by Grant Mckenzie

Created on: July 10, 2009

Before there were airplanes, there were airships. The grandest of these was the Hindenburg, which crashed in a fiery blaze on May 6, 1937 at the Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The Hindenburg represented the height of luxury air travel just as the Titanic was the pinnacle of transatlantic luxury only 25 years before, but there were many accomplishments that led to this success. Like the Titanic, however, there were also many oversights that led to the disaster.

BALLOONS

Man has yearned to join the birds since ancient times. In Greek mythology, Daedalus and Icarus patched wings together with feathers and wax. Reality and gravity succeeded for thousands of years in keeping man's feet planted firmly on the ground. In 1783, that all changed when the Montgolfier brothers designed the first balloons based on the buoyancy of heated air and the first manned flight occurred in a Montgolfier balloon on November 21, 1783. Shortly after that, on December 1, 1783, a French physicist named J.A.C. Charles designed and flew a hydrogen-filled balloon. This was significant since hydrogen could be enclosed in a sealed balloon and did not need a source of heat to fly.

EARLY DEVELOPMENTS

By the mid 1800's, not much advancement had been made in flight technology and in balloons more specifically. During the American Civil War, balloons were used for battlefield observation. Very little had changed from the Montgolfier designs and tethers were still in common use to prevent the balloon drifting away. At that time, there was no way to steer a balloon in flight. A German military observer, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, was inspired by the utility of these balloons and returned to Germany with ideas about how to make a balloon autonomous. His dirigibles, or balloons capable of directed flight, soon took shape, although progress in development was slow.

WARTIME ADVANCEMENTS

Using Charles' concept of a hydrogen-filled balloon, Zeppelin added a rigid streamlined body, engines, and cargo capacity to his airships, but it wasn't until WWI that advancements in design really began to take hold. Airships were used as observation platforms at first, just as the balloons had been in the American Civil war, but the autonomous nature and the range of the new dirigibles gave them much greater utility. By the end of the war, dirigibles had also been designed to drop bombs over French cities, making them the first long-range strategic bombers. The increases in range and

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