Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you should Know. This is one of those ones, Chuck, that I'm really surprised we haven't done already.
Yeah, for sure. And actually, boy, talk about a segway. This is about the transatlantic voyage of the Hindenburg. But before we get into that quickly, we want to remind everybody, or maybe if you're hearing this for the first time, about the Stuff at Sea voyage that we are going on in partnership with Virgin Voyages. We're taking to the Great Seas, right.
We are not the skies, the seas, and we are actually headlining a very special voyage called Stuff at Sea and it's us doing our thing, including a live podcast on board, and then some of our other colleagues too, including the stuff they don't want you to know. Guys are going to be doing their thing two on this. I think it's a five night voyage.
That's right October two through seven, from New York City to Bermuda. Like I said, this is through Virgin so that means it is a kid free luxury experience. And there's also gonna be interactive sessions. The you're gonna be meet and greets, they're gonna be themed activations. Woha, wonder what that is.
I also saw it described as a culture soaked escape where pink sand paradise meets curious minds. I don't think anything else needs to be said besides that.
Yeah, I mean, you get it, folks. If you want to come hang out on a very large boat with us in the middle of the ocean and here us do our live podcast along with other things, then this is going to be our only chance to ever do that.
Yeah, very nice. You can go to virgin Voyages dot com slash stuff in October. Cool. I don't know that this was the best episode to put that in, but we did what we did.
You know, well, it's not like it's the Titanic episode.
Oh that's a great great Yeah, that's a good point that would have been.
That would be bad, really, because we're taking through the skies now talking about what happened on May six, nineteen thirty seven, when the Hindenburg dirigible crashed burst into flames over Lakehurst, New Jersey. And I am also surprised you haven't covered this. This is you know, I didn't really know much about it. I knew the Hindenburg crash, and I'd seen the footage and heard the stuff the commentary, but I was like, yeah, man, that they built that
thing and they tried it out and it crashed. I didn't know that they had successfully flown this stuff a bunch, and that there were even worse airship disasters than this. This is just the most well known. For reasons we'll get into.
Yeah, it was pretty shocking to see, and it was really well documented. But yeah, I think including.
Me, never mind, there it is what those are the reasons?
Oh yeah, but including me though, Chuck, I thought it was the maiden voyage too. I didn't realize it was just part of a larger thing either. And I think the Hindenburg itself had already been on a three day publicity tour and a round trip to Buenos Aires and back from Germany before the unfortunate incident happened in New Jersey.
Yeah, it had flown a bunch.
Yeah, So let's talk about this. Because the Hindenburg was known as an airship, which was also known as a dirigible, which you mentioned a second ago, and there's actually specific criteria to be a dirigible, and the Hindenburg just checked all the boxes.
That's right. Dirigible means it is powered, so it's not just floating around if they're like a hot air balloon. But hot air balloons and dirigibles are the same things as far as being lifted by what's known as LTA gas lighter than air gas in this case. In this case we're talking hydrogen, but also helium was almost used
and now it's pretty much exclusively used. Yeah, and then it means it's steerable as well, so you can you can tell it to go in a certain direction, tell it by way of working the rudder and powering those engines and it'll go in that direction.
Mm hmm. All you have to do is shout dirigible, go there and it goes.
Well. I didn't know that it was actually an It can be an adjective as well.
For steerable, dirigible and steerable. So like this car is highly dirigible because it's got great responsiveness.
Yeah. Just try using that word like that though, and see if you don't get pushed back.
I would think there have to be an auto journalist who's used it here there because they're just so sick of using the same terms, you know.
Yeah, like Current Driver magazine, like the snooty writers.
Yes, exactly. So there's three forms that argiles come in, Chuck, and it basically all has to do with how the structured the blimp part is well structured. I guess the B word. Yeah, I know you're not really supposed to say that, but it's true. I mean, I think it's pretty accessible to say blimp.
You know, yeah, we got you know, the Eastlake Golf tournament is right near my house and so when we're hanging out at the house during the tournament, oftentimes that Goodyear Blimp is directly over my home. It's very cool to see.
Didn't you say you're trying to angle for a ride in the Goodyear Blimp and that you're in laws have ridden in the Goodyear Blimp at our Akron show.
Yeah, I have never done that. You know, obviously Akron is the home of Goodyear, and I think the blimp still and my father in law Steve has at one point road in that Goodyear blimp, but I have never done it. So if anyone can take me up, and you I mean you're invited, you.
Know, Oh sure, sure, I assume that if you're interested. I don't know if I am or not. My dad went on a hot air balloon ride and I was like, I'm not getting in that thing.
Yeah, I mean after reading this, I mean, it's a different deal now, but it definitely gives pause.
Right, So let's get back to what the balloon like envelope aka the blimp part. How that describes what type of dirigibles are. There's three of them.
Right, yeah. There's non rigid, semi rigid, and rigid. Non rigid is more like a high air balloon. That means there's no structure on the inside and it's just the pressure of that gas keeping everything puffed out.
Yes, and hot air balloons are what make New Mexico's license plates so nice.
Oh yeah, I agreed.
Semi rigid is kind of like non rigid, except there's like a keel. There's like a structure for the keel, the part that runs along the bottom of the envelope. Right, yeah, so there is some structure to essentially the bottom, but then I guess it flops over, so it's basically like a chef's hat. Like the sweetest chef's hate. Yeah, but it flies right, and then Rigid is the last one. There's like a skeleton like frame, usually of a really
light but strong material, maybe aluminum. You sent a YouTube of colorized photos of the Hindenburg, the interior in particular, and they said that its skeleton was made of dure illumine. Have you ever heard of that before?
I had never heard of it, so of course I had to look it up. I'm sure you did too. That's an aluminum copper alloy, right, that's as strong as soft steel whatever that is.
Yeah, I don't know what that is either, but if it's not exactly what it sounds like, then somebody messed up naming.
It's a lot lighter than soft steel, obviously, and in the case of the Hindenburg, and I learned this all from that YouTube video. It's pretty cool to see those pictures as well. Yeah, there are fifteen, as they described them, ferris wheel like rings that gave this thing the shape, and between those rings, and this is something I didn't know,
there were sixteen separate balloons between those rings. And that whole thing was covered with Goodyear latex and then a cotton like canvas fabric outer shell.
Yeah, so the outer skin the envelope was not what the gas was filled in, like it was in these basically bladders inside the envelope, right, yeah, yeah, how many were there? Like fourteen?
I guess then, I think sixteen balloons. We al should mention that cotton canvas fabric was coated with their protective coating because that'll come into play.
Yeah, it kept the sun off essentially so that the sun wouldn't heat the gas inside and so that the UV rays wouldn't break it down into useless I don't know what you'd break hydrogen down into. I guess ions.
I don't know.
So the other thing about the rigid one, and I had no idea about this either, is that the the passengers and crew usually are inside that envelope, inside the blimp. And if you look at the Hindenburg, there's like a little you know, what's called the gondola attached to the bottom of it, and that seems to be I think the cockpit where if you were a passenger and you were hanging out in the Hindenburg, you were inside that blimp. I had no idea about that.
Did you, Yeah? I did, because like where else would they be because I mean, once you find out that there are like twenty five cabins and a bar and a restaurant and all that stuff, it's obviously not going to fit. I mean, you know, you could hang out there. In fact, I think they encouraged the passengers to hang out in those two that double decked area because that's
where all the windows were, right. But I also learned that from watching the trailer to the Hindenburg movie when it showed a lot of action inside that shell.
Okay, gotcha. So I just thought that the gondola was just that dwarfed by the blimp itself and that it held all that stuff. I had no idea they were inside the blimp. I find that much more claustrophobic.
Yeah, for sure. And I could see how you would think that because once you get a little bit and we'll talk about the size of this thing, but you need not only look at pictures of the Hindenburg flying over New York City to see how gargantuan this thing was.
It was enormous. So that good Year blimp, it depends on which one you're talking about. I've seen that the Hindenburg was more than eight hundred feet long, almost as long as the Titanic.
Yeah, how does it compare to the seven forty seven? Where is that?
I think it's like three times as long as the seven forty seven and twice as tall.
Yeah, seriously, Like go look up just type in like Hindenburg over New York City and it's the scale is really kind of it drives at home for sure.
Yeah, it was really It's really impressive. One of the other things I saw, too, is that it had a gas capacity. So of the hydrogen it held of seven million, sixty two thousand cubic feet of highydrogen gas. And to put that in perspective, that's the gas equivalent of seven sixty two thousand and one cubic foot bags of top soil that you get at the Garden Center. That's how much hydrogen gas it held.
It's a lot of gas, and you know, of course that's what keeps it aloft. As far as those engines, it had four diesel engines, and it moved pretty quick. I mean as far as travel of the day. It could get across the Atlantic in two days. Yeah, the fastest ocean line aer trip took five and it's still it had the sister ship the LZ one thirty. There are still the two largest aircrafts to ever take flight off the ground.
Yeah, so this was a pretty impressive ship for anybody, but it also was not like the first of its kind. It was the point that they had reached in the development of dirigibles up to that point, which had really been kind of going for almost one hundred years at that point. I think it was in eighteen fifty when the whole dirgible craze kicked off in Paris, thanks to our friend Pierre Julienne.
Yes, that's right. That was the first one. I think was in eighteen yeah fifty, Like you said, the next one and that seemed more like a little like, hey, everybody, check this thing out. In eighteen fifty two you got the first full size one. Thanks. It was really the French and Germans leading this charge was a French engineer named Jules Auri Gifar one hundred and forty three feet pretty big.
Sure, cant and sneeze at that. He also traveled seventeen miles around in his first flight of his airship, which is again nothing to sneeze that. He was puttering around a six.
Miles an hour literally around right.
Yeah, yeah, in circles essential. The first few airships just basically traveled in circles. The next one was eighteen eighty four. This is considered the first round trip light. I'm not sure what Giffard was doing, but the French Army Corps of Engineers like thirty years later took their dirigible in a round trip flight, again a circle, but this one was just four to five miles and it had a nine horsepower motor and that is the same size motor of a really good push mower, lawn mower.
Yeah. I mean, you know, you're up there in the sky, so you're you don't have to give it a lot to get it going. And again they're not going very fast, six to ten miles an hour. All of these so far have been non rigid. By the way, the first rigid win came in eighteen ninety nine courtesy of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. That's where that word and eventual band name would come from.
Yeah. Yeah. Zeppelin basically became the leader in developing, designing and developing airships dirigibles at a time when it was like this is the new thing, Like if you wanted to get from one continent to another you took a log liner, Like you said, they were kind of slow. Zeppelins could go way faster, and it was like that the promise of airship travel was just limitless at this time when Zeppelin came along.
Yeah, for sure. And as far as the band, I can't remember who said it, this is off the dome, but somebody said something about them going over. They would go over like a led Zeppelin. Yeah, obviously that's a two contradictory terms. Sure, and that's what they meant. They're being sort of a cheeky and of course you know it was. The Hindenburg was on the cover of their first record, of their debut album.
One other thing, I looked up the el Z in any of the Zeppelins, So like the first rigid airship was called el Z one and you mentioned no, I thought probably it was, Yeah, but it's a looft shift or airship in German. So airship Zeppelin one was the first rigid airship. The sister ship of the Hindenburg was
ELZ one third. Yeah, that's right. So yes, I think, as a rule of thumb, anytime you're taking advantage of a new technology that carries you away from Earth or carries you long earth that really fast speeds do not go in any models that are still in the single digits. That's just a good rule of thumb, I think.
All right, So if the new plane comes out and it's the oh, I don't know, Airmax seven.
Just wait until he get the ten. They're gonna get there fast because those next three are not going to stay around very long.
You're right, that's good advice. So nineteen ten was the first commercial passenger flight. This baby went I think it carried twenty three people plus nine crew on a sight seeing loop yep. But it crashed. No casualties, no, get this.
So this was LZ seven, still single digits. Yeah, ran out of fuel, was blown off course and it had in in trouble and it crashed into some trees. But the fact that nobody died is pretty well happy, I guess.
Yeah. Eighteen years later we got our first transatlantic flight, and this is what they were gunning for. This thing went from Germany to where the Hindenburg would go, Lakehurst, New Jersey. It's sort of a suburban Philadelphia like east of Philly. Okay, one hundred and eleven hours and forty four minutes. But this is what they were, you know, they were looking for, you know, the next wave of like taking people. It wasn't just like wowser stuff or hey,
like we tried it once. They were like really trying to compete with ocean liner travel.
Yeah, I say we take a break and we come back and get into that a little more. How about that? All right, We'll be right okay, Chuck. So, like you were saying, before the break, the zeppelin development had gotten to the point where it's like, we can get across the Atlantic, we can get down to South America anytime we want, Like, no problem, We've reached that point. Let's
just start creating dirigibles that are meant for transatlantic travel. Like, let's really put a dent in the ocean liner industry. We're just going to create a new travel industry. And that's what they said about doing so. The the Hindenburg LZ one was the part of this larger planned fleet of specifically transatlantic luxury zeppelins that we're going to essentially change the world and make it much smaller.
Yeah, for sure, it was you know, it was luxury in the sense that it was an airship that catered to rich people. If you look at the pictures, it looks nice, but it's it's still not like anything you would get on board, like the Titanic or anything like that,
just because it was an airship, so they couldn't. You know, there are obvious weight limitations and size limitations, like the cabins were really really small, but they you know, they were they were good, good looking enough for the for the crowd that they were catering to, which is really rich people. Because I think it costs, like in today dollars like ten thousand dollars compared to about half that for an ocean liner transatlantic ocean liner voyage.
Yeah, those are one way too, not like our voyage in October, which is round trip.
That's right. They're bringing us back right, yeah, Okay.
It's gonna leave us stranded in Bermuda.
I mean they could drop us in Atlanta on the way home. I would think, oh, that's.
A great idea, that's a wonderful idea. Choke, we'll ask, okay, So yeah, I mean there, it was expense but it was also very new, right, so you can imagine, I mean, luxury ocean liners have been doing this for a very long time. By the time they reached that cost of about five thousand dollars for a luxury liner. So you can imagine that, like the Zeppelin Company had their eye on bringing costs down eventually so that more people could afford it. Yeah, but in the meantime to start, I mean,
that's kind of what you do. You attract everyone's attention by getting the richest, most famous, most powerful people that come fly on your friendly skies, and then newspapers write about it like, oh my gosh, did you see Missus Astor eight hundred feet up hanging from the outside of the Hindenburg. It was amazing. You could see Rode up or dress. That's what newspapers want to write about, you know, And so that's what they were doing.
Yeah, and today Missus Astor's equivalent, I guess is Katy Perry. That's exactly right, Chuck, what a time delive.
That was amazing.
So I mentioned hydrogen and helium as the LTA lighter than air gases used to power anything like this. And they had a real decision to make early on with the Hindenburg, like what to use, and the original design was hydrogen, but then they said there was a crash of in nineteen thirty of the British airship R one oh one out of the single digits YEP still crashed, survived impact, but everybody died in the hydrogen fire because
hydrogen turns out superflammable. So Hugo. Eckner said, you know what, let's go to helium. It's way more stable. It's a little bit heavier, so we're going to have to design a larger envelope so we can keep that same payload. But then there was a US helium embargo and the United States was the only maker and cellar of helium at the time, and so they said, all right, you know what, let's go back to hydrogen and let's just cross our fingers.
Yeah, there was a Helium Act of nineteen twenty five that I never heard of that the US is like, this is a natural research that we really need, so we're just going to keep it all to ourselves.
And we see a podcast on that at some point right on helium.
No, we've definitely talked about it because there was a shortage and it was all everybody was really worried about it growing away, and then all of a sudden we found a huge new vein of it in the United
States and now there's no problem with helium anymore. Stuff like that makes me feel like we're definitely in a simulation sometimes, you know, Yeah, it happens a lot like people are like, oh, we're hitting peak oil or you know, like we're going to run out of helium and all this horrible stuf's going to happen, and then nothing happens, Like something comes along and just completely does away with that randomly.
Yeah.
At any rate, that was not the case for the designers of the Hindenburg. They had to go with hydrogen, like you said, and because they had made that envelope so much bigger to accommodate the more helium that they were going to need, they were going to now have to fill the whole thing with hydrogen. So they added a bunch more passenger cabins to basically, we'll make more money, but also to make it heavier so that it would do all the same things it would have had a been helium.
Yeah, so it wouldn't float away. Pretty much, pretty much, we went over some of the sizes. I think we should probably mention the cruising speed with seventy six miles an hour with a topper of eighty four miles per hour. Yeah, and total you've got about forty flight crew, ten to twelve stewards and cooks. As we'll learn there was a bartender as well, and then fifty passengers in thirty six and then up to seventy two I guess because they built those extra cabins.
Right right, right, And that was nineteen thirty seven season, and I think nineteen thirty six was the only complete season in the Hindenburg service. One other thing that I was trying to get to the bottom of that was surprisingly hard to find was its cruising altitude. Now, yeah, apparently it's usual cruising altitude or normal cruising out sude was like six hundred and fifty feet or about two hundred.
Meters man's press.
It is impressive, but they would usually fly lower to basically fly under clouds rather than through or over them. So yeah, I mean these things I saw somebody say, like these are they were flying at the height of like, you know, the tallest trees in the world, Like it, It wasn't that high up that they were flying.
Yeah. I mean also, and I don't know if that anything to do with it, but you want people to see this thing if they're trying to draw them up business. Sure, and again those pictures over New York City, that thing is pretty low.
It is like like kind of concerningly low. Actually.
Yeah.
Yeah, so Chuck, just a little more about what it looked like inside and what it was, you know, like aboard the Hindenburger. Remember these were luxury, like, state of the art luxury accommodations in the mid nineteen thirties, but they also had to adjust for weight and stuff like that. Like you were saying, it seemed like there was formica everywhere, Like it looked like the walls were made of formica even.
Yeah, totally a lot of formica, but that that jibe a little bit with sort of the art deco look that seemed like it ran throughout.
Yeah. For sure, they dressed for dinner like you would think. There was an illuminum piano made specifically because a baby Grand would just be too heavy. Yeah, and they had, of course incredible meals in this incredibly cramped dining room. Yeah. And then there was a smoking room, which at first I'm like, well, of course there's a smoking room, it's the thirties. And then I was like, hydrogen dirigible that is actually pretty remarkable.
Yeah, it had a double air lock. Apparently there was one lighter, so they didn't trust people to, you know, just to bring their own lighters, so there was one lighter that would light everyone's cigarettes I guess or whatever else. They were smoking pipes I imagine cigars, blunts. Who knows the bartender was. I can't remember the guy's name, but they talked about him in the YouTube video and he seemed to be a pretty popular guy. And there's one story of a famous passenger who creates a drink or
I guess rather his wife did. British author Leslie Charteris, who created the Saint Yeah franchise, His wife Pauline was a bored and apparently they ran out of gin, like probably pretty fast, a lot of gin based drinks back then. So she created a martini made from kishpasser which I looked up, which is like a some sort of a cherry thing.
Yeah, it's like a cherry brandy. It's really good.
Oh you've had it?
Oh yeah? Yeah, remember when I was like super into making cocktails.
Yeah, I mean I've used like the cherry, like the Lexardo liqueur and stuff. Is it sort of like that.
No, it's much lighter and it's not nearly a syrupy and heavy. It's more of a spirit than like a syrup, you know what I mean.
Yeah, Well, because the yeah lxardo is a liqueur, but the other one is like a legit ninny proof you know kind of thing.
Yeah, where you're like who, But it's it is very good and it's it's like a cherry flavor. So she used that instead of gin, and apparently then did the bartender die because like supposedly, the rest of the ingredients are lost to history.
I mean, I guess Pauline must have died or else she could have just probably told everybody. By the way, like, after this tragedy settles, I created a whiz bang of a drink up.
There exactly remind me to tell you about the Hymn cocktail that came out. But I saw somebody surmise that the other ingredients were probably drivermoth, which you like at a Martini grenadine and not like Roses grenadine, but like the real pomegranate syrup, and a lemon peel. Yeah that sounds nice, Sure, I'll try that.
So what else they had that piano.
Oh.
The cabins had running hot and cold water. They had a little fold down desk, but they were small. The crew cabins were just like would expect a crew cabin to be very small. It look like those beds were a couple of feet wide.
Yeah, and there were bunk beds too.
Yeah.
So with an art deco ladder, no less too pretty. Of course it was kind of cool looking. I'm not a huge fan of the nineteen thirties esthetic. I liked the ladders for the bunk beds.
I'm big into deco. Maybe you can get one of those off of eBay or something.
Oh man, it's it's probably dead or gone up in flames.
I would guess, well, some of that stuff survived as in a museum. True, so you couldn't buy it, but maybe we could, you know, bust it out.
Yeah, we could break into the Smithsonian.
Get that ladder for you.
Just pass everything else by and go straight for the Hindenburg ladder.
That's it, that's all you want.
And I'd be like, I'd get it home and be like, I don't even have bunk beds, So this is all getting lots of press, like this is a big deal. Remember, the Hindenburg was part of a playing Transatlantic fleece, so this is big news. One thing that a lot of people forget is that the Nazis were in charge of Germany at the time. The Hindenburg was a German ship. It was a civilian ship, but it still had big fat swastikas on its tail fins. And as everyone knows,
the Hindenburg went up in flames. I think is no coincidence that its tail went up in flames first, because why wouldn't.
It, right, it's a good point. I didn't think about that. Actually.
So the Nazis were like, hey, we're trying to get everybody a like us to psych them out, and let's send the Hindenburg on a three day publicity tour around Europe. Essentially, that was its maiden voyage in March of nineteen thirty six.
Yeah, they did a lot of these little propaganda flights and apparently the one that lifted off on May six had some engine trouble. But they had had to skip endurance test because of one of those propaganda flights.
Right, Yeah, they were like it'll be fine. Apparently, think that they would have found the engine troubles, but The Hindenberg made its first passage to America in May of nineteen thirty six, which is confusing because it was May of nineteen thirty seven when it had its last Yeah, its last voyage to America, so almost exactly a year later in between its first trip to America and its last trip to America. Yeah, it got me all throughout
researching this. Yeah for sure, Wait wait what how are these people alive?
And then yeah, they completed thirty four flights in nineteen thirty six, which included some of those propaganda flights, one of which very famously at the nineteen thirty six Olympic Games there in Berlin. And then you know, round trip flights to America and then the one to Brazil that you mentioned, and they had, you know, they were catering like you mentioned the astors, you know, Nelson Rockefeller, the
head of Eastern's airline TWA pan Am Like. I think they were kind of rubbing in the face of all these early airlines, right saying, come fly on this super slow but kind of awesome thing.
I wonder also if they were like, hey, don't you guys want to start your own airship division. We'll sell you theatirships, you know. Yeah, it could have also been a little of both. Yeah, right, that millionaire's flight you mentioned, Eddie Rickenbacher was also on that, and he's the American flying ace from World War One who took down the Red baron. Yeah, so I'm sure it was a tad awkward around the other German military Nazi leaders who were on that millionaire's flight too.
Yeah, well this guy, right.
So that was nineteen thirty six. It was a triumphant year for the Hindenburg, and it had six more successful flights in nineteen thirty seven. When it started, I say we take a break and come back again, and things just start to go poorly for the Hindenburg. How about that?
All right, we'll be right back, all right. I was confused by the May stuff as well, because here we are in May again, one year after the first commercial passage in thirty six, all those successful flights. Later, the seventh one of the new year, on May third, nineteen thirty seven, Captain Max Press was at the Helm and it lifted off there in Frankfurt headed toward Lake Hirst. There's a naval air base there by the way, which is why they kept going to suburban New Jersey.
Yeah, which is kind of shocking. They were letting the nazis land blimpse and at a naval air base in New Jersey.
Yeah, I mean this was still I mean, this was just before they probably would have said no, right, right, Yeah, So they got all the way there, they flew and that's sort of the cruel tragedy of this is or one of them is, you know, if there were any nerves, they're like landing in New Jersey and they're like, this is great. We made it. Everybody, we're all sort of drunk. We put out our last cigars. It was a storm. There was a storm happening, so they sort of delayed
the landing. They flew out over the ocean for a few more hours. I imagine everyone got even more liquored up. And then finally around seven pm, they descended in high winds from about five hundred feet down down down to a little under three hundred feet and they actually dropped those mooring ropes, which turned out spoiler alert could have caused this whole thing, and they secured those ropes at
seven twenty five. They secured those ropes to the ground with their winch system, and in less than thirty seconds it was all over.
Yeah, but the ropes that bear this in mind, the ropes had been dropped and touching the ground for at least four minutes by this time, right, Yeah, so yes, it took I think I saw thirty four seconds from the time when the flames erupted to the time when the entire thing was destroyed and crashed on the ground. It went that fast, Like I said, the stern, the tail of it caught fire first and the flames just kind of blew through the envelope and came out the nose.
And what's just mind boggling is that as it landed on the ground, because it was a light skeleton but not something you would want to land on you. And in fact, one of the ground crew died, yeah, from the skeleton landing on him. People once it hit the ground, people were running out of the flames and survived. They were running for their lives and they actually made it, which is crazy.
Yeah. Two, I mean, we'll go ahead and go with the numbers. Two thirds of the people basically survived. There were ninety seven people on board total, thirty six passengers, sixty one crew, and only thirty six people perished, thirteen pass and twenty two crew and then the one ground crew person that you were talking about, and very famously it was it was called live by a Chicago radio
reporter named Herb Morrison. Yeah, and I think we should either I'll either read it, well, I'll read it, but hopefully we can replace it with the real thing, Like surely this is like within the public domain, right.
I saw uncertain according to the Library of Congress.
All right, well shall I do it? Then?
Yeah? Do it? Can you do a great HERD Morrison impression?
Though, I'll do my best. Weall.
Can you do it as Jim Morrison?
Maybe I should do it as Sammy Davis Junior, just to give it some light.
I would love to hear that if you're okay.
No, no, I can't do that. That would be even that this decades later, it would be disrespectful, I think.
Yeah, I guess that hasn't been one hundred years.
No, all right, so here we go. This was Herb Morrison's call, and this is what was played and literally played in movie theater newsreels like the next day. So it's all over the place, it's fire and it's crashing it's burning, bursting into flames, and it's falling on the mooring mast. This is the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world. Oh, it's crashing, oh four or five hundred feet into the sky, and it's a terrific crash. Ladies and gentlemen. There's smoke and there's flames now and
the frame is crashing to the ground. Oh the humanity and all the passengers screaming around here. I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honest. It is just laying there, a massive smoking wreckage, and everybody can hardly breathe and talk. Honest, I can hardly breathe. I'm going to step inside where I cannot see it.
That was excellent. If you listen to herb Morrison actually doing this, he's in between a lot of these sentences, it's like, oh, oh yeah, he is just completely overwhelmed. It happens immediately the moment he sees those flames. He's just completely overwhelmed. Go listen to her Morris and calling that because it's just it's quite stirring. And he's the one who gave us that phrase, Oh the humanity.
Yeah, apparently, and that's where that comes from I just kind of want to do a straight reading. I didn't want to do all the morning.
No, no, I mean, no one expected you to do that.
Well, I didn't want to arouse anybody.
Oh yeah, he've always got your eye like three steps ahead, man.
I hope so. But yeah, oh the humanity that had never been said before? Is that true?
I don't know. I don't know if it had been said, but certainly heard. Morrison was the one who popularized it. Seems to me like everything that he said was just pouring out of him without thinking. Yeah, so I would guess that was just off the cuff for him.
Man, it's amazing. So again, only thirty six of the ninety seven people aboard perished. Immediately, there were about fifteen hundred US Navy personnel there that were, you know, all of a sudden doing not much of a search but just rescue attempts. And like I said, it was all over the news the next morning, it was on movie theater newsreels. Within hours of both American and German investigators were there, and immediately theories started coming out kind of left and right.
Yeah, so this is the thirties, everybody's already starting to get wise to what the Nazis are like. There's also communists running around, maybe even old school anarchists who like to throw bombs. So the idea that it was this act of sabotage was bandied about very quickly. Yeah. One of the first people who had their eyes set on them was a guy named Joseph Spee. Have you did you see his professional name?
Oh no, I didn't. I saw he was an acrobat, But he was an acrobat.
He was also an actor. He appears in Marathon Man. Apparently he's the guy who dies in the car crash that starts everything off.
Oh wow.
His professional name as an acrobat was ben Dova. I'm not kidding.
Oh wow, it's amazing.
Yeah. So he I'm just gonna call him Bendover from here on out.
Sounds like a Bart Simpson call into its stabborn totally does.
He was deemed suspicious by one of the stewards, a German steward a board the Hindenburg, and apparently the German steward told the authorities who are investigating this that he found Joseph Bendova quote unsympathetic to airship travel like he wasn't he wasn't just overjoyed or blown away by it apparently, which is spoken like a true everyday fascist pos if you think about.
It, Yeah, budd he might also have been like, I'm Bendova, you think like you should see what I've seen exactly.
Well, that was one of the other things too, that when he was being investigated, they were like, he's also an acrobat. He could probably climb around into the Skelton and plan a bomb. So apparently they found zero evidence to that of like supporting him being a bomber whatsoever.
Yeah, I have not seen the film from noineteen seventy five with what's the guy's name Georgie Scott and Anne Bancroft among others, but it seemed from the trailer that they fully like just fictionalized, and that it was it was a bomb and it was sabotage and that was that was the movie.
Oh really, I didn't know that. That's lame.
Yeah, that's what it looked like to me. And apparently it was a fifteen million dollar movie at the time, which was a lot of dope in nineteen seventy five for a movie.
Sure, what was going on with blimps and disaster stuff in the seventies, because there was also that movie Black Sunday.
Yeah, it was just the peak, it was peak disaster film, so they were they were looking at all angles.
I think I should have guessed that there were other people who were considered for sabotage anti Nazis. Sure there was one that said the Zeppelin company and or the Nazi Party blew up the ship for insurance money.
Yeah, that was one.
It was. I think it was covered for fifteen million dollars and according to Westig, that's about three hundred and fifty five million dollars today.
Wow.
Do not think the Nazi Party would not have considered doing that.
Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, bombs being fired at from below, from above. The one thing they do know for sure is that the hydrogen was what caused it to go up in flames in like thirty seconds. There is no controversy about that. How that happened is still
not like for sure. Known witnesses said that as the ship approached, it appeared to be glowing before the fire even started, and so at the time scientists heard that and they were like, oh, okay, well it gathered an electrostatic charge because of these storms that were going on, and that there was probably like a hydrogen leak and that's what ignited the whole thing.
Right. The thing is is like that electrostatic charge, if it had like sparked, it would have had to have sparked exactly where that hydrogen leak was, and across an eight hundred foot dirigible. The chance is of the spark and the leak happening at the exact same spot are pretty low, right, Yeah, I agree. So there's other theories that tried to Basically, basically everyone agrees there was an electrostatic charge. Somehow the electrostatic charge sparked, somehow that spark
set off the hydrogen explosion. Almost everyone agrees on that. But within that you still have a lot of room to maneuver around and figure out, you know, what exactly led to this disaster. And what's amazing is that we still don't know today.
Yeah, I mean, there have been a lot of books written about it over the year. There was one in nineteen sixty two called who Destroyed the Hindenburg by AA Hurling And they blamed a ground rigger named Eric Spell who was actually on the crew. He was in inside the blimp, and apparently blew it up to a pease or to please his communist girlfriend. But I don't know if he survived or not. But that doesn't make sense, and I don't think there was any evans at all about that.
No, And now that I see Michael Mooney, he wrote a book called The Hindenburg and that movie was based on the Hindenburg and he basically used that theory. So that's why they would have made it like a bombing.
Yeah, he must have been the character in the movie that I saw that was running around up to no good.
Ben Doova is a character in that movie. But he goes by I think Joseph spiel I think.
Oh, this is a missed opportunity.
Oh for sure. Yeah. There's also a theory about incendiary paint, which is basically a scientist from NASA named Addison Bain who his career is based on creating hydrogen fuel propulsion systems right, using hydrogen as fuel.
Yeah, so he's pro hydrogen very much.
So he had an idea that no, the hydrogen that was secondary, that what really ignited first and then eventually ignited the hydrogen was this coating on the outer shell of the envelope which we talked about that kept the sun's rays off and that that ignited. And he really went to talent on this. Apparently he had a television special and had to really work at getting an actual
piece of salvaged envelope from the Hindenburg. He burned it on TV, but he really had to bend over, He had to bendova backwards to get this thing to light. So essentially his own demonstration proved to critics like, that's that that theory's not doesn't hold hydrogen.
Yeah, it was. It was debunked. Boy, you were just flying all over the place with these jokes in double entendre's very impressive.
Thanks, I appreciate you noticing.
The giant capacitor theory. That was just like five years ago. There's a Caltech professor named Constantinos Giappus, not sure where he was from, but he offered a different take on the ignition source. I think there was a pbshow Hindenburg colon the new evidence and here was the deal. There was, you know, the outer skin that we were talking about,
but that skin wasn't directly wrapped on the frame. It had these little wooden spacers like hundreds, I would imagine thousands of these things spacing it out so it didn't
actually touch the frame. And his proposal was that when the ship dropped those ropes that we talked about, and I said to put a pin in it, that the space between the ship's skin collected a lot of positive electrostatic charge during that storm, so that the area between the skin and the metal frame collected electrons when the ropes hit the ground, and it turned it into just a big, basically a giant bomb, a big energy storing
capacitor that was dotted with these little capacitors like ignition points.
Essentially, Yeah, that's so, that's what his That's where we were saying that the ignition point, the spark, and the hydrogen leak being at the same spot was very unlikely. And what Geoppis basically said was like, no, all those spacers became capacitors themselves, and they were all soaring, all this energy negative on the frame, positive on the skin, and all it took was one spark for all of
them to start sparking. And if you have a hundreds or like you said, thousands of little capacitors sparking at once, it's going to blow up a hydrogen dirigible, and it's going to do it pretty fast. And I said that there was four minutes in between the time when they dropped the mooring cables to the ground and the time
the Hindenburg blew up. And in one of the tests that Giappus ran for Nova for this program, he basically ran essentially the same situation that the Hindenburg would have gone through under his theory, and it took four minutes for it to develop enough of a charge for the capacitor to spark.
So, yeah, he just sounds pretty good.
Yeah. I like this one a lot too.
Yeah, and it's the most recent one, I guess the others have been debunked, So yeah, you know, I'm bandwagoning admittedly for sure.
So one of the things that a lot of people aren't aware of is that the Hindenburg when it went up, not only did it immediately put an end to the idea of transatlantic airship flights or airships in general, aside from Goodyear, who bravely was it? Yeah, it put the kibosh on hydrogen as a fuel. That's why people like Addison Bain in the nineties were coming up with these
these things trying to defend hydrogen. They're saying, no, it's safe, it's safe, and people are like, did you see the Hindenburg. You're a fool. And apparently it is safe in some ways compared to like gasoline.
Yeah, I mean there are new airships happening, and there's you know, there's people working with hydrogen again, so it's like enough time has passed to where they're looking into this kind of thing again. I think the Pathfinder one. Google co founder Sergey Brinn is the sort of brain child behind that one. That thing is four hundred and feet long, eight feet long, and I think is still like none of these things are commercialized yet they're like still in testing phases and development phases.
Yeah, and they all run on helium not hydrogen too.
Yeah, I mean hydrogen's being used for other things, but yeah, that they're still I don't think they could ever use hydrogen again for something like this.
We've talked about the Hindenburg before. It must have been on like one of the videos we did, because I remember us saying that none of the people who jumped, no, none of the people who didn't jump died. That the people who jumped from the Hindburg who died. That's not true. That is a urban legend and we kept it going. But this was fifteen years ago, so come on give us a break.
Okay, Yeah, if you want to see parts of it, I told you, you know, some in the Smithsonian, some of the pieces of the ship, some of the luxury stuff, you know, kind of like the Titanic survived. The National Museum has some stuff. Obviously, the Air and Space Museum have some stuff, and that's where you can see it. Just keep your eyes, keep your eyes off that ladder. That's for Josh.
Thanks man. I appreciate you looking out for me like that. Since Chuck is looking out for me with Smithsonian artifacts, that means obviously it's time for listener mail. Guys.
This is just a really nice email for Michael and Columbus, Ohio. Hey, guys, just want to give you thanks for being one of the most consistent aspects of my world for almost two decades. I started listening when I was ten years old. Nice on and off of course at first, but in the last couple of years I've been listening to new episodes every week. Such a gift you've given and are still giving to this world, sharing your stories, perspectives and jokes
and rants and spectacles. With this, I truly hope you too, and Jerry and all the people who help behind the scenes are able to recognize the benefit an impact of having consistent worldly discourse. Being able to turn on a podcast and learn about landing on the moon or the wonders of the world or anything in history really inspired the learning in me and continues to spark my curiosity every week. Josh, Chuck and team you guys rock. Thanks from a twenty seven year old kid trying to figure
out this world. Hope remains alive and that is Michael and Columbus Man.
Live those really great Thanks a lot, Michael.
That inspires us.
Yeah, I'm inspired to go another eighteen years, Chuck, I hope I live that long.
You better, man, I Well, I plan on it.
Uh okay. Well, if you want to be like Michael and send us just a really gee whiz that's super nice email. We love those, love them. You can send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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