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Zeppelins - The Original Luxury Liners Of The Sky · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_03: Hey Alex, how are you?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_03: Hey sweetheart, how are you?
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_03: I just got finished washing my hair.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_03: How does it smell?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: Shout out to a previous episode on V Dell Sastoon from a couple weeks ago.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_03: Um Vidal Sassoon.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: Who knew?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I want to talk about something completely different.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, we're gonna change channels here.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, you and I definitely have different uh styles of things.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: And I I'm gonna share with you something that my wife said, and and uh this kind of kind of felt good and kind of hurt a little bit.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: She told me that you usually pick more interesting people than I do.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_03: And I I don't disagree.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_03: Like I feel like your episodes are a little more um they're a little more uh uh unexpected or random, and mine seem to be, you know, Teddy Roosevelt, right?
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: Right up the middle.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_03: That that kind of uh but I feel like you need both.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: And and I mean I wouldn't say the more interesting.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think random is the better, better um Yeah, yeah.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_03: Well, today I have a dead end.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_03: Now we both have established that we're not gonna talk about what dead ends are anymore, or or ask, pretend like we don't know what they are.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_03: But uh for those of you that don't know, they are our every other week episode where we talk about something that used to exist but doesn't anymore, or maybe fell out of favor, or something like that.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_03: That's sound right to me.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_03: That sounds great.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_03: That sounds really fun.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_03: Let's do it.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_03: So imagine that you are in, I don't know, you're in England, or you're in New York City, or you're in Germany, and you look up in the sky, and all of a sudden there's this giant, giant thing flying over you.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_03: And of course, this is really kind of before airplanes, or at least before airplanes were really popular, uh, and a lot of people had ridden on them.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, that thing became uh synonymous, much like much like we sometimes use proper names for the name of something, you know, we might say a zoom call when it's just really a conference call, or we might say Xerox when we mean uh, you know, Xerox these when we mean copy these.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_03: These were Zeppelins.
• 2:17
  unknown: Oh.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_03: Zeppelins.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_03: You heard of heard of those?
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_03: Sure, sure.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_03: They're like blimps.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, they are, but they aren't.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um and I say they're a dead end because actually uh blimps still exists, and actually, actually, um, we'll get to we'll get to what still exists and what doesn't.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_03: But um they were uh the brainchild of a man named Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_03: He was a German, uh he was of noble descent, he had some money, he put a lot of his own money into developing these things, and he had a dream of flight.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: What year are we talking here?
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_03: Uh we're talking the late 1800s.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_03: We're talking like, you know, starting in uh 1874.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: Pre-war, pre-World War.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, oh yeah.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_03: Uh as a matter of fact, um the first time that there is documentation of Zeppelin talking about a uh a Zeppelin, uh uh an airship, was in 1874.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_03: He had some entries in his diary about it.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_03: He kind of he became obsessed, much like other people did about airplanes.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_03: He became obsessed about airships.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_03: But before before we go any further, I want to kind of explain the differences uh between the three.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_03: So you you said um you said blimp, which is a common uh thing.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_03: A blimp and a Zeppelin are both airships.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um and a blimp is the type that is inflated by gas, and there's no rigid structure.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_03: There's no structure around it.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_03: The gas expands, and you know, at one point that was some hydrogen, at one point that was helium, and they've also used a thing called Blaugas, which was a German thing.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_03: It was a mix.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but that would be the way it was held its pressure was by pressure, air pressure.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_03: So the outside of it's like a balloon, kind of, right?
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like you could push in.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, you could push it in because there was no uh there was no structure.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_03: Even the giant ones like the Goodyear blimp.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_03: Well, yes, up until a point, and again, we'll get to the good the whole Goodyear story a little bit later, but um there were also semi-rigid ones which had a fixed keel attached to them, and they still used internal pressure to keep the thing uh rigid, but it had parts of it were supported by um by metal that might be steel, it might be aluminum, it might be wires, it might in some cases it was wood back in the day.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_03: And then there's rigid ones, rigid, these rigid um airframes are what really became the zeppelins.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_03: These these things did have entire structures inside of them that were uh covered in different gas bladders internally, and so Zeppelins were pretty much the rigid structure kind, like a steel uh uh exterior.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, they were bent uh in such a way that they formed.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_03: Well, originally, you know, there were people doing balloons way back in, I think even maybe the 1600, 1700s, there were people that were making balloons that were going up.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: The big difference with these airships was they were more cigar shaped, kind of football-shaped, American football shaped, and they were able to steer them.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_03: And so have you ever heard the term dirgible?
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_03: Or dirigible.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, dirigible.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, um, do you know that comes from the French word uh diriger, which means to steer?
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_03: So that's why these were called dirgibles.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_03: But yes, airships are not extinct.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um, zeppelins kind of are, but again, there's some changes to that, so I want to talk about it.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_03: But let's talk a little bit about uh Count Ferdinand.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_03: Wait, which one was the Hindenburg?
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_03: It was uh it was a rigid airship.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_03: So that would have been it was not a blimp, but it was a Zeppelin.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_03: It was a Zeppelin, and the only reason it was a Zeppelin is because it was made by the Zeppelin Company.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_03: So so a and at one point the Zeppelin Company was the biggest manufacturer and the the one making all of them.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, it was it would be like calling a a uh pickup truck a Ford.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_03: Got it.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_03: So that's what you mean by the brand name was Zeppelin.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_03: Correct, because of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_03: His full name was Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich Graf von Zeppelin.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_03: It's like every German name.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_03: And he was born uh in 1838, so he kind of barely made it to the 20th century.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_03: As a matter of fact, he uh he he was pretty old when they finally got these things in the air.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_03: He was born in uh uh the Bodensee, which um say means sea in German, but it's a lake.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_03: The Bodensee is a lake in Germany.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um and he went to a military school near Stuttgart and eventually became a military officer.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_03: So he kind of learned um military applications for these kind of things, which what do you think would be uh useful?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_03: Like if you had a balloon that you couldn't you couldn't really steer, it was very cumbersome.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_03: What would the military use that for, you think?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_03: Uh surveillance.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, they would put these things up and they could see the enemy coming.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that was something that Zeppelin was introduced to as he was in the military.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_03: And you were probably out of the range of something that could hit you.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_03: You yeah, and and the stuff back there wasn't back the stuff back then, the weapons they were using weren't very accurate and you know couldn't go very high.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_03: So if you were 200 feet in the air and behind enemy lines or behind your own lines.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_03: So it's not very stealthy.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like they can see that it's up there, but there's nothing they can do about it.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_03: It was kind of that way of uh you know security through through the fact that they couldn't do much about it.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_03: That changed, of course.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_03: But um Zeppelin really became interested in these uh airships while he was in the military.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um he was not um a young man when he started his company and actually became a company mate devoted to Zeppelins.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_03: He was actually age 52, and back then that was pretty pretty old for somebody when he started building airships.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so have you ever heard the the term LZ?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_03: Like the the Hindenburg was um designated LZ 129, um the Graf Zeppelin was uh 127, LZ 127.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_03: No, I haven't.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_03: So that was their official name, uh LZ, and it stood for, and this was um German, Luftschiff Zeppelin.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_03: And so Luftschift means literally airship.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_03: So Luft is air, shift is ship.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_03: So they, you know, wasn't very original.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_03: Back in those days, too, everything was thought of in nautical terms because they didn't have flight, they didn't have any reference for it.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_03: So they you know they talked about things in knots and they talked about the the keel of it, and they talked about the port and starboard, you know, and the pilot was a captain.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_03: So this is like 30 years before the flight, right?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: Or yeah, yeah.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_03: This is this is like in um so so LZ1, which was the first product that uh Looftshift Loof Shift Zeppelin made, um, was built in 1898.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_03: So a couple decades before the airplanes started.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um well the first airplane flight was in 1903.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_03: So it was actually only five years before the first airplane.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_03: But um, but this was this was the first Zeppelin.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't necessarily the first balloon.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_03: There had been other people building balloons and trying different things, but this was a big difference maker.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_03: Now take a guess how long LZ1, their very first effort was just in in feet.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_03: How how far did it travel?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_03: Is what you're asking?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, how long it was, how big it was.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, oh.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_02: You know, these are pretty big, aren't they?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um but this is their first one.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: Hmm.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know, maybe uh um 50 feet.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_03: 420 feet.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_03: Oh.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_03: 420 feet.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_03: So significantly larger than a football field.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um, it had two metal gondolas.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: It used almost 400,000 cubic feet of hydrogen, and it had 17 gas cells.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_03: So this thing was a pretty, you know, you think about it, you look at it, it's like, yeah, it's just a big balloon.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_03: They weren't really that simple because they had to have this frame structure, they had to have these gas cells, they had to have a ballast and outriggers and engines to make make them move forward, and they had to be able to uh pitch up and down.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, there was actually quite a bit of engineering.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: But is is most of that area though for for the gas or like there you couldn't the cabin wasn't very large, right?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_03: No, the cabin was not very large.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_03: The gondola was um the gondola was used to carry the motor and the crew.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_03: That was really um so in some of these early ones, it was maybe eight people because there were a lot of jobs that had to happen.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_03: Some of the later uh Zeppelins would have a crew of 30 people, like the Hindenburg, I think was you know, 25, 30 people on the crew.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's still though, enormous for that few people.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's like not very efficient.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it is and it isn't.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, there were a couple of big advantages.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_03: So, this is also the time when airplanes were starting to be uh recognized.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_03: Their dream was to build um passenger passenger ships that were faster than airplanes or faster than ships, more comfortable than airplanes, and he wanted to have these uh ability for people to go back and forth across Europe and the United States and South America and all these places.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_03: And that actually happened.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_03: They actually were able to do that.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_03: But um, their first effort was called the LZ1, and it had a device.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_03: If you can imagine this long 420-foot airship, and there's the you know, the the front and the back, basically, the bow and the stern, and you had to point this thing up and down.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_03: They did that through a series of pulleys and weights.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_03: So they would they would pulley the weight to the front and it would tilt the nose down and then pulley the weight to the back, and it tilt the nose up.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, that's so that's so rudimentary, but yeah.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: You gotta crawl before you can walk, right?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_03: Well, this LZ1 um was actually launched uh on the Bowden Say um off of a boat.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_03: They built a big um kind of platform out in the water, and they wanted to launch it, and they had all kinds of trouble with it initially.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_03: It was, you know, the frame was not strong enough.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um the the bow would droop and the stern would droop because the the frame didn't hold those up.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_03: Um the weights that were used were always getting stuck, so it was hard.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_03: It was just really difficult and unreliable.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_03: Well, flash forward and uh and Count Zeppelin and his team develop more and more of these.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_03: So they start getting more and more.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_03: Now I told you he was a count, right?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_03: So he had some money.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_03: He threw all his own money at it, but he also had to go out and sell people on this and sell the government on it.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_03: And he had a really difficult time raising money at times.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you'd think this was something a lot of people would want.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_03: Well, they really actually some didn't, and some saw it as a waste of money.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_03: But he was able to convince people that this was the future, it was a good investment, and then also to get government subsidies.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_03: So during the during the wars, he actually didn't want to, but he turned them to the military during World War I, and uh the Zeppelins were used to bomb other countries, France, bomb England, they would fly them over and drop bombs.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_03: And like you said before, um, they were big giant targets, but there weren't really airplanes back then, or not very many of them.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_03: And the guns they had could hit them, but they were they were actually harder to take out of the sky than you might think.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_03: Well, right, because like you said, they weren't blimps.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_02: You could take a blimp out pretty easily, but uh but if with the steel structure, yeah, it's probably hard to bring down.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the steel structure was only a frame inside and it was covered with cloth.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it was covered with uh different types of of um waterproof and airtight uh cloth, but they also had bladders.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, this one had um I think the LZ1 had 17 gas cells that were made of rubberized cotton.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_03: And they, if one of them went out, it didn't take the whole aircraft down, right?
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_03: They could they could keep going.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, flash forward, um they do end up uh in 1928, they introduced the LZ 127, which was also called the Graf Zeppelin.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: So Graf is actually a word that means count.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, I remember I told you his whole name, part of it was Graph.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um, it's like Count Zeppelin.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_03: He was he was noble, he was mil or um nobility.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_03: So the Graf Zeppelin actually flew from 1928 to 1937, and it carried over 34,000 passengers during that time.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_03: Flew over a million miles on 590 flights, not a single injury during that whole time.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_03: And you said across oceans, even.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so they made successful um trips from uh Europe over to New York.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um and it was during this time, too, that they started to negotiate with American companies and suppliers, um, specifically Goodyear, to build a partnership.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_03: Now, part of that reason that they were negotiating with the US and wanting to partner was because these Zeppelins were all filled with hydrogen.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_03: And if you know your periodic table of the elements, hydrogen is number one.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_03: Well, they didn't even know, like at this time, helium was a um newly discovered thing.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't it wasn't something that most people knew about it, and it was discovered um in 1903.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_03: There was a uh plane in Kansas where they were um drilling for oil, you know, thanks to our buddy Rockefeller, and the they hit a pocket of gas.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the gas was escaping, and usually if it was natural gas or if it was oil or if it was some sort of petroleum, it would burn.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_03: This wouldn't burn.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: And so they figured out that there was uh 72% nitrogen, 15% methane, which is only um methane is only uh combustible when it's mixed with a lot of oxygen.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_03: Uh it was one percent hydrogen, and then uh 12% of an unidentified gas.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it turns out that that part of that was helium.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: Amarillo, Texas used to be the helium capital of the world.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: For the same, you know, all that oil.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_03: Well, this was all the central plains of the US, right?
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_03: Which Amarillo is kind of southern part of it, but yeah, this was in Kansas.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and basically they the Zeppelin company realized that helium was a future.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_03: Well, can you imagine some of the problems with helium?
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: Because everybody on the on the on the flight would have a high voice, you mean?
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_02: They don't talk like Mickey Mouse.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_03: Uh yes, that's one problem with helium.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_03: The only problem that I see, really.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_03: Well, first of all, it didn't explode, so that was a good thing.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_03: It was non-combustible, but it was rare, much more rare than hydrogen.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_03: Hydrogen's everywhere, right?
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you can pull hydrogen out of just about anything.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_03: But also the lifting power of helium is not nearly as strong as hydrogen.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_03: Hydrogen is like 78% better at lifting or something like that.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know the exact number.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_03: How fast were these?
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_03: Are we going like 20 miles an hour?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_03: Initially with like the LZ1, yes.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_03: I think you know, 18 miles an hour.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_03: And the problem they had with some of the early ones with their motors and such was the wind when you got up high was stronger than that.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: So they really, you know, they were sometimes traveling backwards and they would have to tack back and forth.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_03: You know, they were having problems.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: Can you imagine going from Europe to New York at 20 miles an hour and then sometimes backwards?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_03: So, so by the time they were making that flight, they were going 70, 80, even 100 miles an hour.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_03: Still, though.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: That's and they were also I guess it's faster than a ship, though, maybe.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yeah, it was much faster than a ship.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um, as a matter of fact, they were saying that the the um one of the big things about the Graf Zeppelin and eventually the Hindenburg was you could make it um it could go across the sea, um, drop off passengers, pick off, pick up passengers, and be back from Europe, you know, across to New York, back to Europe before the ship, you know, the Queen Mary or whatever had made it across the one way.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_03: More than twice as fast.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_03: They got to where they were going 100 miles an hour.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_03: The other big thing was initially they didn't understand air currents as well as they did later, but after some experimentation, they realized trade winds, just like in sea, existed up high, and there were currents that they could get into that would take them faster one way or the other.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_03: And and part of it was I believe it was faster going back to Europe than it was coming over here.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but if they came to the U.S.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_03: in a more southerly route, which added miles, it was actually faster.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_03: It was a longer trip, but it was faster because of the way they um the way they would do the experience.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: We still use that.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_03: Airplanes still do that.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_03: They even started to experiment with going over the North Pole and and kind of taking over because that's what a lot of airplanes do when you go to Europe, is you go, you don't go straight across the Atlantic or the Pacific, the Atlantic in that case, you go up over the pole.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_03: So this is all going on.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_03: The Graf Zeppelin is uh doing well, and then this is around the time, you know, as I said, it was like 1928 to 19 um thirty seven that that was going on.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_03: Well, of course, Hitler comes to power and the Nazis uh start to take over, and they initially were going to pull the plug.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_03: They were gonna say, hey, why are we wasting money on this?
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, quit the government subsidies.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_03: But then uh there was a guy named Joseph Goebbels.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_03: Have you heard of him?
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he was uh he was a their propaganda guy.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, mean son of a bitch.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_03: And he realized that Zeppelins were a huge opportunity to advertise the strength of Germany, advertise the strength of the um Nazi Party, and that it was really, you know, a source of pride.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_03: And so he put money into it, much to the chagrin of the folks running the Zeppelin Company.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_03: They were they were not happy about it, but they didn't really have a choice.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: Uh there was a guy named Hugo Eckner who kind of took over after Zeppelin got older and died.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, Hugo Eckner ran it for a long time, ran the Zeppelin Company, and he would do things like give half-hearted Nazi salutes.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um he accidentally forgot to put the Nazi flag on the back on a few flights.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_03: He did stuff like.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Like sort of subserve subversive stuff.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_03: And he actually was being uh followed by the Gestapo.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_03: He was being watched because they questioned his loyalty to the Nazi Party.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_03: He really kind of had some hard time.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_03: Well, he had gotten pretty famous.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_03: He actually knew Franklin Roosevelt.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_03: He he became friends with Franklin Roosevelt.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_03: He came to the U.S.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_03: many times because at that time crossing the ocean in an airship was a big deal.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_03: It was like world news.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_03: So after years and years and you know, quite a few iterations of the Zeppelins, they they did build the Hindenburg.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_03: Now the Hindenburg uh was named after a, I believe Hindenburg was he was a military um or a higher up military person in the German army before the Nazis.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_03: And that was another s another f uh slight that Hugo Eckner took at the Nazis by not naming it after Hitler or after one of the Nazi party.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um he he named it after somebody that was pre-Nazi, and but they were okay with it because he was a military guy and they they let that one go.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um the Hindenburg was enormous.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um any guess on how big is it was it was now the the LZ1 was 420, 430 feet long.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_03: Let's see.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it has to be probably man, I don't even know how to guess that.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_03: 804 feet.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_03: So imagine the size of these giant freighters you see going out in the ocean.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it was it was it was on order bigger than those, actually, much, much bigger than any commercial airplane today.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it it was it was enormous.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um and everybody thinks of it just as its um as its crash and its you know downfall, but it actually was successfully flown many, many times before that.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_03: As a matter of fact, it had um over 2,000 flights before it it was crashed, before it exploded.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: And so people and and here's the weird thing at the time people were convinced that flying an airship was safer than flying in airplanes because more people died in airplane accidents than died in in uh airship accidents.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_03: Oh wow.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_03: At the beginning.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_03: There was a guy, I'm not gonna get into all this, but I read this book called um uh Empire of the Sky, and it was a guy named Juan Tripp.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_03: Have you ever heard of Juan Tripp?
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_03: Juan Tripp was one of the first people to to build uh want to start commercial airline service.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_03: And he and Hugo Eckner, who took over the Zeppelin company, were kind of in a battle.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_03: It was kind of like uh Ford versus Ferrari or um who were the who were the electric, the AC versus the DC, uh Edison versus um uh who's your boy?
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um Tesla.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_03: Tesla, yeah.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um anyway, this was a a big thing because they were proving through those 2000 safe flights that the Hindenburg was a safe, um, comfortable because you know, you think about it, in an airplane, you're strapped into a seat.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_03: You can get up and walk, but there's not much place to go.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_03: The Hindenburg had a music room with a piano, it had a bar, a bar area, it had a dance floor, they would have bands that would come on.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_03: They had, you know, berths, much like on a train.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you had your own little cabin that you could stay in, depending on how much you paid.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_03: I've never seen any pictures of the inside of the Hindenburg.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_03: There are pictures of it.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_03: There's also you know, mock-ups of what it looked like.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_03: Rich people, right?
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_03: Very, very expensive for those tickets.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_02: So, how do you have an idea how how much that would cost?
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_03: They said it in terms of what it cost comparison to a uh first-class berth in a ship, like to go across, it was like four times that.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_03: Whoa.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_03: So, so and it wasn't as luxurious as a ship because ships had more room because ships could carry more people.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_03: They were they might not be as long, but they had multiple floors, and so you know, bigger cabins and state rooms and such.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_03: So, but they were much slower.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_03: And the other thing that was really popular about the um airships and traveling on them was how smooth they are.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_03: You don't really feel any shaking, you don't feel vibration generally if everything's going well.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_03: It's very smooth and very placid, and the views are amazing.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_03: No turbulence.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_03: You're not very high up.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you're you're not as high up, but also you know, you're all you're attached to such a big thing that while there may be turbulence, you don't feel it as much.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_03: And these guys were learning to avoid that.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_03: That was the big thing with these airship captains, is they were learning the the air the jet streams, they were learning how to avoid um turbulence.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_03: Some of the earliest crashes and disasters that the Zeppelin Company had were when they got turned sideways and the wind was blowing them sideways when they were trying to take off or land or when they were even tied down.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_03: Like that was huge.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_03: That was where they lost a lot of them was um basically winds that would catch the thing like a giant sail.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_03: So eventually uh, you know, 1937 came, and that's the year that the Lakehurst, New Jersey uh disaster happened in on May 6, 1937, and it kind of is what killed the rigid airship or the Zeppelin.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_03: There were 97 people aboard, and do you have do you know how many people died?
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_03: How many?
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_02: All of them, right?
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: Uh no, no, only 35 died.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_03: No kidding.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_03: 62 survived.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_03: Part of the reason, and part of the reason why um why airships were considered safer is even after it exploded, it didn't drop like a rock.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_03: It it fell to ground slowly because there was still hydrogen in it that was keeping it aloft.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_03: And so it came down slowly.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_03: It did, you know, really the fire was the bigger thing more than the fall.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, 62 people of the 97 survived, many injured.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_02: So if you were in a part of the Hindenburg that wasn't on fire, you just glided to the ground.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_03: You you didn't, I'd say gliding might be a little bit of an understatement, but yeah, you came you came at probably a fast pace, but not fast enough to kill you.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_03: And then the big thing was, you know, if you could escape before the balloon on top of you collapsed.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, I never knew that.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_03: Have you ever watched the videos of it?
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah, it's brutal.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and then that reporter, you know, with oh, the humanity.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, right?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_03: This was this was um so do you have any idea what caused it?
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_03: Hydrogen, the fact that it was powered by hydrogen.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but there were theories that it was sabotage.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_03: There were theories that it was the US government that sabotaged it because of the Nazis.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_03: Really?
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_03: But that wasn't the case.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_03: What what happened why would you put that out there if it's not the case?
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, the Nazis put it out there.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's not you putting it out there now.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, no, no.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_03: The the Nazis put it out there.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_03: There were there were investigations and there was a lot of you know international tension after that happened because there were people that said that a bomb was set off, there were people that said that the US government was behind it and there was a strange person that was seen on it, you know, that nobody could identify.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, but what happened is when the ship was coming in, and by the way, um our our boy um who took over for Zeppelin, Hugo Ekner, he was not flying at this time.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um the Nazis had kind of like taken that away from him, uh, that privilege.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_03: And so there was another guy flying it who was not quite as experienced, still had a lot of experience as an air airship captain, but he came in uh to he flew over New York, the Hindenburg flew over New York, and there's plenty of pictures of that.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_03: If you look for it, it it almost looks fake, but it actually was real, which I think is really cool how fake it looks, you know.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: That men it's so menacing the picture when the Hindenburg blocks the sunlight.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_02: And and all of a sudden it comes, it's just that dark cloud, and then you see that big thing over.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_03: It's really a cool it's so big that it could block.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's it's not like when an airplane flies over and you might see a shadow for half a second, but yeah.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_03: But but also people would go out on their roofs and applaud when these when these um dirgibles would go by.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, they were this was brand new to everybody, right?
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't like you had airplanes flying over all the time.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_03: This was quite a sight, and people remembered it.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it came in to New York and then it was headed to Lakehurst, New Jersey to land at a naval station.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_03: And what happened is there was a storm at the naval station, so they delayed the landing.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_03: And when the storm cleared up, they made some kind of extreme moves because they were running late and they wanted to get the passengers there on time.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_03: So they ran it a little too fast.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_03: They made some quick turns that kind of stressed the airframe, and a cable snapped inside of it, but nobody knew that.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_03: And when they got close and they uh put the mooring lines down, and there were usually big crews of people that would grab these mooring lines and tie them and hold them and you know, even walk the thing.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_03: But um the connection to the ground caused a static discharge, and that static discharge is what set it off.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_03: So while it was flying, whilst in flight, it wouldn't have that wouldn't have happened, but it was the fact that it was just like birds can land on a uh a wire um because they're not grounded, or or you know, linemen who work on electrical wires can touch a wire if they can hang from a wire, high voltage wire, and as long as they're not grounded, they're fine.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_03: As soon as it was grounded, that spark, that static that was caused by that um cable that was kind of moving around in there, the friction of that cable against the uh fabric caused a spark that set it up.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_03: And that spark happened because they were grounded.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_03: Damn.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_03: And and the Germans had known for a while that that hydrogen was more dangerous.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, the US had had a couple of airships.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um, we had one called the USS Akron that crashed at sea.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and we also had one that was uh called the USS Um, let's see, there was the Akron, the Shenandoah, and the Los Angeles.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_03: These were all actually airships that were built by the Zeppelin or built um off of the plans from the Zeppelin in the US for the US Navy.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_03: Now, what's interesting, they were trying to actually uh create an aircraft carrier and the Akron and the Macon, which were two um US uh rigid airships, were able to carry a couple of, I think it was up to like five or six uh Curtis Sparrowhawk biplanes and they would actually carry them from these sort of trapezas that hung below the airship, and then they would launch off of it, and then I think they could catch them too when they they landed.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_03: It was weird.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, imagine seeing uh uh an airship going over with airplanes hanging off of it.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's crazy.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's like when we used to see this the um the space shuttle coming in on top of the 747.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_03: Well, these both of these ships were designed.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_03: One was um they the US designated them, so the Germans called them LZ, as I said before.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_03: These were ZR, so they were called ZR, which stood for Zeppelin Rigid.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_03: So the ZR1 was the USS Shenandoah in 1922.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I don't know what the ZR2 was, but there was a ZR3, which was the USS Los Angeles.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the Akron was the ZR4 and the Macon was ZR5, and that's as far as they got because they pretty much crashed all of them.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_03: It was uh not a good use of government money.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_03: Well, after the Hindenburg, everybody kind of switched gears.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_03: Obviously, the Zeppelin Company suffered greatly.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_03: They couldn't, they couldn't sell these tickets anymore.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_03: World War II happened, and so Germany was up in terminal, and there wasn't, you know, there weren't people uh that there weren't Americans, rich Americans that would go on this flight, and Germans weren't coming to America on blimps anymore or on airships anymore.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_03: So um so the Zeppelin folded up, like they basically couldn't keep going.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_03: Now they did have this relationship with Goodyear, and Goodyear did for many years use their plans, eventually switching over to the blimps, as we talked about before.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_03: And so the Goodyear blimps have always been flown as uh kind of publicity, but in the uh 2000s, and I think this started in well, first of all, in uh 1997, uh the Zeppelin company was reinvigorated, somebody invested money back in it, and they started with these new designs that were a little bit smaller, they used helium, they were still uh semi-rigid, and they were called NT.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_03: So instead of uh LZ, these were NT.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_03: NT stands for Neua Technology, which is new technology, and in 1997 they built the uh NT1, which was 246 feet, so they didn't make them as big, they didn't try to carry as many people, but it basically was built to reinvigorate the Zeppelin company.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_03: It was their first prototype in many, many years, and it carried 14 passengers and two pilots.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_02: I don't really see the point anymore.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's just a novelty kind of thing.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_03: It was tourism, sightsees, sightseeing and tourism.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um, the other the other big thing is obviously uh the the Goodyear um use them for getting aerial footage of things, you know, sporting events or political events or whatever, but it's also just advertising.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: You remember when they used to have that hangar in spring and you'd drive up by 45 and you pass that Goodyear blimp hanger and you'd see that thing?
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm gonna blow your mind.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_03: I I went on the Goodyear Blimp.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_03: What?
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, I went on the Goodyear Blimp when I was like 14 or 15.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_03: Um, my mom was belonged to a uh nonprofit called Sunshine Camps, I think.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_03: And they had a um silent auction, and my mom or our family and another family went in on and Goodyear donated a ride on the blimp, and I think we went halves on it because it could carry like eight people or ten people or something.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_03: And so we went halves and we got to go up, and it was amazing.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: You went to the spring thing and you went to the hangar and you and you just did you just like tour around Houston?
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_03: Like I don't remember.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's weird.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_03: That's almost like a it's almost like a fever dream for me.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I had to ask my mom, did this really happen?
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_03: Because I don't think I have any pictures of it.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_03: You know, that's the thing back then, is if you weren't intentional and brought a camera, you might not have you bring a camera.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_03: I I don't know.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_03: That would have been a very smart thing to do.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_03: But there may be there may be pictures.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_03: I just might have to find them at my mom's house.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_03: So you went up in the 80s.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's cool.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_03: It was, and and again, I need to scour my my mom's house to see if I can find any pictures because I imagine my dad would have taken pictures, but I don't remember if my dad went with us or not.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_02: Was it scary?
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like was it or was it more of a like being in an airplane?
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_03: So I'll describe it.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_03: And first of all, I've never had any issue with I don't have an issue with airline turbulence.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_03: I've been in private planes.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_03: I've just like two years ago, uh went up in a helicopter several times for a job I was doing.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um and so I'm I have a high tolerance for that.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_03: I've been on um sail uh like gliders, you know, with no motor.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um so I have a high tolerance, but I was not scared at all.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_03: I was very excited, and the weirdest thing was you didn't like taxi down a runway, build up speed, and take off.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_03: You just got out of the hangar and then you pointed the nose straight up and then just started going straight up.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_03: Now I say straight up, like a 45-degree angle or some really steep angle.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_03: So you went from sitting level to being way back on your back, and then the thing is going up in the air, and you can look out, there's windows everywhere, but you're not you're not the thing's not flat.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it is going up because it doesn't matter.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_03: The thing could be the thing could be almost any direction and would still stay up.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't need the lift of a wing.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_03: And then when it landed, how was it?
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly the opposite.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_03: I'm glad you asked.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_03: It was like it was on a pivot, it was like uh it was on a spit or a pivot in the middle.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_03: It nosed down and and then used the motors to push it down towards the ground.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_03: And when we got close, it leveled off, and then they dropped the lines, they you know did something with the released some helium or whatever, and it just kind of slowly dropped down.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_03: It was super smooth.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_03: Really?
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_03: It didn't bounce or anything.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, very, very smooth, very smooth.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_03: And that's one of the things for today's applications.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_03: There are applications where they need to be um at altitude, and I say they the the researchers or whatever need to be at altitude, and they need to have smoothness, and so that was one of the things that there are still quite a few airships around that that are used for that purpose.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_02: I would love to see pictures, not just because I'd love to see a 14-year-old you, but um seeing Houston in the mid-80s would be a cool yeah, an aerial shot.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_02: It probably looks completely different than today.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_03: Also, no, and that's a funny thing.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_03: I I I had kind of forgotten about that, you know, and then I I've remembered it off and on.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_03: But anyway, it was a very cool experience.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_03: I wish I had I wish I had uh some documentation of it, but it was something I got to do.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_03: Also weird that you used to bring cameras everywhere back then.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_03: I know, I know.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_03: It's one one thing you didn't shoot.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_03: There there may be there, I definitely know there's not film of it because I had all the family films um converted recently.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_03: There may be photos of it, and my dad took a lot of pictures.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_03: He was a good photographer and you know had good good cameras and good lenses.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um there may be photos of it that I just need to find, you know.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_03: My my family's photos are not my my parents' photos are not very well organized.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_03: So I wanted to just kind of wrap up on the Goodyear blimps, though.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_03: So in as I said, the Zeppelin company came back into being um in the 90s, and now the uh four Goodyear blimps that exist now.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_03: Do you have any idea what their names are, what they're called?
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_03: It's just one word and then the number one and two.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_03: They're called the Wingfoot.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, oh, because of the Goodyear logo.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_03: There's Wingfoot 1, Wingfoot 2, Wingfoot 3, and then there's also a European uh wingfoot that's that's over in Europe.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_03: And they're about a quarter of the size of the Hinderbird, they're about 250 feet instead of 800 feet.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_02: As as somebody who goes to sporting events, uh that was always really cool when the Goodyear blimp was there.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_02: That was like a sign that you're at a big game.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_03: And and definitely um, you know, just kind of awe-inspiring to see it because again, they are so big and they're so slow, and they're just hanging up there.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_03: It isn't like they're it's not like a I mean a jet flyover is cool as can be, but uh uh airship just kind of hanging out in the sky.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, you know.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, I think a lot of that had to do with how cool the Goodyear blimp looked.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like now there's a Geico blimp, yeah, and it is not at all good looking or awe-inspiring or impressive.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's just an advertisement.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_02: Like it doesn't, it doesn't elicit any of that awe.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's just like, oh, look.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_03: There's also one for Dick's sporting goods, like a big white one that has the Dick's Sporting Goods logo on it.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, there are some of these.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_03: They're that they're a little bit smaller, but think about it.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_03: Goodyear was in partnership with with Zeppelin back in the day, right?
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_03: And they were building these things for the military back in the 20s and 30s.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_03: So they've have a they had a big head start.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_03: True.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_02: True.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_02: I the one thing that I'm that I keep thinking about though is that uh Count Um Zeppelin, Von Zeppelin, um when he was toiling away trying to perfect this thing and think about the right, you know, materials and the right uh uh mix of uh um you know uh fuel and all that, he had no idea that a hundred years later the only thing that his name would mean would mean hard rock.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_03: Well, well, so so let's talk about that.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um and by the way, just just so you know, the the four Goodyear blimps now are not blimps, they're actually um semi rigid airships.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, and they are uh Zeppelins, they're built by the Zeppelin Company in Germany.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_03: So so it is a dead end, but it's not.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_03: But let's talk about Led Zeppelin.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_03: Do you know the story of why um why they're named that?
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I would guess that it was an expression that something would go over like a lead balloon or a lead zeppelin or something.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_02: That was that it wouldn't go over well, right?
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_02: Isn't that wasn't there an expression that was something like that?
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_03: That is correct.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but the story goes that uh Jimmy Page was talking about creating a super group with Keith Moon, um Jeff Beck, and a guy named John End Whistle from the Who.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_03: In the Who, yeah.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_02: The bass player for the Who.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_03: So um Keith Moon.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_03: So this was this was before Led Zeppelin was popular.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um they were still playing, I think they were playing as the new yardbirds back then or or something prior to the name.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, Keith Moon said, Oh yeah, mate, that would go over like a lead balloon.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_03: And uh Paige took that and replaced the word balloon with Zeppelin because it's much bigger and more impressive.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_03: And then they actually um spelled it LED so that it wouldn't be pronounced lead, because L E A D could be smart.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_03: So you definitely had to say lead Zeppelin.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_03: That's where the name came from.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_03: I was kinda right about that.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_03: You were, you were, you didn't know that story, huh?
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_03: Mooney.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, under a raging moon.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_03: Well, uh that was uh probably the longest dead end we've ever done, but I figured there's a lot to that.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_03: It's a lead end.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_03: A lead end.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_03: Well hey everybody, hope you enjoyed it.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_03: Let us know what you think.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um be sure to be sure to you know hit that uh download button so that you can be notified when there's new things on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and also check us out on YouTube.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of great.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe we should uh spell dead end so people don't pronounce it deed.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_02: D.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_03: It's another deed end.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_03: Alright, bye everybody.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: We floated high in skies of old Balloon of steel and dreams in gold.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: We flew so far now.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: Stories told Prestige and grandeur they upheld Airplanes came and stole the show Speed and power stow the glow Up in clouds where legends grow The Deathlands phased out, oh so slow Oh, we rode in style Once upon a mile in the early days High above the haze With campaign night Starry tight, so the Zephyr in the light bright Crafted with care Good ear in hair Lounge just find wine Oh stole divine gift is guide is no despair Oh those flying shits so rare Tales of Zeppelin floating high Romantic dreams in Azure sky Abbot Yet we try to keep those memories OpenStack in the early days on the hate night life.