down, it seems even weirder. Oh, God. So this disaster was over in about 90 seconds, right? Just because the hydrogen burns so quickly, you will notice here all the hydrogen burns up, right? Just because it is more buoyant than air.

So you had a good chance of surviving this disaster if you could get away from the wreckage very quickly, right? People jump, try, and I think some of them survived, if I remember rightly. Like that's terrifying. A lot of people survived this one, actually. This is not one of the worst airship acts. Do we know what ignited it in the first place?

No. I guess you would know. There are theories, yeah. Hit me with the theories. Operation Gladio, number one. The paint is the one. Mythbusters did a whole episode about this, right? About the incendiary paint, but that's not the ignition source.

Oh, my bad. Sorry, sorry, sorry. The ignition source is one of the big issues. So Dr. Chairman Hugo Efner, Echner, Hugo Efner, Echner, owner of a Zeppelin company and pornography company. Not pornography, read it for the articles. So he was in Austria at the time of the incident, and he was phoned up at about two in the morning to say,

someone said, hey, Innenberg exploded over Lakehurst, New Jersey. And his first reaction was, this must have been sabotage, right? Has to be. There's definitely the only logical explanation. Everybody's paranoid at this point, right? Everybody's seeing spies everywhere. Yeah, it is a prelude to war, so that makes sense. A lot of folks at Lakehurst also thought, this is fucking sabotage, right?

So laymen who survived the accident was like, there's no way this airship would have just exploded, right? He died of his burns the next day. Jesus Christ. Yes. Proust was expected to die of his burns, but survived. And he was like, yeah, this is sabotage. Had to be sabotage.

And the Naval Air Station commander, Charles Rosendahl, was also like, yeah, this is fucking sabotage. There's no way this would have just happened, right? You know, there's no way an airship this large could just spontaneously combust. So one of the favorite suspects was a man named Joseph Sprawl, right? He was an acrobat. Back when you could just do that. Back when anyone could be an acrobat, if they could jump more than a feet.

Watching a man lift his leg, like to a 90 degree angle, and being like, holy shit, how the fuck is he doing that? Incredible. He was bringing a dog. Okay. Back to the United States. The surprise is kid, uh, red. The dog was in a kennel.

No, he was not a Nazi. We'll get to that. And he had to go back to the cargo section to feed the dog several times, unsupervised, right? So they're like, he must have planted the bomb. The other thing is, while he was as a passenger, he had made a whole bunch of anti-Nazi jokes. Cool.

Oh, I, I would like to retract my statement. Yeah, this guy is based actually. Just this, this guy. Acrobat just flexing on you both literally and metaphorically. Farming this girlfriend. And also, like, he's in the sky, just surrounded by, I assume, Nazis, making anti-Nazi jokes completely isolated. Like, you can't just like,

Yeah, you can't leave. Yeah. Yeah, you can't leave. What are you going to do? He's an acrobat. You can't be just going, don't jump. Exactly. You throw out.

Wow. You're going to shoot a Luger in here? In, in a, you know, in an airship? You're going to shoot a Gatton? Fair, fair point. So, you know, this is, this was, he was a favorite subject. He survived the disaster. Tell me the dog dead.

I don't know about the dog. So, because we don't know, we can assume yes. Okay. Good. Yes. Let's go with that. No further questions. The dog, the dog lived.

He was a very, very cute dog. He was a German Shepherd. Aw. Good boy. Yeah. Yeah. So, and you know, another favorite suspect was Eric Sprel, right? Who was a crewman on the ship.

He was a, a, a rigger, right? Um, so he was, he had access to the entire ship and he had a, my God, communist girlfriend. Again, based, based, based. And so, you know, they were both suspect. Sprel was dead. He, he died in the accident. Spraw, the acrobat was not.

Because the acrobat is dodged into the fire. Of course, yeah. He jumped beautifully from the, from the, from the zipline. He did H-flips and landed perfectly on the ground. He used the highest technology of gymnastics yet invented a single backflip. So, after learning more information about how the airship had come to land, Hugo Echner, Dr. Chairman Hugo Echner, said, you know what happened is that Mr. Proust had handled the airship roughly coming into land.

He made a sharp S-curve. And this led to an aft hydrogen bag being ripped apart by a cord, which was sub subsequently ignited when a rope was dropped down to the ground. Well, that's, that's the shitty thing about a zipline as opposed to a plane, right? There's, there's shits like falling apart and stuff. You can't see or hear it, right? And he's just way back there. You're not going to send a guy to check.

Yeah, exactly. You have to go for a short walk. Yeah, testing my morning constitution to see if we're all going to die or not. Probably. On the other hand, I would love to do a nice walk around the ship while flying across the ocean. That would be cool, yeah. It's actually true. It would be nice.

Meet us up. Going to do it with a big enough plane is the thing. Well, you need a plane that has like an outdoor segment, which I don't think you can do. Not with that attitude. You can try. All right. Yeah, a chrono plane. They're coming back. That's right.

We've been saying it more and more. As a result of dropping the cord and the cord got saturated, the static electricity set the hydrogen on fire. That was Hugo Eckner's theory, right? And no one has figured out exactly what set the Hindenburg on fire, right? People have said it was lightning. People have said it was an engine failure. And people have proposed that it was actually the skin of the airship that caused the vulcule fire

as opposed to the hydrogen because it was painted with a paint which was made of iron and aluminum, right? Which essentially is thermite. It looks fucking pimp. Looks very pimp, yeah. But it also looks pimp when it explodes because you're just dripping thermite on the ground. Drip or die. Well, ideally, you don't explode.

Well, I mean, I feel you make it safely to your destination. What did you get for going to New York? Going to Lakehurst, New Jersey. You can look at a fucking elephant. No, the elephant's furthered out. You got to go to Margate for that. You can hang out at the wall with us. Wait, does a Margate in New Jersey?

Yeah, it is Margate, New Jersey. 02:35:18,460 --> 02:35:19,820 This would lose to the elephant. Wow, OK. You sound so disappointed. Just because Margate is bad enough with knowing that there's one of them. Lucy, the elephant. I just I don't like the idea that they're reproducing now.

They're spreading. I'm going to use the restroom. I'll be right back. Do you want to briefly explain to me the sheets and walla? Yeah, all right. So please do. I have no idea what this is. I'm way too European.

I understand this. So in Pennsylvania, there are two big gas station chains. And there are there's a third one that I like called rudders, but that's not in the pencil. That's not in the Philly Pittsburgh discourse. So I just get ignored. All right. So sheets is based out of Western Pennsylvania.

They focus more on fried foods. It's a little rednecker, we'll say. Lots of they have a lot of stores in sort of rural areas. And then conversely, on our side of the state, Philly, that has Wawa's, which started out as like a deli. Now they're gas stations and all that sort of thing. They sell mostly cold cut sandwiches. But since their expansion to Florida a few years ago,

they've very much gone downhill. And now it's just sort of slightly better than subway food. I like sheets because I like just the front, like they have fried mac and cheese bites. That does sound good. And I'm unapologetically American. The Pennsylvania Secret Service, of course, remains a bipartisan in this, which is why the cards when I go to a sheets

and I ask for when I ask for a tin of Copenhagen, they don't give me a blank stare and say, where's that? They do with the Wawa. The sheets employees know where that cope wintergreen is, maybe. Formerly, however, we are neutral, which is why the Wawa and the sheets logos are probably illegally both on the Pennsylvania Secret Service card. Yeah, please don't send us a cease and desist. Once again, you can ask me to print you a Pennsylvania Secret Service card.

And if I've forgotten you, keep asking me until I don't forget you anymore. But don't do that if you're a lawyer for Wawa or sheets or the Pennsylvania Secret Service, I guess. Which agency are we threatening? Both Wawa, Sheets and the Secret Service. The three most top secret organizations. Yeah, I like to get my mac and cheese hot buys from the Secret Service. Oh, no, it's the Wawa Gestapo. Oh, I wanted to apologize.

I wanted to note the death of one of our co-workers. Activate Windows, no. No, activate Windows is gone because Twitter used your atomic thumbs, gave me a Windows key from a recycled PC. Yeah, so. I thought that one of our parents had died and I was just now fighting this out. And I was like, it's one thing with Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies during recording. You've got to give me a little bit more of a heads up there.

But no, no, it's activate Windows. So that's right. So what happened? What happened to Zeppelins after this? Nobody wanted to fly on one anymore because they want to get burned to death. Because they're pussies. Yeah, because everyone heard about this on the news. Suddenly it was like you had footage.

It's a big story for like live video footage of stuff, right? I mean, it was not live. It was newsreel footage and even the radio broadcast was not live. It was actually considered bad form to broadcast anything. We should bring that back. You're just like, no, we're going to check this before it goes out. A lot of times the radio broadcast and the video footage are put together into one thing. No, there was a video crew filming a newsreel and there was the radio crew doing the commentary.

Those were two entirely separate news crews. Yeah, but once the news spread and you heard like the broadcasts, you know, suddenly this pride of the German of German engineering is not as much anymore. Kaputt. Das ist kaputt. Unser Wagen ist kaputt. Das Hindenburg schutscht nicht.

I don't know if they're good. Zeppelin, bad. Zeppelin, bad. As we go through 35 languages. So one of the things about this is after the Hindenburg disaster, one thing was certain, which is that the lighter-than-air airship rigid or otherwise was just not a practical solution anymore. Too far gone in the public image and it was only marginally effective economically, right?

And then almost immediately afterwards, WW2, the good and just war broke out. Yeah, another one, America one. Another one, America one. Yes, America one, yeah, for the entire, for in the spirit of freedom and democracy. You're welcome. Yes, so. Do you want to buy some steel?

And Hindenburg's sister ship, which had been finished at this point, the Graf Zeppelin II, LZ 130 and LZ 127. They got up to 130 of these fucking Jesus Christ, man. LZ 127, Graf Zeppelin, they were both broken up and scrapped to build warplanes. Lehman died from his injuries in disaster. Mass Bruce survived. Dr. Chairman Hugo Echner remained critical of the Nazis afterwards, but also remained on their payroll.

Okay, another classic analysis. You know, there's a limit to what the liberals can do to oppose Nazism. Well, he's got to pay rent somehow. Yeah. So he founded a newspaper, the Sud Courier in the Constance region, and advocated for German-French collaboration. Cool, I guess. After the war, he was fined 100,000 Reichschmarks by the French for being a collaborator.

Which is a fucking rich considering. He was eventually formally rehabilitated. You're no longer a Nazi, congratulations. No longer a Nazi, congrats. You were only kind of a collaborator, not like a... You only founded a newspaper, let's get real. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, that's probably one of the Yeah.

Lower down on the list of Nazi crimes, founding prints, more and more print media. Plus, he did do all of the like process stuff where he was like, I'm going to do the Nazi stuff that the Nazis want, but I'm going to show him I don't like it. Yes. You want to do the trust the process drop right there for me? Oh, yeah. I got to scroll real quick.

And they're cheating, trust the process. Liberals. After the war, he worked for Goodyear Zeppelin. He worked on developing plans for new and larger airships, but they never really materialized. I'd say they never took off. They never took off, yes. He was unable to float them.

That's so high. They never, these ideas never inflated. Yes. Because instead they all blew up. It turned out planes were better than Zeppelin's, but he died, I think, in 1954. But one thing which is interesting is his Zeppelin corporation lived on. Yeah.

I've been wondering about that logo. That's been on all the slides. They are still around. Yes. They create solutions. Blue Ship Brow Zeppelin GMBH survived after existing as an almost dead holding company after almost all of its facilities were bombed to pieces by the Allies in World War Two. You're welcome.

The company was revived in the 1980s. I see they have welded a helicopter body onto the frame there. Yes. They've produced a small number of semi-rigid airships, right? So the underside of this airship is a rigid frame, but the top side is sort of a balloon. This is known as the Zeppelin NT. Yeah, Zeppelin isn't a Zeppelin. So several companies have attempted to revive large airships for commercial freight operations

since then. Some of them getting it as far as to building huge hangars, right? All of them have failed miserably, but Zeppelin don't exist. They still build these semi-rigid airships. It's mostly for stationary research observation or advertising, right? A lot of those hangars that they end up building, because they cost so much money, they only build a hangar, but they never actually build an airship, so there's... That was a good thing, yeah.

Sometimes you can just find a big Zeppelin hangar, which is huge somewhere in the middle of freaking nowhere, and most people just use them to shoot movies and shit, though. There's one in Germany, which is, I think, been converted to an indoor tropical water park. Again, the most German education trains. Yeah, it's like, would you like to go to a tropical destination, which is indoors? But not leave the fatherland. You can just drive to the Mediterranean Sea. It's in the EU.

You can just have a nice tropical vacation without even getting in an airplane. That's great. I think Tom Scott made a video about that. But the Zeppelin Corporation is still making these Zeppelin NTs, and the good year Zeppelin collaboration is back on, because good year has not operated a proper blimp since 2017. The good year blimp is now a Zeppelin NT. So the good year Zeppelin. Yes, the gutia.

If you, as part of the Zeppelin design, you actually have to listen to constant Wagner. That's actually the big obstacle. Yeah, like people say, maybe we should bring back the Zeppelins. It's going to be more fuel efficient. Like we got to do something about air travel and the carbon emissions of that. But the problem is they don't think about the accordion emissions. Yeah, and they cannot have it, because if they remove the accordion Wagner, it crashes every time. To load bearing accordion.

Just watching this thing fly in low over your house and like. It's the good year. Because it's going so slow and it's so huge, you hear it for like 45 minutes. It crashes into your apartment building and it crumples up. It just gently presses against your living room windows. This thing just this here window and bounces off. Oh, podcast delirium has set up. Okay, we're good.

Here we are. We've done. We've done the episode. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. All right, here we go. This is safety. This is actually a continuation of last week's safety third. We're going to talk about a Norfolk Southern Intermodal Terminal.

Oh, no. Oh, boy. Yeah. So this is what you might call a yard mule. This is for carrying trailers around an intermodal yard. You've got a fifth wheel hitch in the back, but it's elevated so that you can move trailers around while they have the legs extended. If you ever see this on the road, that's highly illegal, but sometimes they do it.

What can you do? So if you remember from last episode, the Roofing Terminix Incident, fast forward a few years and my regional manager who replaced the aforementioned problematic regional manager was also fired over an incident involving the toxifying of a lake of Connecticut. And from what I have heard, the accidental poisoning of the former vice president's dog. I won't say which one, but it was an important recount in Florida one time. My branch manager is made regional manager in promptly cleans house

like a new mob boss in Bob from our last episode finds himself out of a job. I learned from this incident that if you recognize the situation is unsafe and someone tells you just to do your job, refuse, and if needed, leave. That's right. This lesson would prove to be useful about two weeks prior to Thanksgiving of this year. In October, I lost my job for the second time because of the Rona. And I found work in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I'm sorry.

As a yard hustler or a yard jockey, right? When I was hired, I was given a massive packet of paperwork to fill out the week before my first day. There were many pages of safety policy acknowledgments, and it seemed to me that wow, they must run a tight ship here. I assume day one would be full of onboarding, training videos, and safety education, but my assumption was very wrong. Upon reporting for work, I was brought right out to a freight train full of intermodals and paired up with the guy who would train me.

It was his fourth week on the job. Good start. Very good. Confident start. His idea of a safety breathe was to tell me not to step on the knuckle connecting the cars. A tip he learned from seeing the movie unstoppable. Jesus Christ, you don't understand that. This is crazy.

Is he wrong? After working one train as a team, putting pins into the top of the intermodal so a second row of containers could be stacked on, I was left alone to do a few cars while he got his yard hustler. They believe us this, again, the yard tool right here. I was then treated to the thrill of riding half in, half out of a cab, barely big enough for one person, let alone two pins. You can see this guy right here.

I sat on the floor with my legs sticking out the back as my new co-worker gave me a rundown of the job in between us hooking up, relocating and unhooking trailers. Another driver working the same area as us thought it'd be fun to mess with us by zipping passes at high speed and making close passes blowing his horn. Fastened to furious here, damn. He genuinely was doing this for fun as apparently it was a slow day due to an issue with the bridge over the Lehigh Valley Gorge having stopped Norfolk Southern from bringing more trains in or out of the yard all morning.

Well, we were back in a trailer into a spot when along came our friend riding shiny in chrome, hauling an intermodal at full speed. He must have forgot how trailers work when you make any kind of a turn because his near miss with his cab brought the wheels of the trailer into contact with our front bumper. Getting us hard enough to jackknife install the truck and throw both of us around in the cab. I got away with scrapes on my arm and a good bump on my forehead. As it turns out, in a truck crash, the hard hats, they do nothing. I could try to repeat what I said to the other driver,

but Alice would need to do just one long 27 seconds. Is that 27 seconds? Okay, good. Great. I can move on. He didn't actually write what he said. You know, right? The driver who hit us in the guy training me agreed that the best thing to do was to tell no one and file no reports because in their words, management does not care if no one is seriously hurt and the equipment still works. It's fine. Which is true. After another hour of work, we went on lunch at which time I went to my car and called my wife. We agreed, box this job. I walked to the office trailer and found someone

I assumed was in charge of something and told them. I told them what had transpired and I wasn't going to work in a rail yard where safety is not even given a thought. He tried to placate me by telling me if the onboard camera proved what I was claiming, the offending driver would be fired. I told him that solves nothing. You don't bother training anyone in safety so you can't assume anyone you hire is any safer than anyone you fire. The problem is the total disregard for their employees lives. He may have said something else as I stormed out. I didn't care. I went home, I kissed my wife and I called OSHA. I'm still unemployed as of writing this job or as of writing this, but I have found one really good opportunity with a linen supply company that wants to hire me

if the Rona ever gets under control. Well, shit, best of luck and congratulations on doing the right thing. I was about to say, yeah, but it's straight down the line by the book. Oh, no, no good deed. Yeah, it's going to get serious. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, God, I was offered an opportunity to work in Draige for Norfolk Southern a while back and it's like, I don't want nothing to do with. Do you remember that one time we were in the 7-11 and the clerk asked us what we knew about trucking because he thought we were truckers or at least would know about trucks. And we had to explain, do not do Draige. Don't do Draige. Yeah. And Draige is

taking shipments from trains to the final destination on a truck because there's like so many rent-to-own scams and bullshit. Yeah. It's gig economy bullshit and they know it is. But it's like being gig economy since like the 1670s. So that was safety third. Congrats on being mad about safety. More people should be mad about safety. Be ordinary about it. Be a crank about it. It will save your life and the lives of others. Hey, we hit three hours. Hey. Yes. Next episode's on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster. Don't even have any commercials before. Yeah. If you want a Pennsylvania Secret Service card, DM me on Twitter with the name, the photo and the address if I have forgotten you,

which is likely by this point, I apologize profusely. Sometimes mental health happens to me. Keep DMing me until I send you a picture of the thing that I just printed. That means that I will send it. Keep bothering until you remain until I do it. Keep doing it. I mean, I can do advertising for myself as a guest. Absolutely do that. If I'm allowed to do that, it might be bad for me. I do YouTube videos that have nothing to do with disasters or engineering that sometimes have a very slight flavor of history. I am the La Croix of history YouTubers if you want to do that. And you can just find my name by just me and Mulder and you'll find it. You'll find it. I also stream city builder games on Twitch, which is probably more relevant. We'll put a link to your

YouTube in the description. Thank you. So kind. We are doing a Q&A episode. Episode 50 was celebrating that by doing a Q&A. You can ask us stuff. Don't be mean. But also the Tacoma Narrows bridges between this episode. That's right. That's episode 49. That's the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster. Yeah, exactly. But the other thing is we have a curiouscat.me and what we're going to do is we're going to put that there. And if you send us emotionally abusive questions, we are not teenagers. So we're not just sending that out there so we can find excuses to do self harm. We don't need the excuses. We just want plenty of questions. Yeah, exactly. I'm doing self harm right now. So sweet. Jesus Christ. Someone asked us when the last time I sharded was so I'm going to

I'll hold on to that one. I got a story for you. I expect one of my favorite games to play with people as a drinking game is what's the worst poop you ever took? I will be telling that story. Okay. Really? He's going to be telling it. Great. He's going to be telling that story. Yeah. This is not a Q&A. This is just an A. The A stands for ass. Yes. We're just where the poop comes from. Thank you, Ross. That would be excellent here. All right. Oh, shirts. We are getting two new designs. We're getting designed by Battlomchansky as was our first shirt. The G.O.D. NTSB design. And we are getting Alice's incredibly

lovely train good car. International shipping when? Yes. We're still working on that. We just okay. I asked. We're still working on it. I think that's everything. All right. That's everything. I just want to say thanks. Yeah. Thank you for suggesting this topic because it was a lot of fucking fun. I enjoyed this. Thank you for having me. I guess I'm a friend of the show. Absolutely. No, we have no friends. I'm a friend of the show. I am a friend whether you like it or not. That's the Swedish way. A friend of the show. A friend of the show. People are renowned for their friendliness. People are renowned for their friendliness and steel exports. No, but it's been great being on. I love talking about the Hindenburg. I love

talking shit about blimps and supplements. Yeah. Yes. Regenerations. Dergibals. Dergibals. Dergibals. All right. All right. I'm going to hang up now before I get emotionally used to it further. This is when we start talking about the G.O.D. Me. Oh, God. Shit. All right. How do I turn this off? How do you still not know? Well, I'm trying to figure out the thing, the thing that I need to look at. Oh, right. Yeah, because it speaks to the thing. Okay. This is the end. Goodbye.