The Hindenburg Disaster

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“Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I-Heart Radio.”

Welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Now, this is one of those ones, Chuck, that I'm really surprised we haven't done all really. Yeah.

For sure. And actually, boy, talk about a segue. This is about the transatlantic voyage of the Hindenburg. But before we get into that quickly, we want to remind everybody, or maybe if you're hearing

this for the first time, about the Stuff It Sea voyage, that we are going on in partnership

with Virgin Voages, 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 It Sea, and it's us doing our thing, including a live podcast on board. And then some of our other colleagues too, including the stuff they don't want you to know

guys are going to be doing their thing too. On this, I think it's a five night voyage. That's right, October 2 through 7 from New York City to Burmuda, like I said, this is through Virgin. So that means it is a kid-free luxury experience.

And there's also going to be interactive sessions. We're going to meet meet and greet. They're going to be themed activations. Whoa, what do 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 hang out on a very large boat with us in the middle of the ocean and here”

is to our live podcast along with other things, then this is going to be our only chance to ever do that. Yeah, very nice. Are you going to go to virginvoages.com/stuff, and that's an 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 be bad. Because we're taking to the skies now, talking about what happened on May 6, 1937, when

the Hindenburg derigible 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, and that they built that thing and they tried it out and it crashed.

I didn't know that they had successfully flown the 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. 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 around trip to Buenos Aires and back from Germany before the unfortunate incident happened

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 Durgeball, which you mentioned a second ago, and there's actually

specific criteria to be a Durgeball and the Hindenburg just checked all the boxes. That's right, a Durgeball means it is powered. So it's not just floating around up there like a high air balloon. But high air balloons and Durgeballs 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. And then it means it's steerable as well. So you can, you can tell it to go into certain direction, tell it by way of working the rudder and powering those engines and it'll go in that direction. All you have to do is shout Durgeball, go there, and it goes well.

I didn't know that it was actually an ad, it can be an adjective as well. First terrible. Durgeball is steerable. So like this car is highly Durgeball 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? Like, current driver magazine and the disnewty writers. Yes, exactly. So there's three forms that Durgeball's come in, Chuck, and it basically all has to do with

how the structure, the blimp part, is well structured, I guess. The B word? Yeah, I know you're not really supposed to say that, but it's true.

“I mean, I think it's pretty accessible to say blimp, you know?”

Yeah, we got, you know, the East Lake Gulf Tournament is right near my house. And so when we're hanging out at the house during the tournament, oftentimes that good your 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 good your blimp and that you're

in laws have written in the good your blimp at our Akron show?

Yeah, I have never done that.

You know, obviously, Akron is the home of good year, and I think the blimp still in my father-in-law Steve is at one point road and that good year blimp, but I have never done it. So if anyone can take me up and you, I mean, you're enrided, you know? Oh, sure.

Sure. I assume that. If you're interested. I don't know if I am or not. My dead one on a hot air balloon ride, and I was like, I'm not giving 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 durgables 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 high air balloons are what makes a new Mexico's license plate so nice.

No, yeah. Agreed. The rigid is kind of like non-rigid except there's like a keyhole. There's like a structure for the keyhole, 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 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 it skeleton was made of dirt aluminum. 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. Yeah. It's a lot lighter than soft steel obviously. And in the case of the Hindenburg, and I learned this often in that YouTube video, it's

pretty cool to see those pictures as well. There are 15, 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 16 separate balloons between those rings, and that whole thing was covered with good-year 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 arms. Yeah, right?

Yeah. How many were there? Like 14, I guess then? I think 16 balloons, so that we all should mention that cotton canvas fabric was coated with

Yeah. It kept the sun off essentially so that the sun wouldn't heat. And 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?”

No. No. 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 the envelope, inside the blimp. And if you look at the hindenburg, there's like a little, you know, what's called the

gondola attached to the bottom of it, and that seems to be, I think, the cockpit, where if you were a passenger and you were hanging out in the hindenburg, you were inside that blimp. I had no idea about that, did you? Yeah.

I did, because like, where else would they be? Because, I mean, once you find out that there are like 25 cabins in 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 could your 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.

How does it compare to the 747? Where is that? Think it's like three times as long as the 747 and twice is tall. Yeah. It's seriously, like go look up, just type in like Hindenburg over New York City.

And the scale is really kind of drives at home, for sure. Yeah. It's really impressive. One of the other things I saw too is that it had a gas capacity. So the hydrogen it held of 7,662,000 cubic feet of hydrogen gas.

And to put that in perspective, that's the gas equivalent of 7,662,000 one cubic foot bags of topsoil that you get at the garden center. That's how much hydrogen gas it held.

“It's a lot of gas, and 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 air trip took five, and it had the sister ship, the LZ 130. They're still the two largest aircrafts to ever take flight off the ground.

Yeah.

It 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 Durjables up to that point, which had really been kind of going for almost 100 years at that point. I think it was an 1850 when the whole Durjable craze kicked off in Paris thanks to our friend Pierre Julianne.

Yes. That's right. There was the first one I think was an 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.

Thanks. It was really the French and Germans leading this charge. The French engineer named Jules Henri Giffle, 143 feet, pretty big. Sure.

He's at that. He also traveled 17 miles around in his first flight of his airship, which

is, again, nothingness, knees that he was puttering around at six miles an hour. Literally around, right? Yeah. In circles, it's such, 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 Giffleard was doing, but the French Army Corps of Engineers, like 30 years later, took their durs ball and 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.

Yeah, I mean, you're up there in the sky, so you don't have to give it a lot to get it going. Again, they're not going very fast, six to 10 miles an hour.

All of these so far have been non-rigid by the way, the first rigid one came in 1899 courtesy

come from. Yeah.

Zeppelin basically became the leader in developing, designing and developing airship

storage bowls 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, Zeppelin could go way faster, and it was like the promise of airship travel was just limitless at this time when Zeppelin came along. Yeah, for sure, and as far as the band, I can't remember who said it.

This is off the dome, but somebody said something about them going over, they would go over like a Led Zeppelin. Yeah.

“Obviously, that's a two-contradictory terms, and that's what they meant, they're being sort”

of, uh, cheeky, and of course, you know, it was the hidden berg was on the cover of their first record of their debut album. One other thing I looked up, the LZ, um, in any of the Zeppelin's, so like the first rigid airship was called LZ-1, and you mentioned for Led. No, I thought probably it was, yeah, but it's a luft shift or airship in German.

So airship Zeppelin-1 was the first rigid airship, the sister ship of the hidden berg,

was LZ-1-30, you know, 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 at really fast speeds, do not go in any models that are still in the single digits. That's just a good rule of thumb, I think.

All right, so if the, if the new plane comes out and it's the, oh, I don't know, airmax-7. Just wait until they get to 10, they're going to get their fast because those next three are not going to stay around very long. You're right. That's good advice.

So 1910 was the first commercial passenger flight.

“This baby went, uh, I think it carried 23 people, plus nine crew on a sight seeing loop.”

Yep. But it crashed, no casualties. No, get this. So this was LZ-7, still single digits. Yeah.

Ran out of fuel was blown off course and it had engine trouble and it crashed into some trees. But the fact that nobody died is pretty, um, well, happy, I guess. Yeah. Uh, 18 years later, we got our first transatlantic flight and this is what they were

gunned in for this thing went from Germany to, um, where the Hindeberg would go Lakehurst, New Jersey. It's sort of, uh, suburban Philadelphia, like East of Philly. Okay. 111 hours and 44 minutes. But this is what they were, you know, they were looking for, you know, the next wave of,

like, taking people. It wasn't just, like, wilder 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.

What about that? Got it. We'll be right. Some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite on humor me with Robert Smigle and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier this

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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 durgibles 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 Hindenburg, LZ1209, was the part of this larger planned fleet of specifically transatlantic luxury Zeppelin's that were going to essentially change the world and make it much smaller. Yeah, for sure. 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. 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's dollars, like $10,000 compared to about half that for an ocean liner, transatlantic ocean liner voyage. Yeah, those are one way to not like our voyage in October, which is round trip. That's right. They're bringing this back, right?

Yeah. Okay.

“It's going to leave us stranded and bermuda.”

I mean, they could drop us in Atlanta on the way home, I would think. Oh, that's a great idea. That's a wonderful idea. Chuck will ask. Okay.

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

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 do newspapers right about it. Like, oh my gosh, did you see Mrs. Aster 800 feet up hanging from the outside of the Indian Burger was amazing, you could see right up her dress.

“That's what that's what newspapers want to write about, you know, and so that's what they”

were doing. Yeah, today Mrs. Aster is equivalent, I guess, is Katy Perry. That's exactly right, Chuck. What a time to live. That was amazing.

So I mentioned Hydrogen and Helium as the LTA, a lot of the near gases used to power anything like this. And they had a real decision to make early on with the, the Hindenburg, like what to use. And the original design was Hydrogen. But then they said, those are crash of in 1930 of the British airship R101, out of the

single digits. Yes. So 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. But then there was a US Helium in Bargo, and the United States was the only maker and seller of Helium at the time. And so they said, all right, you know what, let's go back to Hydrogen and let's just cross

our fingers.

Yeah, there was a Helium act of 1925 that I never heard of, that the US is like, this

is a natural resource that we really need, so we're just going to keep it all ourselves. And we did a podcast on that at some point, right? On Helium. No, we definitely talked about it, because there was a shortage, and it was all, everybody was really worried about it sailing 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. It's like that makes me feel like we're definitely in a simulation sometimes. You know? 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 going to happen, and then nothing happens. Like something comes along and just completely does away with that randomly.

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, well, make more money, but also to make it heavier so that it would do all

the same things that would have had it been Helium. Yeah. So it wouldn't float away. Pretty much. Pretty much.

We went over some of the sizes.

“I think we should probably mention the cruising speed with 76 miles an hour with the”

top of 84 miles per hour. And total, you've got about 40 flight crew, 10 to 12 stewards and cooks as we'll learn that was a bartender as well. And then 50 passengers in 36, and then up to 72, I guess, because they built this extra cabin, right?

Right. And that was 1937 season, and I think 1936 was the only complete season in the Hindenburg service. One other thing that I was trying to get to the bottom of that was surprisingly hard to find was that it's cruising altitude.

Now, yeah, apparently it's usual cruising altitude or normal cruising altitude was like 650 feet or about 200 meters. Man, that's impressive.

It is impressive, but they would usually fly lower to basically fly under clouds, rather

than through or over them. So yeah, I mean, these things, I saw somebody say, like, 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. Yeah, I mean, also, I don't know if that didn't 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, the thing is pretty low. It is, like, kind of concerning low actually. Yeah.

Yeah. So Chuck, just a little more about what it looked like inside and what it was, you know, like

“aboard the Hindenburg, remember, these were luxury, like, state-of-the-art luxury”

accommodations in the mid-1930s, but they also had to adjust for weight and stuff like that, like, you were saying, seemed like there was for Micah everywhere. Like, it looked like the walls were made of for Micah, even. Yeah, totally a lot of for Micah, but that, that job, a little bit, with sort of the ardeco, looked that seem like it ran through out.

Yeah, for sure. They dressed for dinner, like you would think. There is an alluminum piano made specifically because a baby grand would just be too heavy. Yeah.

And they had, of course, incredible meals in this incredibly cramp 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, durable, that is actually pretty remarkable.

Yeah. It had a double airlock, apparently there was one lighter, so they didn't trust people to, you know, just to bring their own 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 created a drink, or, I guess, rather his wife did, British author Leslie Schortera, who created the saint.

Yeah. Franchise. His wife Pauline was aboard, and apparently they ran out of gin, like, probably pretty fast. A lot of gin based drinks back then.

Sure. So she created a martini made from a kishposer, which I looked up, which is like a, some sort of a cherry thing. Yeah. It's like a cherry-breend.

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 looksardo, liquor, and stuff, is it sort of like that? No. It's much lighter, and it's not nearly a therapy, and heavy.

It's more of a spirit than, like, a syrup. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, because the, yeah, looksardo is a, as a, a liquor, but the other one is a, like, a legit, 90 proof, you know, kind of thing.

Yeah. Oh. But it's, it is very good, and it's, like, a cherry flavor, so she used that instead of gin, and apparently, the, I don't, 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 the tragedy settles, I, I created a wasbang of a drink up there. Exactly. And I need to tell you about the human right cocktail, I can't put, but I saw somebody surmise that the other ingredients were probably driver moose, but you get a martini.

Grenadine, and not like Rose's Grenadine, but like the real pomegranate syrup, and lemon peel.

Sure. Don't try that. So, uh, what else? They had that piano.

“Oh, the cabins had running hot and cold water.”

They had a little fold down desk, but they, they were small.

And the, the crew cabins were, uh, just like you would expect a crew cabin to be very small. It looked like those beds were a couple of feet wide. Yeah. And there were bunk beds too.

Yeah. So, um, with a art deco ladder, no less too. Pretty. Of course. It was kind of cool.

Lookin. I'm not a huge fan of the 1930s aesthetic. Oh, I love it. I like the, uh, ladders. Yeah.

Yeah. For the bunk beds. I'm digging the deck up. Maybe you can get one of those off of eBay or something. Oh, man.

It's probably dead or gone up in flames, I would guess. Well, some of that stuff survived as an museum. True. So you can buy it, but maybe we could, you know, bust it out. Yeah, if we could break into this misony, get that ladder for you.

Um, and just pass everything else by and go straight for the hidden murder ladder. That's it. That's all you want. And I'd be like, I get it home and be like, I don't even have bunk beds. Um, so this is all getting lots of press like this is a big deal.

Remember, the hidden burgers part of a plane transit landing fleet. So this is, this is, this is big news. One thing that a lot of people forget is that the Nazis were in charge of German at the time. The hidden burger was a German ship.

It was a civilian ship, but it still had big fat swastikas on its tail fins. Oh, yeah.

“And I, as everyone knows the hidden burger went up in flames, I think is no coincidence”

that it's 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 alike us to psych them out.

And let's send the hidden burger on a three day publicity to around Europe, essentially. That was its maiden voyage in March of 1936. Yeah, they did a lot of these little propaganda flights. And apparently the, the, the one that looked it off on May 6, had some engine trouble. But they had had to skip endurance tests to because of one of those propaganda flights.

Right. Yeah. They were like, it'll be fine. They apparently think that they would have found the engine troubles. But the, the hidden burger 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, it's 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?

Right. Yeah, they, they completed 34 flights in 1936, which included some of those propaganda flights. One of which very famously at the 1936 Olympic Games here 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 Astros, you know, Nelson

“Rockefeller, the head of Eastern Airlines, TWA, Pan Am, like, I think they were kind of”

rubbing in the face of all these early airlines, saying, come play 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 their ship division? We'll sell them their ships, you know?

Yeah, they could have also been a little of both. Yeah, I'll be right. That millionaire's flight, you mentioned Eddie Rickenbacher was also on that. And he's the American flying ace from World War I who took down the red Baron. Yeah, yeah.

So I'm sure it was a tad awkward around the other German military Nazi leaders who were on that millionaire's flight, too. Yeah. Oh, this guy. Okay, so that was 1936, it was a triumphant year for the Hindenburg and it had six

more successful flights in 1937 when it started. I say we take a break and come back again and things just start to go poorly for the Hindenburg. How about that? All right, back.

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“You need to tell me what you know is somebody coming after me.”

Jacob told Levant, you're ruining my life. Listen to Kingdom of fraud on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, I was confused by the May stuff as well because here we are in May again, one year after the first commercial passage in 36, all those successful flights later, the seventh one of the new year on May 3rd, 1937, Captain Max Press was at the helm and it lifted

off there in Frankfurt, headed toward Lakehurst. 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 blimps 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 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 7pm, they descended in high winds from about 500 feet, down down down down to a little under 300 feet and they actually dropped those mooring ropes, which turned out spoiler alert could have caused this whole thing. Yeah. And they secured those ropes at 7.25, they secured those ropes to the ground with their

winch system and in less than 30 seconds, it was all over. Yeah. But the ropes 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, yeah, so it took, I think I saw 34 seconds from the time when the flames erupted to the”

time when the entire thing was destroyed and crashed on the ground. It went that fast.

Like I said, the stern, the tail of it caught fire first and the flames just kind of blew

through the envelope and came out the nose and what's just mind boggling is that as it landed on the ground because it was a light skeleton but not something you would want to land on you and in fact, one of the ground crew died from the skeleton landing on him. What's the hit the ground?

People were running out of the flames and survived. They were running for their lives and they actually made it, which is crazy. Yeah. I mean, we'll go ahead and go over the numbers. Two thirds of the people basically survived.

There were 97 people on board, total 36 passengers, 61 crew and only 36 people perished. 13 passengers and 22 crew and then the one ground crew person that you're talking about. And very famously, it was called "Live" by Chicago Radia, a reporter named her Morrison.

“And I think we should either, I'll read it, 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 herb Morrison impression there? I'll do my best. Wait, can you do it as Jim Morrison? No, maybe I should do it as Sammy Davis Jr., just to give it some light.

I would love to hear that if you're okay now.

That would be even that this decades later, it would be disrespectful, I think. Yeah, I guess it hasn't been 100 years. No. All right. So here we go.

This was her Morrison's call.

“And this is what was played in 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, 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. Honest is just laying there a massive smoking wreckage and everybody can hardly breathe

and talk. Please, I can hardly breathe. I'm going to step inside where I cannot see it. That was excellent. If you listen to her Morrison actually doing this, he's in between a lot of these sentences.

He's like, oh, yeah, he's just completely overwhelmed. It happens immediately. The moment he sees those flames, he's just completely overwhelmed. Go listen to her Morrison calling that because it's just quite stirring and he's the one who gave us that phrase, oh, the humanity.

“Yeah, apparently that's where that comes from.”

I did, I just kind of wanted to do a straight reading. I didn't want to do all the moaning. No, no. No, no, no. I didn't expect to do it.

Well, I didn't want to arouse anybody. Oh, yeah.

You've always got your eye like three steps ahead, man.

I hope so. But yeah, oh, the humanity that had never been said before. Is that true? I don't know. I don't know if it happened said, but certainly, her Morrison was the one who popularized it.

It seems to me like everything that he said was just pouring out of him without thinking. Yeah. So I would guess that was just off the cuff for him. Man, it's amazing. So again, only 36 of the 97 people who board perished immediately, there were about

1500 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. And next morning, it was on movie theater newsreels with an hours, both American and German investigators were there.

And immediately theories started coming out, kind of left and right. Yeah. So this is the 30s. Everybody's already starting to get wise to what the Nazis are like. There's also communists running around, maybe even old school anarchists who like to

throw bombs. So the idea that it was a act of sabotage was bandied about very quickly.

One of the first people who had their eyes set on them was a guy named Joseph Spay.

Have you, did you see his, his professional name? Uh, oh, no, I didn't. That's all 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. Professional name as an acrobat was Ben Dova. I'm not kidding. Oh, wow.

That's amazing. Yeah. So he, I'm just going to call him Ben Dova from here on out, it sounds like a Bart Simpson call into most avid. It totally does.

He was deemed suspicious by one of the stewards, a German steward, the board, the Timberg, and apparently the German steward told the authorities who were investigating this that he found Joseph Spay Ben Dova, 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.

“But he might also been like, I'm Ben Dova, you think, like, you should see what I've”

seen. 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 get a skeleton and plant a bomb. So, apparently they found zero evidence to that, like supporting him being a bomber whatsoever.

Yeah, I have not seen the film from 1975 with, uh, uh, what's the guy's name, a Georgie Scott, and, uh, and, and Bencroft, 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 $15 million movie at the time, which was a lot of dough, in 1975

for a movie. It was sure. What was going on with blimp's and disaster stuff in the '70s, because there was also that movie Black Sunday. Yeah.

That's the peak, it was peak disaster films, so they were, they were looking at all angles like that. I should have guessed that. There were other people who were considered for sabotage, anti-nautzees.

There was one that, that said, the Zeppelin Company and/or the Nazi party blew up the ship for insurance money. Yeah. That was one.

I think it was covered for $15 million, and according to West egg, that's about $355

million today. Wow. But the Nazi party would not have considered doing that. Yeah. That's a good point.

Yeah. Bombs being fired at from below, from above. The one thing they do know for sure is that the hydrogen was what, like, caused it to go up in flames in like 30 seconds. Right.

There's 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 was probably

“like a hydrogen leak, and that's what ignited the whole thing.”

Right. The thing is, like, that electrostatic charge, if it had, like, sparked, it would have had to have sparked exactly where that hydrogen leak was in a cross of 800 foot dergable. The chances of the spark and the leak happening at the exact same spot are pretty low. Right.

Yeah, agree. So there's other theories that that tried it, basically, basically everyone agrees. There was, it was, 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 can, you still have a lot of room to maneuver around and figure out, you know, what exactly led to this disaster.

And what's amazing is that we still don't know today.

Yeah, I mean, there've been a lot of books written about it over the year. There was one in 1962 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 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. No, and now that I see Michael Mooney, he wrote a book called The Hindenburg and that movie was based on The Hindenburg, and he basically used that theory.

“So that's why they would have made it like a bombing.”

Yeah, he must have been the character in the movie that I saw that was running around up to no good. Ben Dova is a character in that movie, but he goes by, I think, just a spiel. I think. So this is a missed opportunity.

Oh, for sure. Yeah.

There's also a theory about incendiary paint, which is basically a scientist from NASA named

Addison Bain, who his career is based on creating hydrogen fuel propulsion systems, right, using hydrogen as fuel. Yeah. So he's pro hydrogen. Very much so.

He had an idea that no, the hydrogen was, that was secondary. That 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 is not, doesn't hold hydrogen. Yeah.

It was, it was debunked. Boy, you were just flying all over the place with these jokes and double entendre. It's very impressive. Thanks. I appreciate you noticing.

The giant capacitor theory, those, just like five years ago, there's a Caltech Professor named Konstantino's G-Apus, not sure where he was from, but he offered a different take on the ignition source.

“I think there was a PBS show, Hindenburg, Colen, the new evidence.”

And here was a 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. So that's what we were saying, that the ignition point, the spark and the hydrogen leak

And what Jepis 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 hundreds or like you said, thousands of little capacitors sparking at once, it's going to blow up a hydrogen derrigeable and it's going to do it pretty fast. And I said that there were four minutes in between the time when they dropped the more

in cables to the ground and the time the Hindu bird blew up. And in this, in one of the tests that Jepis ran for Nova for this program, he basically ran essentially the same situation that the Hindu bird would have gone through under his theory. And it took four minutes for it to build up enough of a discharge for the capacitor to spark. So, yeah.

He's a 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, 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 Hindu bird went up, not only did it immediately put it into the idea of transatlantic airship flights or airships in general, aside from good year who brave dogs.

“But put the Kibosh on hydrogen as a fuel, that's why people like Addison Bane and 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 Hindu bird? Yeah.

You're a fool. And apparently it is safe in some ways compared to 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. And I think the Pathfinder 1, Google co-founder, Sergei Bryn is the sort of branch out behind that one. That thing is 400 in 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.

Yeah, they're still, I don't think they get every hydrogen again for something like this. We've talked about the Hindu bird before. It must have been on like one of the videos we did because I remember saying that none of the people who jumped, no, none of the people who didn't jump died that is all interesting who jumped from the Hindu bird who died.

That's not true. There's a urban legend and we kept it going, but this was 15 years ago, so come on, give us a break. Okay. Yeah.

“If you want to see parts of it, it's told you that some of this 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 and 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 wanted to give you thanks for being one of the most consistent aspects of my world for almost two decades. I started listening when I was 10 years old.

On and off, of course, at first, but in the last couple of years, I've been listening

to new episodes every week, such a gift you've given and are still giving to this world, sharing your stories, perspectives, and jokes, and rants, and spectacles with this. I truly hope you too, and Jerry, and all the people who help behind the scenes are able to recognize the benefit and 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 for 27 year old kid trying to figure out this world, Hope Remains alive, and that is Michael and Columbus. Man, why if that was really great, thanks a lot, Michael. Yeah, that inspires us.

Yeah, I'm inspired to go another 18 years, Chuck. I hope I live that long. You better, man. I, well, I plan on it.

“Okay, well, if you want to be like Michael and Sanders just a really cheap whiz, that's super”

nice email, we love those, love them. You can send it off to [email protected]. Stuff you should know is a production of "I Heart Radio." For more podcasts, my heart radio visit the I Heart Radio app.

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