Today, we ride airships. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
Powered flight takes two
very different forms: heavier-than-air and
lighter-than-air. Heavier-than-air flight has
developed steadily, but lighter-than-air
transportation seems, for the moment, to have come
and gone. The grand hotels that buoyed gently
through the skies in the early 20th century have
completely vanished. Little more than advertising
blimps survive.
The first successful powered balloon flight was
made by the French steam-engine designer Giffard in
1852. He mounted a three-horsepower steam engine of
his own design on a 147-foot-long balloon and
chuffed away at six miles per hour on a three-hour
ride over the suburbs of Paris. Experimental
powered balloon flights continued for the next
fifty years. Oddly enough, many of those
experiments took place in the still wild west of
central California.
Then in 1900 Henry Deutsch, a French financier,
offered a 100,000-franc prize to the first person
who could fly the 14-mile course from the Paris
Aero Club around the Eiffel Tower and back in
thirty minutes. The two leading contenders were the
young Brazilian, Santos-Dumont, living in Paris,
and the German, Count von
Zeppelin.
Santos-Dumont, who just barely won the prize in
1901, soon lost hope for lighter-than-air flight.
"To propel a dirigible balloon through the air," he
complained "is like trying to push a candle through
a brick wall." He turned to heavier-than-air flight
and, in 1906, was the first European to fly an
airplane.
But Count von Zeppelin went on to develop the rigid
dirigible into a glorious machine. He was flying
passengers by 1910 and achieving remarkable
popularity in Germany. The public, in its huge
enthusiasm, completely forgave Zeppelin's
spectacular failures. The public also seriously
overrated the effectiveness of his vulnerable
bombing dirigibles during
WW-I.
And so, after the war, Zeppelin could begin
transoceanic service with really grand airships.
The grandest of these was the
Hindenburg. Completed in 1936, it was
just a little shorter than the Queen Mary. It served
fifty passengers and crossed the Atlantic Ocean in
two and a half days. This two-story flying hotel
had staterooms, a lounge, a promenade, a dining
room that offered venison and roast gosling -- all
the amenities anyone might think of.
When the Hindenburg caught fire and
burned in Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937, that put
an end to the great dirigibles. Nobody realized
that nothing can burn in hydrogen, and the real culprit was the
Hindenburg's fabric, soaked in
flammable acetone-based lacquer and aluminum
particles. Santos-Dumont, it seemed, had made the
right choice. Rather than tackle the tractable
problems of making airships safe, people abandoned
them and went with the airplane.
But who, crammed in like a sardine on a
transatlantic jet and suffering jet lag, doesn't
look back at the gentle elegance of these quiet
monsters and grieve that hasty decision?
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work. (Theme Music)
(Theme music)
