The Hindenburg Disaster

7:46Chuck Bryant:So let's get back to what the balloon-like envelope, a.k.a. the blimp part, how that describes what type of dirigibles there are. There's three of them, right?

7:57Josh Clark:Yeah, there's non-rigid, semi-rigid, and rigid. Non-rigid is more like a hot air balloon. That means there's no structure on the inside, and it's just the pressure of that gas keeping everything puffed out.

8:08Chuck Bryant:Yes, and hot air balloons are what make New Mexico's license plates so nice. Oh, yeah.

8:14Josh Clark:Agreed.

8:14Chuck Bryant: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 Swedish chef's hat. Yeah. But it flies. Right. And then rigid is the last one. There's like a skeleton-like frame, usually of a really light but strong material, maybe aluminum. You sent a YouTube of colorized photos of the Hindenburg, the interior in particular, and they said that its skeleton was made of duralumin.

8:54Chuck Bryant:Have you ever heard of that before?

8:56Josh Clark: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.

9:05Chuck Bryant: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.

9:13Josh Clark:It's a lot lighter than soft steel, obviously. And in the case of the Hindenburg, and I learned this all from that YouTube video, it's pretty cool to see those pictures as well. There are 15, as they describe them, Ferris wheel-like rings that gave this thing the shape. And between those rings, and this is something I didn't know, there were 16 separate balloons between those rings, and that whole thing was covered with Goodyear latex, and then a cotton like canvas fabric outer shell.

9:44Chuck Bryant: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?

9:55Josh Clark:Yeah, yeah.

9:56Chuck Bryant:How many were there? Like 14, I guess, then?

9:58Josh Clark:I think 16 balloons. We all should mention that that cotton canvas fabric was coated with a protective coating because that will come into play.

10:07Chuck Bryant: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?

10:20Josh Clark:I don't know.

10:21Chuck Bryant:So the other thing about the rigid one, and I had no idea about this either, is that 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?

10:50Josh Clark:Yeah, I did. Because, like, where else would they be? Because, I mean, once you find out that there are like 25 cabins and a bar and a restaurant and all that stuff, it's obviously not going to fit. But, I mean, you know, you could hang out there. In fact, I think they encouraged the passengers to hang out in 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.

11:20Chuck Bryant: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.

11:34Josh Clark: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.

11:52Chuck Bryant:It was enormous. So that Goodyear blimp, it depends on which one you're talking about. I've seen that the Hindenburg was more than 800 feet long, almost as long as the Titanic. Yeah.

12:03Josh Clark:How does it compare to the 747? Where is that?

12:06Chuck Bryant:I think it's like three times as long as the 747 and twice as tall. Yeah.

12:11Josh Clark:I mean, seriously, like, go look up, just type in, like, Hindenburg over New York City. And the scale is really kind of drives it home for sure.

12:20Chuck Bryant:Yeah. It's really impressive. One of the other things I saw, too, is that it had a gas capacity, so of the hydrogen it held, of 7 ,062 ,000 cubic feet of hydrogen gas. And to put that in perspective, that's the gas equivalent of 7 ,062 ,000 one-cubic-foot bags of topsoil that you get at the garden center. That's how much hydrogen gas it held.

12:46Josh Clark: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.

12:57Chuck Bryant:I mean, as far as travel of the day, it could get across the Atlantic in two days.

13:02Josh Clark:The fastest ocean liner trip took five, and it still had the sister ship, the LZ-130. They're still the two largest aircrafts to ever take flight off the ground.

13:14Chuck Bryant:Yeah. So this was a pretty impressive ship for anybody to see. But it also was not like the first of its kind. It was the point that they had reached in the development of dirigibles up to that point, which had really been kind of going for almost 100 years at that point. I think it was in 1850 when the whole dirigible craze kicked off in Paris, thanks to our friend Pierre Julien.

13:41Josh Clark:Yes, that's right. The first one, I think, was in 1850, like you said. The next one, and that seemed more like a little like, hey, everybody, check this thing out. In 1852, you got the first full-size one. It was really the French and Germans leading this charge. It was a French engineer named Jules-Henri Giffard. 143 feet, pretty big. Sure.

14:07Chuck Bryant:You can sneeze at that. He also traveled 17 miles around in his first flight of his airship, which is, again, nothing to sneeze at. He was puttering around at six miles an hour.

14:21Josh Clark:Literally around, right?

14:22Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Yeah, in circles, essentially. The first few airships just basically traveled in circles. The next one is 1884. This is considered the first round-trip flight. I'm not sure what Giffard was doing, but the French Army Corps of Engineers, like 30 years later, took their dirigible in a round-trip flight, again a circle. This one was just four to five miles, and it had a nine-horsepower motor, and that is the same size motor of a really good push mower, lawnmower.

14:54Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, you know, you're up there in the sky, so you don't have to give it a lot to get it going. And again, they're not going very fast, six to ten miles an hour. All of these so far have been non-rigid, by the way. The first rigid one came in 1899, courtesy of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. That's where that word and eventual band name would come from.

15:17Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Yeah, Zeppelin basically became the leader in 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 luxury liner. Like you said, they were kind of slow. Zeppelins could go way faster. And it was like the promise of airship travel was just limitless at this time when Zeppelin came along.

15:46Josh Clark: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.

15:55Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

15:56Josh Clark:Obviously, that's two contradictory terms. Sure. And that's what they meant. They were being sort of cheeky. And of course, you know, it was, the Hindenburg was on the cover of their first record, of their debut album.

16:07Chuck Bryant:One other thing I looked up, the LZ in any of the Zeppelins. So like the first rigid airship was called LZ-1. And you mentioned...

16:17Josh Clark:Not for Led.

16:18Chuck Bryant:No, I thought probably it was. Yeah. But it's a Luftschiff or airship in German. So Airship Zeppelin 1 was the first rigid airship. The sister ship of the Hindenburg was LZ-130. 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 along Earth at really fast speeds, do not go in any models that are still in the single digits. That's just a good rule of thumb, I think. All right.

16:56Josh Clark:So if the new plane comes out and it's the, oh, I don't know, Air Max 7?

17:01Chuck Bryant:Just wait until they get to 10. They're going to get there fast because those next three are not going to stay around very long.

17:08Josh Clark:You're right. That's good advice. So 1910 was the first commercial passenger flight. This baby went, I think it carried 23 people. plus nine crew on a sightseeing loop. Yep. But it crashed. No casualties.

17:24Chuck Bryant:No, get this. So this was LZ-7, still single digits.

17:28Josh Clark:Yeah.

17:29Chuck Bryant:Ran out of fuel. It was blown off course. And it had engine trouble. And it crashed into some trees. But the fact that nobody died is pretty, well, happy, I guess. Yeah.

17:42Josh Clark:18 years later, we got our first transatlantic flight. And this is what they were gunning for. This thing went from Germany to where the Hindenburg would go, Lakehurst, New Jersey. It's sort of suburban Philadelphia, like east of Philly.

17:55Chuck Bryant:Okay.

17:56Josh Clark:111 hours and 44 minutes. But this is what they were, you know, they were looking for, you know, the next wave of, like, taking people. It wasn't just, like, wowser stuff or, hey, like, we tried it once. They were, like, really trying to compete with ocean liner travel.

18:12Chuck Bryant:Yeah. I say we take a break and we come back and get into that a little more. How about that?

18:17Josh Clark:All right. We'll be right back.

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20:17Chuck Bryant: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 set about doing. So the Hindenburg LZ-129 was the part of this larger planned fleet of specifically transatlantic luxury zeppelins that were going to essentially change the world and make it much smaller.

21:08Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. It was, you know, it was luxury in the sense that it was an airship that catered to rich people. If you look at the pictures, it looks nice, but it's still not like anything you would get on board like the Titanic or anything like that just because it was an airship. So they couldn't, you know, there are obvious weight limitations and size limitations. Like the cabins were really, really small, but they, you know, they were good looking enough for the crowd that they were catering to, which is really rich people. Because I think it costs like in today dollars like$10 ,000 compared to about half that for an ocean liner, transatlantic ocean liner voyage.

21:49Chuck Bryant:Yeah, those are one way too. Not like our voyage in October, which is round trip. That's right.

21:54Josh Clark:They're bringing us back, right?

21:55Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

21:56Josh Clark:Okay.

21:57Chuck Bryant:They're just going to leave us stranded in Bermuda.

22:00Josh Clark:I mean, they could drop us in Atlanta on the way home, I would think.

22:02Chuck Bryant:Oh, that's a great idea. That's a wonderful idea, Chuck. We'll ask.

22:06Josh Clark:Okay.

22:07Chuck Bryant:So, yeah, I mean, it was expensive, but it was also very new, right? So you can imagine, I mean, luxury ocean liners have been doing this for a very long time. By the time they reached that cost of about$5 ,000 for a luxury liner. So you can imagine that, like, the Zeppelin company had their eye on bringing costs down eventually so that more people could afford it. 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 to come fly on your friendly skies. And then newspapers write about it like, oh, my gosh, did you see Mrs.

22:45Chuck Bryant:Astor 800 feet up hanging from the outside of the Hindenburg? It was amazing. You could see right up her dress. That's what newspapers want to write about, you know, and so that's what they were doing.

22:56Josh Clark:Yeah, and today, Mrs. Esther's equivalent, I guess, is Katy Perry. That's exactly right, Chuck. What a time to live.

23:05Chuck Bryant:That was amazing.

23:06Josh Clark:So I mentioned hydrogen and helium as the LTA, lighter-than-air gases, used to power anything like this. And they had a real decision to make early on with the Hindenburg, like, what to use. and the original design was hydrogen, but then they said there was a crash in 1930 of the British airship R101, out of the single digits, still crashed. Survived impact, but everybody died in the hydrogen fire because hydrogen turns out super flammable. 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.

23:51Josh Clark:But then there was a U.S. helium embargo, and the United States was the only maker and seller of helium at the time. And so they said, all right, you know what, let's go back to hydrogen and let's just cross our fingers.

24:04Chuck Bryant:Yeah, there was a helium act of 1925 that I never heard of that the U.S. was like, this is a natural resource that we really need, so we're just going to keep it all to ourselves.

24:13Josh Clark:We did a podcast on that at some point, right? on helium.

24:19Chuck Bryant:No, we definitely talked about it because there was a shortage and it was all, everybody was really worried about it going away. And then all of a sudden we found a huge new vein of it in the United States and now there's no problem with helium anymore. Stuff like that makes me feel like we're definitely in a simulation sometimes. You know? Yeah. It happens a lot. Like people are like, oh, we're hitting peak oil or, you know, like we're going to run out of helium and all this horrible stuff's going to happen. And then nothing happens. Like something comes along and just completely does away with that randomly.

24:50Chuck Bryant: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. And so they added a bunch more passenger cabins to basically, well, make more money, but also to make it heavier so that it would do all the same things it would have had it been helium.

25:16Josh Clark: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 was 76 miles an hour with a topper of 84 miles per hour.

25:30Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

25:31Josh Clark:And total, you've got about 40 flight crew, 10 to 12 stewards and cooks. As we'll learn, there was a bartender as well. And then 50 passengers in 36 and then up to 72, I guess because they built those extra cabins, right? Right, right.

25:48Chuck Bryant:And that was 1937 season. And I think 1936 was the only complete season in the Hindenburg service. One other thing that I was trying to get to the bottom of that was surprisingly hard to find was its cruising altitude. Oh, yeah. Apparently, its usual cruising altitude or normal cruising altitude was like 650 feet or about 200 meters.

26:09Josh Clark:Man, that's impressive.

26:10Chuck Bryant: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 wasn't that high up that they were flying.

26:30Josh Clark:Yeah. I mean, also, and I don't know if that had anything to do with it, but you want people to see this thing if they're trying to drum up business. Sure. And, again, those pictures over in New York City, that thing is pretty low.

26:40Chuck Bryant:It is. Like, kind of concerningly low, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, Chuck, just a little more about what it looked like inside and what it was, you know, like aboard the Hindenburg. Remember, these were luxury, like state-of-the-art luxury accommodations in the mid-1930s. 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.

27:07Josh Clark:Yeah, totally a lot of formica. But that jibed a little bit with sort of the Art Deco look that seemed like it ran throughout.

27:14Chuck Bryant:Yeah, for sure. They dressed for dinner, like you would think. There was an aluminum piano made specifically because a baby grand would just be too heavy. Yeah. And they had, of course, incredible meals in this incredibly cramped dining room. Yeah. And then there was a smoking room, which at first I'm like, well, of course there's a smoking room. It's the 30s. And then I was like, hydrogen dirigible. That is actually pretty remarkable.

27:41Josh Clark:Yeah. It had a double airlock. Uh, apparently there was one lighter, so they didn't trust people to, you know, just to bring their own lighter. So there was one lighter that would light everyone's cigarettes, I guess, or whatever else they were smoking. Pipes, I imagine, cigars. Blunts, who knows? Um, the bartender was, uh, 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. Uh, and there's one story of a famous passenger who created a drink, or I guess rather his wife did, British author Leslie Chateras, who created the Saint franchise.

28:20Josh Clark:His wife Pauline was aboard, and apparently they ran out of gin, like probably pretty fast. A lot of gin-based drinks back then. Sure. So she created a martini made from Kishbasser, which I looked up, which is like some sort of a cherry thing.

28:37Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it's like a cherry brandy. It's really good.

28:41Josh Clark:Oh, you've had it?

28:42Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah. Yeah, remember when I was, like, super into making cocktails?

28:47Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, I've used, like, the cherry, like, the Luxardo liqueur and stuff. Is it sort of like that?

28:53Chuck Bryant:No, it's much lighter, and it's not nearly as syrupy and heavy. It's more of a spirit than, like, a syrup, you know what I mean?

29:01Josh Clark:Yeah, well, because the, yeah, Luxardo is a liqueur, but the other one is, like, a legit 90-proof, you know, kind of thing.

29:10Chuck Bryant:Yeah, where you're like, whew. But it is very good, and it's like a cherry flavor, so she used that instead of gin. And apparently, did the bartender die? Because supposedly the rest of the ingredients are lost to history.

29:26Josh Clark:I mean, I guess Pauline must have died, or else she could have just probably told everybody, by the way, after this tragedy settles, I created a whiz-bang of a drink up there.

29:35Chuck Bryant:Exactly. Remind me to tell you about the Hindenburg cocktail I came up with. But I saw somebody surmise that the other ingredients were probably dry vermouth, which would make it a martini, grenadine, and not like rose's grenadine, but like the real pomegranate syrup, and a lemon peel.

29:53Josh Clark:Yeah, that sounds nice.

29:55Chuck Bryant:Sure. I'll try that.

29:58Josh Clark:So what else? They had that piano. Oh, the cabins had running hot and cold water. They had a little fold-down desk, but they were small. the crew cabins were just like you would expect a crew cabin to be very small it looked like those beds were a couple of feet wide yeah

30:15Chuck Bryant:and there were bunk beds too yeah so with an art deco ladder no less too it was kind of cool looking I'm not a huge fan of the 1930s aesthetic ooh I love it I like the ladders for the bunk beds

30:31Josh Clark:I'm big into deco maybe you can get one of those off of eBay or something

30:34Chuck Bryant:Oh, man. Like a Hindenburg ladder? It's probably dead or gone up in flames, I would guess.

30:42Josh Clark:Well, some of that stuff survived. It's in a museum.

30:44Chuck Bryant:True.

30:45Josh Clark:So you couldn't buy it, but maybe we could, you know, bust it out.

30:48Chuck Bryant:Yeah, if we could break into the Smithsonian. Get that ladder for you. Just pass everything else by and go straight for the Hindenburg ladder.

30:57Josh Clark:That's it. That's all you want.

30:58Chuck Bryant: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 planned transatlantic fleet so this is 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 it's no coincidence that its tail went up in flames first, because why wouldn't it?

31:37Josh Clark:Right. That's a good point. I didn't think about that, actually.

31:40Chuck Bryant:So the Nazis were like, hey, we're trying to get everybody to 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 1936.

31:55Josh Clark:Yeah, they did a lot of these little propaganda flights. And apparently the one that lifted off on May 6 had some engine trouble, but they had had to skip endurance tests because of one of those propaganda flights, right? Yeah. They were like, it'll be fine.

32:14Chuck Bryant:They apparently think that they would have found the engine troubles. but the the Hindenburg made its first passage to America in May of 1936 which is confusing because it was May of 1937 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 um yeah it got me all throughout researching this yeah for sure wait wait what how are these people alive and then

32:46Josh Clark:Yeah, they completed 34 flights in 1936, which included some of those propaganda flights, one of which very famously at the 1936 Olympic Games there in Berlin. And then, you know, round trip flights to America and then the one to Brazil that you mentioned. And they had, you know, they were catering, like you mentioned, the Astors, you know, Nelson Rockefeller, the head of Eastern Airlines, TWA, Pan Am. Like, I think they were kind of rubbing it in the face of all these early airlines.

33:16Chuck Bryant:Right.

33:16Josh Clark:Saying, come fly on this super slow but kind of awesome thing.

33:19Chuck Bryant:I wonder also if they were like, hey, don't you guys want to start your own airship division? We'll sell you the airships, you know?

33:26Josh Clark:Yeah, I bet.

33:26Chuck Bryant:It could have also been a little of both. Yeah, I bet you're right. That Millionaire's Flight you mentioned, Eddie Rickenbacker was also on that. And he's the American flying ace from World War I who took down the Red Baron. Yeah, yeah. So I'm sure it was a tad awkward around the German military Nazi leaders who were on that millionaire's flight, too.

33:45Josh Clark:Yeah. Well, it's this guy. Right.

33:49Chuck Bryant:So that was 1936. It was a triumphant year for the Hindenburg. And it had six more successful flights in 1937 when it started. I say we take a break and come back again and things just start to go poorly for the Hindenburg. How about that?

34:05Josh Clark:All right. We'll be right back.

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36:28Josh Clark:All right. I was confused by the May stuff as well because here we are in May again. one year after the first commercial passage in 36. Yeah. All those successful flights later, the seventh one of the new year, on May 3rd, 1937, Captain Max Pruss was at the helm, and it lifted off there in Frankfurt, headed toward Lakehurst. There's a naval airbase there, by the way, which is why they kept going to suburban New Jersey.

36:55Chuck Bryant:Yeah, which is kind of shocking. They were letting the Nazis land blimps at a naval airbase in New Jersey.

37:01Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, this was still... I mean, this is 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 7 p.m., they descended in high winds from about 500 feet down, down, down to a little under 300 feet.

37:45Josh Clark:And they actually dropped those mooring ropes, which turned out, spoiler alert, could have caused this whole thing. And they secured those ropes at 725. They secured those ropes to the ground with their winch system. And in less than 30 seconds, it was all over.

38:00Chuck Bryant:Yeah. But the ropes, bear this in mind, the ropes had been dropped and touching the ground for at least four minutes by this time, right? Yeah. So, yes, it took, I think I saw 34 seconds from the time when the flames erupted to the time when the entire thing was destroyed and crashed on the ground. It went that fast. Like I said, the stern, the tail of it caught fire first. And the flames just kind of blew through the envelope and came out the nose. And what's just mind boggling is that as it landed on the ground, because it was a light skeleton, but not something you would want to land on you.

38:41Chuck Bryant:And in fact, one of the ground crew died 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.

38:58Josh Clark:Yeah. I mean, we'll go ahead and go over the numbers. Two thirds of the people basically survived. There were 97 people on board total, 36 passengers, 61 crew, and only 36 people perished. 13 passengers and 22 crew and then the one ground crew person that you were talking about. And very famously, it was called live by a Chicago radio reporter named Herb Morrison.

39:23Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

39:23Josh Clark: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?

39:35Chuck Bryant:I saw uncertain, according to the Library of Congress.

39:39Josh Clark:All right. Well, shall I do it then?

39:41Chuck Bryant:Yeah, do it. Can you do a great Herb Morrison impression, though? I'll do my best. Wait, can you do it as Jim Morrison?

39:49Josh Clark:Maybe I should do it as Sammy Davis Jr. just to give it some light.

39:53Chuck Bryant:I would love to hear that if you're okay with it.

39:55Josh Clark:No, no, I can't do that. That would be, even decades later, it would be disrespectful, I think.

40:00Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I guess it hasn't been 100 years.

40:02Josh Clark:No. All right, so here we go. This was Herb Morrison's call, and this is what was played and literally played in movie theater newsreels, like, the next day. So it's all over the place. It's fire and it's crashing. It's burning, bursting into flames and it's falling in the mooring mast. This is the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world. Oh, it's crashing. Oh, four or 500 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.

40:38Josh Clark:Honest, it's just laying there, a mass of 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.

40:48Chuck Bryant:That was excellent. If you listen to Herb Morrison actually doing this, he's in between a lot of these sentences. He's like, oh, oh. He is just completely overwhelmed. It happens immediately. The moment he sees those flames, he's just completely overwhelmed. Go listen to Herb Morrison calling that because it's just, it's quite stirring. And he's the one who gave us that phrase, oh, the humanity.

41:15Josh Clark:Yeah, apparently that's where that comes from. I just kind of wanted to do a straight reading. I didn't want to do all the moaning.

41:21Chuck Bryant:No, no, I mean, no one expected you to do that.

41:24Josh Clark:Well, I didn't want to arouse anybody.

41:26Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah. You've always got your eye like three steps ahead, man.

41:30Josh Clark:I hope so. But yeah, oh, the humanity. That had never been said before? Is that true?

41:36Chuck Bryant:I don't know. I don't know if it had been said, but certainly Herb Morrison was the one who popularized it. It seems to me like everything that he said was just pouring out of him without thinking. So I would guess that was just off the cuff for him.

41:50Josh Clark:Man, it's amazing. So again, only 36 of the 97 people aboard perished. Immediately, there were about 1 ,500 U.S. Navy personnel there that were, you know, all of a sudden doing not much of a search, but just rescue attempts. And like I said, it was all over the news the next morning. It was on movie theater newsreels. Within hours, both American and German investigators were there. And immediately, theories started coming out kind of left and right.

42:20Chuck Bryant:Yeah, so this is the 30s. Everybody's already starting to get wise to what the Nazis are like. There's also communists running around, maybe even old school anarchists who like to throw bombs. So the idea that it was an act of sabotage was bandied about very quickly. One of the first people who had their eyes set on them was a guy named Joseph Spey. Did you see his professional name?

42:49Josh Clark:Oh, no, I didn't. I saw he was an acrobat, but what was his name? He was an acrobat.

42:52Chuck Bryant: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 Dover. I'm not kidding.

43:07Josh Clark:Oh, wow. That's amazing.

43:09Chuck Bryant:Yeah. So he, I'm just going to call him Ben Dover from here on out. Sounds like a Bart Simpson call into Most Avern. It totally does. He was deemed suspicious by one of the stewards, a German steward, aboard the Hindenburg. And apparently the German steward told the authorities who 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.

43:47Josh Clark:Yeah. But he might also been like, I'm Bendova. You think like you should see what I've seen.

43:52Chuck Bryant: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 and plant a bomb. So apparently they found zero evidence to that of like supporting him being a bomber whatsoever.

44:08Josh Clark:Yeah, I have not seen the film from 1975 with what's the guy's name? George C. Scott and Anne Bancroft, among others. But it seemed from the trailer that they fully, like, just fictionalized and that it was a bomb and it was sabotaged. And that was the movie.

44:28Chuck Bryant:Oh, really? I didn't know that. That's lame.

44:31Josh Clark:Yeah, that's what it looked like to me. And apparently it was a$15 million movie at the time, which was a lot of dough in 1975 for a movie. Sure.

44:37Chuck Bryant:What was going on with blimps and disaster stuff in the 70s? Because there was also that movie Black Sunday.

44:44Josh Clark:Yeah, it was just the peak. It was peak disaster film. So they were looking at all angles, I think. Gotcha.

44:49Chuck Bryant: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.

45:05Josh Clark:Yeah, that was one.

45:06Chuck Bryant:I think it was covered for$15 million. And according to West Egg, that's about$355 million today. Oh, wow. Do not think the Nazi Party would not have considered doing that.

45:16Josh Clark:Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, bombs being fired at from below, from above. The one thing they do know for sure is that the hydrogen was what, like, caused it to go up in flames in, like, 30 seconds. Right. There is no controversy about that. How that happened is still not, like, for sure known. Witnesses said that as the ship approached, it appeared to be glowing before the fire even started. And so at the time, scientists heard that, and they were like, oh, okay, well, it gathered an electrostatic charge because of the storms that were going on. And there was probably like a hydrogen leak.

45:56Josh Clark:And that's what ignited the whole thing.

45:59Chuck Bryant:The thing is, is like that electrostatic charge, if it had like sparked, it would have had to have sparked exactly where that hydrogen leak was. And across an 800-foot dirigible, the chances of the spark and the leak happening at the exact same spot are pretty low, right?

46:16Josh Clark:Yeah, I agree.

46:17Chuck Bryant:So there's other theories that try 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.

46:46Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, there have been a lot of books written about it over the years. There was one in 1962 called Who Destroyed the Hindenburg by A.A. Hörling. And they blamed a ground rigger named Eric Spell, who was actually on the crew. He was inside the blimp and apparently blew it up to appease or to please his communist girlfriend. But I don't know if he survived or not, but that doesn't make sense. And I don't think there was any evidence at all about that.

47:13Chuck Bryant: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.

47:26Josh Clark:Yeah, he must have been the character in the movie that I saw that was running around up to no good.

47:32Chuck Bryant:Ben Dover is a character in that movie, but he goes by, I think, Joseph Spiel, I think.

47:37Josh Clark:Oh, this is a missed opportunity.

47:38Chuck Bryant:Oh, for sure.

47:40Josh Clark:Yeah.

47:40Chuck Bryant: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.

47:55Josh Clark:Yeah, so he's pro-hydrogen.

47:56Chuck Bryant:Very much so. He had an idea that, no, the hydrogen was, 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 town on this. Apparently he had a television special and had to really work at getting an actual piece of salvaged envelope from the Hindenburg. He burned it on TV, but he really had to bend over backwards to get this thing to light. So essentially his own demonstration proved to critics like that theory doesn't hold hydrogen.

48:42Josh Clark:Yeah, it was debunked. Boy, you were just flying all over the place with these jokes and double entendres. Very impressive.

48:49Chuck Bryant:Thanks. I appreciate you noticing.

48:51Josh Clark:The giant capacitor theory, there was just like five years ago, there's a Caltech professor named Konstantinos Giapas. Not sure where he was from. But he offered a different take on the ignition source. I think there was a PBS show, Hindenburg, colon, the new evidence. And here was the deal. There was, you know, that outer skin that we were talking about, but that skin wasn't directly wrapped on the frame. It had these little wooden spacers, like hundreds, I would imagine thousands of these things, spacing it out so it didn't actually touch the frame. And his proposal was that when the ship dropped those ropes that we talked about and 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.

49:38Josh Clark: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.

49:55Chuck Bryant:Yeah, so that's what we were saying, that the ignition point, the spark, and the hydrogen leak being at the same spot was very unlikely. And what Geopas basically said was like, no, all those spacers became capacitors themselves. And they were all storing all this energy, negative on the frame, positive on the skin. And all it took was one spark for all of them to start sparking. And if you have hundreds or, like you said, thousands of little capacitors sparking at once, it's going to blow up a hydrogen dirigible. And it's going to do it pretty fast. And I said that there was four minutes in between the time when they dropped the mooring cables to the ground and the time the Hindenburg blew up.

50:42Chuck Bryant:And in one of the tests that Geopas 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 build up enough of a charge for the capacitor to spark.

50:59Josh Clark:Yeah, this sounds pretty good.

51:01Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I like this one a lot, too.

51:03Josh Clark:Yeah, and it's the most recent one. I guess the others have been debunked, so, you know, I'm bandwagoning, admittedly. For sure.

51:12Chuck Bryant:So one of the things that a lot of people aren't aware of is that the Hindenburg, when it went up, not only did it immediately put an end to the idea of transatlantic airship flights or airships in general, aside from Goodyear, who braved on. That was it, yeah. It put the kibosh on hydrogen as a fuel. That's why people like Addison Bain in the 90s were coming up with these things trying to defend hydrogen. They're saying, no, it's safe, 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.

51:46Josh Clark: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 Brin is the sort of brainchild behind that one. That thing is 400 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.

52:18Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And they all run on helium, not hydrogen, too.

52:21Josh Clark:Yeah. I mean, hydrogen's being used for other things. But yeah, they're still, I don't think they could ever use hydrogen again for something like this.

52:30Chuck Bryant: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 it was only the people who jumped from the Hindenburg who died. That's not true. That is an urban legend, and we kept it going, but this was 15 years ago. So come on. Give us a break. Okay.

52:58Josh Clark:Yeah. If you want to see parts of it, I told you, you know, some of the Smithsonian, some of the pieces of the ship, some of the luxury stuff, you know, kind of like the Titanic survived. The National Postal Museum has some stuff. Obviously, the Air and Space Museum has some stuff. And that's where you can see it. Just keep your eyes off that ladder. That's for Josh.

53:22Chuck Bryant: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.

53:35Josh Clark:This is just a really nice email from Michael in Columbus, Ohio. Hey, guys, just want to give you thanks for being one of the most consistent aspects of my world for almost two decades. I started listening when I was 10 years old. 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 us. I truly hope you two and Jerry and all the people who help behind the scenes are able to recognize the benefit and impact of having consistent worldly discourse.

54:08Josh Clark:Being able to turn on a podcast and learn about landing on the moon or the wonders of the world or anything in history really inspired the learning in me and continues to. spark my curiosity every week. Josh, Chuck, and team, you guys rock. Thanks from a 27-year-old kid trying to figure out this world. Hope remains alive, and that is Michael and Columbus.

54:27Chuck Bryant:Man, alive. That was really great. Thanks a lot, Michael. Yeah, that inspires us. Yeah, I'm inspired to go another 18 years, Chuck.

54:37Josh Clark:I hope I live that long.

54:39Chuck Bryant:You better, man.

54:40Josh Clark:Well, I plan on it.

54:42Chuck Bryant: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 stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com.

54:58Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

55:35Josh Clark:We'll be right back. Every sip. Skypot Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. Get your Skypot Protein Soda now at Target, Walmart, or Kroger. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. Apple Vacations semi-annual sale is here, and it's the perfect time to plan your next beach getaway. Enjoy up to$250 off international and Hawaii vacations, up to$150 off domestic trips and hotel savings up to 70 % off. With instant savings of$300,$500, or even$700, your escape has never been more rewarding. Book by May 28th at AppleVacations.com or contact your local travel advisor.

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