Dirigible Dreams: The Age of the Airship

Index

INTRODUCTION

With plenty of Hindenburg tickets still available, ­Margaret G. Mather, an American in Europe wanting to return home, thought of buying one for New York. Although an experienced air traveler, she recalled her strange reluctance to make the purchase, but then she considered the alternative, which was to cross the Atlantic in increasingly luxurious steamers, whose lavish comfort and entertainment meant little to a sea-sick wretch like herself. She would fly. At a Frankfurt hotel she had her ticket and passport inspected, and then the luggage examination began, she said. It was courteous but very thorough; every inch of my bags was searched, every box opened. I had to pay for fifteen kilos overweight, and tried to argue that point, as I weigh twenty kilos less than the average man, but I was told ‘it is the rule.’ ¹

Mather and thirty-five other passengers, half the Hindenburg’s usual complement, took a bus from the hotel to the airport, and when she saw the great silver airship tethered to the ground, a wave of joy swept over her and, she remembered, Gone were all my doubts and reluctance; I felt all the elation and pleasure that had failed me until now. Retractable steps led her aboard, where on the lower deck she located her cabin, finding it very tiny but complete, with washstand and cupboards and a sloping window. The room also had a narrow but comfortable bed furnished with soft, light blankets and sheets of fine linen, the same material that lined the pearl-gray walls. Having explored her lodgings, she went upstairs to join the other passengers leaning over the lounge windows to watch the ascent. The ground crew had just released the ropes and, this being Germany in 1937, a brass band thumped out martial music while little boy Nazis scurried after the rising airship. It was an indescribable feeling of lightness and buoyancy, she recalled, a lift and pull upward, quite unlike an airplane.

The Hindenburg might have been the sturdiest airship ever built, but like all airships it bruised easily when earthbound, and so departures came at either sunrise or sunset, when winds were lightest. For this reason lift-off had taken place at sundown, May 3, and through the growing dusk the passengers strained to catch a glimpse of the Rhine somewhere below. Flashing beacons guided the dirigible from hill to hill as it passed over hamlets and villages gleaming jewel-like in the darkness, Mather said, before coming to Cologne and a spreading mass of lights that silhouetted the city’s famous cathedral. At 10 p.m. she and her fellow travelers sat down for a late supper of cold meats and salads.

Unattached passengers ate together at a long table and Mather, as the lone single woman aboard, found herself placed at Captain Max Pruss’s right elbow. She thought the captain both professional and genial, and the following day, May 4, he confided in her that because of the weather this was one of the worst trips he had ever made. Conditions outside may have been appalling, yet inside the airship Mather observed that one felt no motion, though the wind beat like waves against the sides of the ship. It was almost uncanny. Enjoying the chance to rest, she spent most of that day looking through my sloping window at the angry waves, whitening the sea so far below.

Living with others in close quarters allowed Mather to make acquaintances, acquaintances that at the end of any other airship voyage would likely have resulted in years of mutual correspondence, and perhaps hopes for a happy reunion. Among those she got to know included a red-faced man who drank and a gentle elderly couple from Hamburg who loved the Hindenburg and held tickets for a return flight. There was also a family aboard with a well-behaved girl and two boys that Mather liked to watch, the children obviously enjoying the trip so much. Among the other travelers heading to the United States were young American men happy to be going home, where, one of them told her, you could drink plain water and there’s no bother about passports. Mather also befriended a Long Island couple returning from a brief business trip but whom, to protect their privacy in death, she subsequently named only as Mr. and Mrs. ——.

On the afternoon of May 5, the second full day of flight, Newfoundland came abeam and the winds lessened. The airship flew low, as low as six or seven hundred feet, over gray waters speckled with white icebergs. A double rainbow completely encircled the ship. That night, Mather slept like a child. At dawn, with no more land in sight, bad weather returned, and in Germany, where every day of every flight of the Hindenburg made news, the Berlin papers reported the airship being twelve hours behind schedule. Whether Mather knew of this she did not say, but it’s unlikely she would have complained about additional time aloft. Indeed, when Boston suddenly appeared below on the morning of May 6, she turned to a fellow traveler and said of herself, It is ridiculous to feel so happy.

The vessels in the harbor saluted the flying leviathan with horns and whistles, and in the suburbs cars pulled to the curb and their occupants leapt out to look heavenward. Resembling bees buzzing a bear, diminutive airplanes flew close to the giant dirigible as it headed toward Providence, Rhode Island. Then, over Long Island Sound, an excited Yalie searched the landscape to the north for a glimpse of his alma mater, and to the south Mr. and Mrs. —— showed Mather the bay where they lived and explained that their son would drive to Lakehurst, New Jersey, to meet them at the air station. Next, the Hindenburg reached Manhattan, and like a tourist taking in the sights, passed over Fifth Avenue and Central Park before heading west. Lakehurst was only fifty miles distant, and the airship arrived within the hour. Mather, however, noted a line of black clouds and bright lightning in the near distance, and saw that no attempt was being made to land.

As if patiently awaiting its appointment with fate, the Hindenburg left Lakehurst and marked time by flying over the beaches and forests of New Jersey or making short sorties out to sea. Mather was also in no rush, and remembered that I was feeling foolish with happiness and didn’t really care how long this cruising lasted. The stewards served an early tea, followed at 6:30 p.m. by sandwiches because, the passengers learned, the atmospherics remained unsettled and the ship might have to linger in the air for an hour or so longer. Apparently a decision to land had then been made by Pruss in the control car, and all at once they were over Lakehurst again. In rapid succession the airship circled the mooring mast, speed and altitude were reduced, ropes were thrown down, and as she leaned out an open window in the dining salon, Mather said she heard the dull muffled sound of an explosion.

Almost instantly the ship lurched and I was hurled a distance of fifteen or twenty feet against an end wall, she said. Then the flames blew in, long tongues of flame, bright red and very beautiful. Amid the flames the passengers were thrown about by the continued lurching, cutting themselves against the sharp metal edges of the Bauhaus furniture. They were streaming with blood, she said of those around her, I saw a number of men leap from the windows, but I sat just where I had fallen, holding the lapels of my coat over my face, feeling the flames light on my back, my hat, my hair, trying to beat them out, watching the horrified faces of my companions as they leaped up and down. Mather was waiting for the inevitable crash but, as far as she could tell, there was none. She heard a loud voice in her direction: Come out lady! it said. She looked and saw that the zeppelin was on the ground and that two or three men were outside. Aren’t you coming? asked one of them. Accepting his suggestion, she left the airship and ran across earth scattered with burning framework. She had survived but her hands were singed.

Mather was among the first to be driven to the first aid station. She was in great pain yet her condition was hardly as dire as others. A terribly injured man was seated on a table next to me—most of his clothes and his hair had been burned off, she said, someone told me he was Captain Lehmann. A commander of many Hindenburg flights, this time Lehmann had been aboard as a training officer, and she could see it was him. During his infrequent appearances among the passengers he had worn a leather coat with fur lining, upturned collar, which partly hid his face, she remembered. He always looked alert but genial, with keen blue eyes. Now his face was grave and calm, and not a groan escaped him as he sat there, wetting his burns. The two shared some ointment, he murmuring danke schöne every time she passed the bottle. It was a strange, quiet interlude, she said, almost as though we were having tea together. I was impressed by his stoic calm, but only when I learned of his death the next day did I realize his heroism.

Terribly wounded people flowed in from all sides, Mather continued of her ordeal, and I could not bear the sights and sounds. I went outside and saw an ambulance draw up. I waited to see if any of my acquaintances were in it. To her horror, when the doors were opened she saw a pile of bodies. Two or three were lifted out, one remained. All I could see of him were his legs, burned and stiff like charred pieces of wood. She felt sick and went outside where the Hindenburg was still burning. I watched it with anguish. Even in the midst of human suffering and death I could not but regret the destruction of so beautiful a thing. I thought of the happiness it had given to me and to many others; of the icebergs and rainbows we had flown over; I thought of how gently it had landed.

Lakehurst, New Jersey, May 6, 1937.

Few catastrophes have been so perfectly captured on film as was the fiery destruction of the Hindenburg. As horrific as the images were, however, the fact remains that two-thirds of those aboard survived, including, of course, Margaret Mather. Equally remarkable: up until then not a single fatality or serious injury had ever been attributed to an airship while in revenue service—something that could hardly be said of the airplane, which by 1937 had killed too many passengers to count. And even when operating safely, no aircraft of the day could possibly have flown nonstop from southern Germany to North and South America as the Hindenburg had done with regularity, let alone with a full load of ­seventy-two passengers, forty crew members, tons of mail, and on occasion an automobile, a private plane, or an antelope on board. Additionally, it would not be until the late 1950s that passenger planes could be expected to reliably fly the Atlantic in one hop, something the Hindenburg had done with ease some two score years earlier. And should, by a miracle of forbearance, Captain Pruss have opted not to land at Lakehurst that terrible night, he would still have had food and fuel to reach his alternative landing site in Akron, Ohio; the airship mast at Dearborn, Michigan; or, in a stretch, possibly the dirigible base in Sunnyvale, California.

With the promise of airship travel still salient, therefore, no one thought immediately after the nightmare at Lakehurst that the airship was dead. To the contrary, the United States moved to guarantee delivery of the nonflammable gas helium to Germany for the Hindenburg’s sister ship, the second Graf Zeppelin, thus making a similar conflagration impossible. And yet, after the tragedy of May 6, 1937, not a single customer was taken up in an airship ever again, and by the start of World War II just two years later, the airship had become entirely extinct. Yes, puny blimps of the Goodyear Tire variety, holding at best six people, can occasionally be sighted bobbing in the skies above, but these balloons with motors are but quaint reminders of the beginning of man’s dirigible dreams, and not of their ultimate realization in gargantuan craft capable of fantastic feats of discovery, warfare, and commerce. Regrettably, the dirigible age came and went far too quickly—so quickly, in fact, that an infant at its advent would have been just a middle-aged man or woman at its conclusion—and arguably the dirigible remains one of the shortest-lived modes of transportation ever conceived. The brief epoch of the airship, however, was charged with incredible potential, it consumed nations and imaginations, and for an exciting period in aviation history it represented the future of human flight.

ONE

As enthusiastic supporters of the aeronaut’s experiments, Parisians welcomed his newest creation, Santos-Dumont Number 5, and early one quiet Saturday morning, July 13, 1901, No. 5 started off from the Parc d’Aérostation at Saint Cloud in the direction of the Eiffel Tower. At the controls stood the airship’s designer and sole occupant, Alberto ­Santos-Dumont, while the Scientific Commission of the Aéro Club watched from the ground. Santos-Dumont reached the tower, about three and a half miles distant, in ten minutes, and, cautiously circumventing the structure, set a course back to Saint Cloud. Having made good speed thus far and cruising safely over the chimney pots and steeples of Paris, he had minutes to spare, but then, in the homestretch, No. 5 faced stubborn headwinds that proved too much for its sixteen-horsepower motor. Knowing he would not be awarded the Deutsch Prize that day, a frustrated ­Santos-Dumont passed over the upturned heads of the Scientific Commission at an altitude of 660 feet, the thirty-minute time limit allotted for the sortie having long since elapsed.

Just at this moment, Santos-Dumont recalled of what happened next, my capricious motor stopped, and the airship, bereft of its power, drifted until it fell on the tallest chestnut tree in the park of M. Edmond de Rothschild.² Inhabitants and servants ran out of the villa toward the stricken No. 5, and there they saw Santos-Dumont marooned on high. Nearby lived the Princess Isabel, Comtesse d’Eu, exiled heir to the Brazilian throne, and she sent a champagne lunch up to her compatriot with an invitation to, after he got down, come tell her of his trip. When my story was over, he recalled, she said to me: ‘Your evolutions in the air made me think of the flight of our great birds of Brazil. I hope that you will succeed for the glory of our common country.’³

The Scientific Commission reassembled less than a month later, this time at 6:30 a.m., and its members again watched as Santos-­Dumont flew toward the Eiffel Tower in his quest for the Deutsch Prize, named for the petroleum magnate and aviation enthusiast, Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe, who promised 100,000 francs to the first person to fly from Saint Cloud to the Eiffel Tower and back. The Brazilian aeronaut reached his goal in nine minutes—sixty seconds faster than his previous attempt, although along the way No. 5 had begun a slow descent because hydrogen had started to leak out from somewhere in the ­ellipsoidal-shaped gasbag. Ordinarily, Santos-Dumont would have come to earth immediately, but to do so would have meant abandoning the prize, and therefore he took the risk of going on. Again he successfully rounded the tower, although now his gasbag had shrunk visibly and, with the fortifications of Paris near La Muette beneath him, the suspension wires holding the keel of the craft to the gasbag had begun to sag. Some of the wires caught the propeller. I saw the propeller cutting and tearing at the wires, he said. I stopped the motor instantly. Then, as a consequence, the airship was at once driven back toward the Tower by the wind, which was strong.

Santos-Dumont always dreaded the prospect of being dashed against the Eiffel Tower in one of his airships and falling, he fretted, to the ground like a stone, and so he frantically searched for a place to land. However, with No. 5 fast losing hydrogen, chances to do so appeared slim. The half-empty balloon, he said of the gasbag above him, fluttering its empty end as an elephant waves his trunk, caused the airship’s stem to point upward at an alarming angle. What I most feared, therefore, was that the unequal strain on the suspension wires would break them one by one and so precipitate me to the ground.

He thought he could fly clear of the building immediately in front of him, the Trocadéro Hotel, and settle his craft on the Seine embankment just beyond, but instead he descended to about a hundred feet and hit the hotel roof, rupturing the bag. This was the ‘terrific explosion,’ he said, described in the newspapers of the day. Santos-Dumont and his No. 5 tumbled into a deep courtyard, but before hitting the ground the keel of the craft, a sixty-feet-long framework of curved pine scantlings and aluminum joints, fortuitously wedged itself at a forty-five-degree angle between a side wall and scaffolding beneath. The Brazilian aeronaut, perched fifty feet from the ground and balancing precariously on his overturned basket, managed to climb onto an adjacent windowsill where, once again, he found himself marooned on high. After what seemed like tedious waiting, he said, I saw a rope being lowered to me from the roof above. I held to it and was hauled up, when I perceived my rescuers to be the brave firemen of Paris. From their station at Passy they had been watching the flight of the airship. They had seen my fall and immediately hastened to the spot. It had been a close call, and Santos-Dumont admitted as much. The remembrance of it, he said, sometimes haunts me in my dreams.

Before he began experimenting with dirigibles, Santos-Dumont had designed a balloon of the free-floating, rotund type and called it Brazil, after his native country. Compared to the other balloons then flying over Paris, Brazil was a speck of a thing, a scant twenty feet in diameter and, even when deflated, as light as a feather. Santos-Dumont, himself diminutive at five feet, five inches and—he claimed—110 pounds, used very thin but very strong Japanese silk to hold the balloon’s 4,104 cubic feet of hydrogen. He also did everything else he could to keep the Brazil extremely light. The varnished silk envelope weighed only thirty-one pounds, the balloon’s basket just thirteen pounds, the guide rope seventeen and a half pounds (yet was a hundred yards long), and the grappling iron a mere six and a half pounds. Despite the misgivings of experts, Santos-Dumont’s little balloon proved successful. The ‘Brazil’ was very handy in the air, easy to control, he said of his aerial runabout. It was easy to pack also, on descending; and the story that I carried it in a valise is true.

Alberto Santos-Dumont.

To reinflate the Brazil he would need hydrogen, a gas relatively simple to make and praised by aeronauts because of its natural buoyancy. Fifteen times lighter than air, when hydrogen is trapped inside a balloon it can lift impressive loads. The gas expands and contracts with changes in atmospheric pressure and air temperature, but at sea level and at sixty degrees Fahrenheit a cubic foot of hydrogen will lift a little more than an ounce. Under these conditions, therefore, to loft Santos-­Dumont’s 110 pounds required 1,760 cubic feet of hydrogen, meaning that his Brazil, with a capacity of 4,104 cubic feet, was more than adequate for the job. Hydrogen, of course, did have and still has one very severe drawback: its enormous explosive potential when mixed with oxygen. Many an unlucky aeronaut in Santos-Dumont’s day met a ghastly end—often luridly depicted in the illustrated newspapers—through hydrogen explosions. Although acutely aware of this danger, he, like all aeronauts, stuck with hydrogen because there was no better substitute, hot air having far less lifting force and requiring that a flame be kept on board, while the nonflammable helium was still decades away.

Santos-Dumont and his No. 5 rounding the Eiffel Tower, July 13, 1901.

No. 5 with its keel wedged in the courtyard and its gas bag in shreds.

Prior to his first flight in the Brazil, Santos-Dumont had made, by his estimate, about thirty ascents in other balloons, and the most memorable flights at night. One is alone in the black void, he rhapsodized of his nocturnal jaunts, in a murky limbo where one seems to float without weight, without a surrounding world, a soul freed from the weight of matter! There is a flash upward and a faint roar. It is a railway train, the locomotive’s fires, maybe, illuminating for a moment its smoke as it rises. Then, for safety, we throw out more ballast and rise through the black solitudes of the clouds into a soul-lifting burst of splendid starlight. There, alone in the constellations, we await the dawn!

The aerial explorer admitted that balloons were his obsession, and that he had the money to indulge in them. (The family plantation back in São Paulo had four million coffee trees and 9,000 laborers, not to mention factories, docks, ships, and 146 miles of private railroad line.) Some of these spherical balloons I rented, Santos-Dumont explained of his hobby. Others I had constructed for me. Of such I have owned at least six or eight.⁴ Still, even with his great wealth, it took Santos-­Dumont a long time before he could overcome his aversion to the costly honorarium⁵ demanded by Parisian aeronauts for even the shortest of ascents.

It was in a Rio bookshop one day in 1897, while he was buying things to read for his second sea voyage to France, that Santos-Dumont, aged twenty-five, came across an account of Andrée and the giant polar balloon. Intrigued, when he arrived in Paris the young man sought out the balloon’s builder, Henri Lachambre, and asked how much it would cost to be taken up. Lachambre, perhaps moved by the youthful Brazilian’s enthusiasm, quoted a reasonable price. At the appointed day and hour Lachambre’s colleague, Alexis Machuron (just returned from the Arctic after inflating the Swedish aeronaut Andrée’s balloon) gave the order Let go all! and instantly Machuron and his passenger were