Hindenburg Reconsidered

Ajouté : 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]89 years ago on May 6th, 1937, a great airship burned in Lake, New Jersey. You all know the story. The airship Hindenburg exploded, a victim of its highly volatile hydrogen gas during a live radio broadcast in which reporter Herb Morrison screamed in horror, "Oh, the humanity." Virtually everybody aboard was killed, victims of the inescapable flame. It was later determined that the skin of the airship was made with material so volatile that it could be described as rocket fuel.

[00:00:34]It's a terrible story. But aside from the fact that the Hindenburg did indeed burn on May 6th, 1937, virtually nothing else in the story I just told is true.

[00:00:46]The story of the Hindenburg disaster has over time become more myth than fact.

[00:00:52]and truth has become nearly forgotten history.

[00:01:00]While airships were used during the Great War, the era of airship passenger travel was relatively brief. The airship Graph Zeppelin was the first airship to offer commercial transatlantic travel beginning in 1928. While its regular service was between Rio di Janeiro and Berlin, its first transatlantic trip was to the United States, landing at New Jerseys Lakest Naval Air Station. It was not the first transatlantic crossing by a rigid airship. The British airship R34 had accomplished that in 1919, but it represented a new era of airships built for commercial passenger and male service. In 1929, the Graph Zeppelin conducted a round the world flight, flying from and returning to Lakeurst.

[00:01:44]In its nine years of operation, the Graph Zeppelin would cross the Atlantic 144 times and log over a million miles.

[00:01:52]It was a pioneer, but in 1931, the Zeppelin company planned to construct two new airships specifically for transatlantic travel that would be larger, faster, and more luxurious.

[00:02:04]Hindenburg and his sister Graph Zeppelin 2 were the last of the rigid airships built for passenger service, at least during the age of the great airships.

[00:02:12]Who knows what the future may hold.

[00:02:14]Built as a flying hotel and able to cross the Atlantic in roughly 50 hours, the company advertised 2-day service versus a minimum of 5 days on a contemporary ocean liner. That of course came at a cost. Initially, a transatlantic ticket on the Hindenburg cost around a thousand Reich marks or $400 US, roughly double the cost of a first class ticket on an ocean liner and between 6 and $7,000 in today's money.

[00:02:39]At 83 ft 10 in long, the Hindenburg class airships, two were built, were the largest flying machines ever produced.

[00:02:46]The size of the Hindenberg class airships is hard to grasp today. A widebody passenger jet like a Boeing 777 is just 250 ft long. The Woolworth building, the tallest skyscraper in the world up to 1929, was some 8 ft shorter than the Hindenburg was long. Still, the Hindenburg was roughly only in league with its competition, ocean liners. The Titanic was 882 ft long. The giant airship was seen as the future of air travel. A passenger named Webb Miller explained in 1936, "In the past 16 years, I have flown about 150,000 miles in airplanes in America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, but have never before encountered such satisfactory air transportation, comparative comfort, freedom from noise, and vibrations afforded by the Hindenburg."

[00:03:33]But how long did it last? Longer than you might realize. One of the most interesting myths about the Hindenburg disaster was that it occurred on the maiden voyage of the airship. The myth actually goes back to the time that the disaster occurred, but it is certainly not true. The Hindenburg, designated the LZ number 129, LZ being a German abbreviation meaning Zeppelin airship, first flew a 3 and a half hour test flight on March 4th, 1936. It made its first transatlantic flight in March to Rio, although it struggled on the return trip, suffering a breakdown of two of its four engines. Arriving back in Germany on April 10th, after engine repairs, Hindenberg conducted the first trip on the route for which it had been designed. Frederick's haven to Lakeurst, arriving safely at Lakeurst on May 9th, taking just 61 hours and 5 minutes.

[00:04:21]Miller said of the trip that the only difficulty in the flight was convincing yourself that you were flying the Atlantic. It was actually necessary to continually remind yourself of this fact.

[00:04:31]While the airship had already successfully completed a a transatlantic round trip, the website airship.net explains that the trip, the first on the route for which the Hindenburg was built, was treated like a maiden voyage.

[00:04:42]The flight certainly had the traditional hallmarks of a maiden voyage, including a passenger list studded with notable personalities, and the excitement, glamour, and media attention, including a live radio broadcast from midair that was typical of a great ship's first journey on its intended route. The New York Daily News wrote of the line of people coming to view the airship in its hanger. There's a long, long line of winding and it leads almost halfway back to New York. And that was not the only trip. The Durible would successfully complete 10 round trips between Lakehurst and Fredericks and another seven between Brazil and Germany. And those were not the only flights to make the news. An October 1936 flight over several New England states intended apparently to support the idea of transatlantic airship service was widely reported as the millionaires flight. The Associated Press reported that a cross-section of the who's who of business, finance, and billionaires row.

[00:05:33]73 men in all gathered today for a 10-hour flight over six eastern states in the German Zeppelin Hindenburg.

[00:05:40]The Hindenburg was touted as easy travel for the 1936 Olympic Games. In fact, Hindenburg made 10 successful roundtrip voyages between Frederick's Heaven and Lakehurst. So, how did a myth arise that the disaster in May 1937 was on the airship's maiden voyage?

[00:05:55]One explanation is that airship travel is seasonal. Airships typically avoided travel across the North Atlantic in the months of January through April as winter storms, unpredictable winds, and poor weather conditions over the Atlantic made it hazardous for the light, lowowered airships. The trip that left Frankfurt for Lakehurst on May 3rd, 1937 was built as inaugurating the 1937 season of regular service. As such, it received much of the fanfare of a maiden flight, celebrity passengers, tourists coming to see the arrival, newspaper footage. The harrowing footage was shown in theaters around the world. And despite its previous fame, for many, the spectacular event on May 6, 1937 was the first day that they had ever heard or had seen pictures of the airship. It is understandable that the idea that the disaster occurred on the ship's inaugural flight as opposed to just the inaugural flight of the season became part of the legend.

[00:06:46]A second possibility is that many seem to connect the Hindenburg disaster with the sinking in 1912 of the Titanic. Both were famous vessels built for luxury and primarily serving the wealthy and both in fact were similar in length. Both also were traveling from Europe to New York. Both carried famous and wealthy people. Again, with so many parallels, it's easy to understand how people also started to believe that the Hindenburg, like the Titanic, faced disaster on its maiden voyage. In fact, it was the Zeppelin's 63rd flight. Which brings us to another myth that the Hindenburg exploded due to its hydrogen gas.

[00:07:22]It is true that the Hindenburg had been designed originally to use helium as its lifting gas. Helium is heavier and less buoyant than hydrogen, and it was at the time much rarer and more expensive. But unlike hydrogen, helium does not burn, making it inherently safer than highly inflammable hydrogen. However, not only was helium rare, but as mentioned in another episode of the history guy, in 1936, the vast bulk of the world's supply was in the United States. The US was building military airships and was hardly able to serve its own helium needs. The Minerals Act of 1925 essentially placed a monopoly on American helium for the US government.

[00:07:59]The US would not sell helium to Germany.

[00:08:03]Despite being designed with helium in mind, the Zeppelin was modified with gas bags made for easily produced hydrogen.

[00:08:09]In fact, that offered an advantage as hydrogen was more buoyant. Was that decision reckless? Not really. While the Zeppelin company recognized that helium would be safer, all durable passenger service to that time had been done using hydrogen. The Graph Zeppelin would travel over a million miles never having used anything other than hydrogen as a lifting gas. It never had an accident.

[00:08:31]In fact, the older Graph Zeppelin was known to naturally leak more hydrogen gas than the Hindenburg and had never experienced an accident. The designers had used numerous means to prevent explosion of the gas, and its use, while a calculated risk, was considered to be manageable. Recall Hindenburg made 63 trips without a fire. So, was hydrogen the cause of the airship's demise? While there are still arguments over what might have been the ignition source, in general, the assumption was that yes, the inflammable hydrogen is why the ship burned. A contemporary report by the US Department of Commerce came to that conclusion, saying the cause of the accident was the ignition of a mixture of free hydrogen and air. That was also the conclusion of the investigation in Germany with Hindenberg designer Hugo Eckner quick to blame the United States for the disaster owing to the helium embargo.

[00:09:20]But the theory has its detractors. most notably a NASA scientist who literally wrote the book on hydrogen.

[00:09:28]Addison Bane was the NASA engineer responsible for fueling the massive Saturn 5 rockets of the Apollo mission filled with liquid hydrogen. A 2017 article in the newspaper Florida Today explained that his friends joke that he ran the biggest gas station in the world pumping liquid hydrogen into rockets from Apollo to the space shuttle. Maine noticed several issues with the hydrogen theory. The journal the American Physics Society explains, "For example, Bane noticed that the fire burned rapidly in many directions. The Zeppelin remained aloft and upright for many seconds after the initial flames were seen, and the flames were bright, none of which are consistent with a hydrogen explosion.

[00:10:04]Hydrogen gas escapes quickly, and thus hydrogen flames, which burn invisible or blue, always burn upward, often with so much force that it extinguishes the flame."

[00:10:13]Ronaldo Bruto notes on the website of the World Business Academy, "You can find more than a single video of someone shooting a high velocity bullet into the tank of a conventional car and seeing it immediately blow up." The same person then shoots the same bullet from the same rifle into the tank of a hydrogen car and it doesn't blow up. It shoots a vibrant blue flame out of the tank into the air and self-extinguishes within minutes. After analysis, Maine instead finds a different culprit, the Hindenburg's skin. The American Physics Society notes in 1994, Bane obtained samples of the fabric that had covered the Hindenburg and had a volunteer team of scientists analyzed them using a variety of physical and chemical techniques, including an infrared spectrograph and scanning electron microscope, which provided the chemical signatures, the organic compounds and elements present. His conclusion, the source of the fire was the use of lacquers and metalbased paints on the outer hole and bladders which were ignited by an electrical discharge. I guess the moral of the story, he said, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel. They conclude, ironically, Bane's findings are not wellknown, and hence most scientists and members of the public persist in the uncritical belief that hydrogen caused the Hindenburg blaze.

[00:11:26]So, was hydrogen innocent? Well, not so fast. Other scientists have taken issue with Bane's theory. AJ Desler of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory summarizes the response in 2004. The composition of the paint is known and it is not a form of solid rocket fuel. Even if it were, it would at best burn around a thousand times too slowly to account for the rapid spread of the fire. For example, if the Hindenburg were coated with exactly the same solid rocket fuel as used in the space shuttle solid rocket boosters, it would take about 10 hours for the airship to burn from one end to the other end as compared to the actual time of 34 seconds.

[00:12:03]So, was it hydrogen or was it paint made of rocket fuel? Both have their advocates. Bane notes that despite their claims about helium, German documents at the time show that the response was to make changes to the airship coating.

[00:12:16]In 2017, Florida Today indicated that Bane was still maintaining that hydrogen was not the cause of the fire, something he presumably maintained until his death in 2025.

[00:12:26]But the two ideas might not be as contradictory as they seem. Bane's consideration was the cause of the fire, but he doesn't deny that once started, the huge amount of hydrogen in the airship would have contributed to the blaze. It's possible that Bane is correct that the flammable skin was where the blaze started, but once on fire, the roughly 7 million cubic feet of hydrogen then caused the fire to spread so rapidly through the massive airship. While hydrogen might have been spreading the fire, the orange flames seem in the films could not have been hydrogen. Obviously, the skin was burning as well. On January 10th, 2007, the television show Mythbusters tested the theory that the skin was rocket fuel and concluded a via scale model test that only hydrogen could explain how quickly the fire spread. The fire was fueled by a combination of the skin and the hydrogen. And whether the flame started with one or the other is still not known, but is generally accepted that it could have been either. But there's still a point of clear myth.

[00:13:19]Bane's quest to exonerate hydrogen began with him taking umbrage at a line on a plaque at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum with the words, "It's hydrogen exploded." As Florida Today explains, the man who wrote the book on hydrogen immediately thought, "No, no, no. There's something wrong here.

[00:13:36]Hydrogen doesn't explode."

[00:13:39]Thus, the actual myth that the Hindenburg exploded. While the fire spread quickly, it never had explosive force. The reason, as a fact sheet of the National Hydrogen Association explains, hydrogen has to be combined with oxygen, at least 10% to have the energy to create an explosion. As the 16 large gas cells on the Hindenburg were sealed, they did not contain enough oxygen to create an explosion. The Hindenburg burned quickly and certainly with the help of hydrogen, but it did not explode. While the entire event only took 30 seconds, the gas cells in fact allowed the durable to settle slowly to the ground.

[00:14:15]Which leads to another myth. How deadly was the accident? The spectacular film tends to convince people that it was virtually unservivable with millions of cubic feet of flammable gas going up so quickly. But that's not the case. In fact, there were only 35 fatalities among the 97 people on board. Nearly 2/3 survived with one fatality on the ground. In fact, some of the deaths were the result of people precipitously jumping who presumably might have survived had they only waited until the airship reached the ground. The bow of the airship was only some 75 ft in the air when the fire started. In fact, Hindenburg was not the deadliest airship disaster in history. More died when the US airship Akran crashed off the coast of New Jersey in 1933. Their 73 crew members died, although most presumably from drowning.

[00:15:01]So, was oh the humanity an overstatement? Well, at least it was the subject of yet another myth. Millions of people who have seen the video of the airship burning as WLS Chicago radio reporter Herb Morrison expressed his raw feelings watched the disaster. The impression has been that Mr. Morrison was broadcasting the disaster live and was narrating the now famous 8mm film.

[00:15:22]Neither is true. In fact, while Morrison's reaction was live, it was recorded on tape, not broadcast live, nor was the footage being aired live.

[00:15:32]The disaster occurred eight years before the first live TV news report by lol Thomas in March of 1940. The film played later in theaters and the audio played later on radio. The two were not put together for many years. Yet many of us alive today have only seen the disaster in this format familiar to audiences accustomed to the immediiacy of live news. It was never presented that way in 1937.

[00:15:55]>> It's bursting the flame. Get it started.

[00:15:57]Get this started. It's flashing. It's flashing terrible. Oh my. Get out of the way, please. It's burning, bursting in the flames and and it's falling on the roing fast and all the folks between it.

[00:16:07]This is terrible. This is the one of the worst catastrophes in the world. Oh, it's like 20 oh 4 500 ft into the sky.

[00:16:15]And it it's a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. And smoke and flames now. And the flame is rising to the ground. Not quite to the mooring mass over humanity and all the fans around it.

[00:16:29]But the film was enough. The disaster undermined a public faith in airships.

[00:16:35]The Graph Zeppelin operated for about another year before service ended. The Hindenburg's sister, Graph Zeppelin 2, never carried passengers. The era of the great airships largely ended on that field in New Jersey.

[00:16:50]And so much of how most of the world understands and conceives of this spectacular and famous event turns out to well not quite be the story and many parts are still unexplained. The question of exactly what caused the fire to start is still a matter of great dispute. Most dramatic representations say in film have tried to center on this story of sabotage, but to this day no solid evidence of sabotage aboard the Hindenburg has ever been found.

[00:17:19]It all goes to show you how even famous events can still be for the most part forgotten history.

[00:17:28]I hope you enjoyed watching this episode of The History Guy. And if you did, please feel free to like and subscribe and share the history guy with your friends. And if you also believe that history deserves to be remembered, then you can support the history guy as a member on YouTube, a supporter on our community at locals, or as a patron on Patreon. You can also check out our great merchandise shop or book a special message from the history guy on Cameo.

[00:18:21]Hey buddy, you want to come and film a video?

[00:18:27]I I'll take that as a no.