by John McPhee
The World concluded, “Very soon, if his hopes are realized, we shall have naval battles in the air, assignations in the clouds, evening sails above the foliage of the park, and airline railways with stations in the tree tops. When the Broadway railroad will be no necessity, and cigar smoke will get into nobody’s eyes but the skylark’s, and the overland route to California will be free from the reach of the Moyane, the Camanche, or the Pottawottamie.”
Andrews was a long time getting his second Aereon into the air, but when he did, on Friday, May 25, 1866, he took three other men with him: Waldo Hill, a director of the Aerial Navigation Company; C. M. Plumb, corporate secretary; and George Trow, publisher of The Art of Flying and of The Aereon, or Flying-Ship, and vice-president of the company. Emmett Densmore, treasurer of the Aerial Navigation Company, stayed on the ground. The new Aereon rose from the vacant lot and nearly ran into the building across the street. It moved northwest, with the wind, to Union Square. There it turned.
“The moment was critical,” the World said later. “The verdict of years of toil, thought, suspense, of a life-felt, life-wrought purpose was committed to the result. Changing her course, the gallant vessel, freighted with so many hopes, veered around as directed and bore on her unswaying, undeviating way, with tremendous velocity, annihilating space, and spurning the wind across whose path she rode, and whose advancing hosts she met and conquered … . She headed in a southwesterly line, along which she shot at a rate of less than three minutes to the mile. The wind, blowing quite freshly, came almost directly athwart the faces of the voyagers, and pieces of paper cast on the bosom of the air were wafted in a course contrary to that pursued by the machine, thus conclusively proving that, unlike balloons, the Aereon can proceed, if need be, against, and not slavishly with, the wind … . Navigation of the air was a fixed fact.”
Picking up a by now familiar theme, the World exulted elsewhere, “Lovers can henceforth soar.” The flight of the Aereon had been “a voyage of discovery through the azure ether that hung as a veil over the busy city. The ship easily and gracefully ascended to a height of some two thousand feet, or considerably more than six times the height of Trinity steeple, where, in mid air, the ceaseless hum of the city ascended with diminished and softened effect, and from whence the multitudinous mass of humanity that darken the streets appeared as Lilliputs, surrounded by houses of equal miniature extent, each intent upon his petty task or pleasure.”
Andrews made another flight, on June 5th. This time, only Plumb went with him. The Tribune’s aerial-navigation man, whose report appeared the next day, was the emotional opposite of his counterpart on the World. “It seemed clearly demonstrated that the balloon possessed motive power of its own,” said the Trib, “but it was at the same time apparent that the proper mechanism for using the power to its best effect has not yet been obtained. The voyagers continued to progress toward the north and disappeared in a cloud. We have no intelligence of their whereabouts up to the time of going to press.”
A Healing Art—A History of the Medical Society of New Jersey gives as record that Dr. Andrews created “the world’s first dirigible.” Aeronautical historians have been a little more hesitant in their diagnoses, ignoring him almost completely, and wondering, no doubt, just how stiff a wind the Aereons could buck. That latter flight went up Long Island Sound, for example, and terminated in Brookville. The previous one ended in Ravenswood, Queens. Andrews had shown, though, that he could turn to the left, turn to the right, fly a closed course. His aircraft was, in a word, dirigible. A depression rolled over the economy just then, and, being out of money, Andrews had to give up his experiments. A few years later, he died.
THE AGE OF ASSIGNATIONS in the sky, picnics over the foliage, may not have arrived as quickly as reporters once hoped, but the age did come, and by 1936 regularly scheduled voyages by commercial airship had been going on for almost thirty years. “Voyages” was the word used on the tickets, even for short runs within a country, and the connotation of ships floating in the atmosphere was not hyperbole but modest truth. The Luftschiffe (nearly all of them were German) were longer than most ocean liners. In the history of air travel, their voyages were without precedent and, as time would tend to show, without sequel. They flew at about seventy-five miles per hour —generally at low altitudes, where they functioned best, in the heavier air—and they crossed the Atlantic in two and a half days. They were steady, and extraordinarily free of vibration. There were no bumps. A milk bottle turned upside down and set on a table in Germany was once carried across the ocean that way, and it never fell. Trips were quiet, almost to the point of silence—engines far astern. In high summer, windows were open all the way. People looked through them at night down long corridors of light on the sea.
June 23, 1936, around 10:30 P.M., the Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei’s LZ-129—the Hindenburg—left Lakehurst for Frankfurt am Main. Eight hundred and four feet long, silver, cylindroid, with a fineness ratio (length over diameter) of six to one, the Hindenburg was the climax and meridian of the big rigid airships. Inside his cloth-covered aluminum frame (in German the gender of airships was masculine) were sixteen vast balloons—rubber bags filled with hydrogen—and they lifted him slowly into the night. He turned to the northeast, crossed pinewoods and horse pastures, thickening suburbs, Raritan and New York Bays. Then he moved in low over Manhattan, and his course was framed by the boulevard lights of Park Avenue, running on and on to the top of the city. The Queen Mary, in the Hudson, strung with lights, grunted cavernously—once, twice. Other ships cut in with horns, whistles, tugboat blasts of jazz-marine. By now, the passengers in the Hindenburg were themselves lighter than air. Most of them were leaning out the windows. There were fifty-seven of them in all, including Rear Admiral Greenslade, Lord Donegall, Captain Schulz-Heyn, Adriel Bird, Mrs. E. M. Latin, Erich Warburg, Olga Boesch. Max Schmeling was there, with a black eye. Max had just defeated Joe Louis. Jean Labatut, a Princeton professor of architecture, was aboard. And so was Charles Dollfus, the French aeronaut, the free-balloonist. Labatut, all but hanging by his feet, pointed a 16-mm. movie camera down at the city and used the airship as a dolly. The film that eventually resulted was, in effect, surreal. Points of light were all that emerged, against a background of absolute blackness. The city lights were less concentrated then, and Labatut’s film of New York, which he still has, is like a slow float through beaded stars and inhabited planets. Labatut finally went to bed, nodding bonsoir to his countryman Dollfus, who had been assigned to the same stateroom. Labatut had expected the cabin—in fact, the whole ship—to be full of handrails to clutch during aerial pitch and roll. There were none anywhere. They were unnecessary. The Professor fell sound asleep congratulating himself on his choice of transportation.
A month or so before, Labatut, on sheer impulse, had walked into the travel department of the Princeton Bank & Trust Co. and asked them to get in touch with the German Zeppelin Transport Company and seek passage for him on the Hindenburg. Each summer, he taught at Fontainebleau. Why not go to Europe this time in—as he put it—a flying sweet potato? He was sure there would be no berth left for him, but some days later the bank called him in and gave him what appeared to be a proclamatory leaflet, ten inches high. It was his ticket: “Die Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei G.m.b.H. übernimmt auf Grund ihrer Beförderungsbedingungen die Beförderung von Prof. Jean Labatut mit dem Luftschiff Hindenburg von Lakehurst nach Frankfurt. Fahrpreis—$400.00, plus $5.00 U.S. Tax.” The company had asked if Professor Labatut would like to inspect their airship beforehand. Yes, he would. He drove to Lakehurst—this was just before the Hindenburg’s departure on an earlier crossing—and he met Dr. Hugo Eckener himself, the commander, and stood stunned at the sight of the airship, a hill of silver, enormous beyond imagining. Out of the sky came a German aviator in a small airplane. He taxied around like a housefly. He had been giving aerial-acrobatic shows in various places in the United States, and he wondered if he could have a lift home. “Why not?” said Eckener. A large
hole was cut in the side of the Hindenburg. The airplane was put inside. The cloth was sutured. Departure was not much later than planned.
Labatut got up early in the morning on June 24th. The Hindenburg was now sliding over Penobscot Bay. Labatut filmed that, too. He was a rarefied sort of architect, who was to become a teacher of teachers of architecture, but he had the child’s eye of wonder, and he was stirred not only by the grace of the big airship but, even more, by the sedate revelations it presented as it flew. At such low altitude, a detailed frieze was constantly evolving beneath him, and he filmed it—animals, houses, towns, forests—in scenes dominated always by the two signatures of the Hindenburg, its reflection on water and its shadow on the land. Sometimes the reflection appeared black on white water. When the reflection ran into a shoreline, the shoreline cleanly ate it up. The Hindenburg just telescoped and disappeared. The shadow—great, unimpeded beluga—was somewhere else. Labatut would pan his camera and find it, rippling over the Maine islands or across great tear-shaped log booms on New Brunswick bays or across a field of high northern daisies on Prince Edward Island where a herd of cows ran in terror before the encroaching airship. Max Schmeling leaned out a window, a still camera pressed against his good eye, and recorded these scenes, too. Labatut turned and filmed Schmeling. The airship moved across Newfoundland’s trackless interior, bridging wilderness rivers and climbing high mountains. The Professor filmed the shadow of the Hindenburg on the Annieopsquotch Mountains. After three hundred miles of Newfoundland forest, the ship slowly crossed over blue-white icebergs in Notre Dame Bay and moved on over offshore islands, and then left North America for the open sea.
The passenger decks were not contained in any sort of external gondola but were entirely within the Hindenburg. Windows were slanted outward. They were part of the configuration of the hull. And as if that did not offer a sufficient view of earth and sea, the company had placed two rows of non-opening windows in the belly of the ship, so people could look straight down. When the customers showed signs of vertigo, acrophobia, or common fear, crew members jumped on the windows to demonstrate their tensile strength. Sleeping cabins were inside, amidships, flanked, on the main deck, by the lounge and writing room on one side and the dining room on the other. There was an aluminum grand piano in the lounge, and a bronze bust of Marshal Hindenburg. Labatut thought the bronze was striking, because it looked so heavy. He said that if Hindenburg’s head had been aluminum it would have seemed lighter than air. The smoking room, a deck below, was double-doored and pressurized, to repel any loose hydrogen that might inadvertently wander into the presence of flame. The cooking apparatus, which was electric, was similarly protected. Matches and cigarette lighters were confiscated at the outset of each voyage. The Hindenburg had been designed for helium, which does not burn and is a natural gas found in significant quantity only in Texas and Kansas. Helium, twice as dense as hydrogen, can lift only about ninety-three per cent of what hydrogen can lift—a factor that had to be taken into account in the engineering of the airframe. Helium for the Hindenburg once sat in steel bottles on New York piers, but it was never shipped. Rigid airships had been effective weapons in the First World War, and Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, refused to let a cubic centimetre of helium go in 1936 to Nazi Germany. The Hindenburg’s passengers, floating beneath seven million cubic feet of hydrogen, were all but unmindful of it, though, as they banqueted on Rhine salmon, Kalbshachsen, lobster, and caviar under the beneficent eye of Eckener, who presided at meals. Mrs. Latin asked Eckener, “What do you do when you go into a storm?” Eckener turned to her heavily. He was a thickset, jowly man with short, bristly hair and piercing eyes—a composite king of Prussia. His glance pierced Mrs. Latin. He said, “Madam, I am not stupid enough to go into a storm.” Dollfus, the aeronaut, enjoyed special privileges from his friend Eckener, who gave him the run of the ship, bow to stern, and Dollfus took Labatut with him onto the catwalks among the gas cells. “I pressed my finger into the rubber balloons and dared the hydrogen to explode,” Labatut remembered, years later. “I knew what the hydrogen was, but I was a true—a true innocent. On the catwalk was just as if you were in a barn.” Eckener invited Dollfus and Labatut to the control gondola, the Führergondel, which protruded below the keel. Two young crewmen were in there with Eckener, each manning a ship’s wheel. One wheel dealt with pitch, the other with roll, and it was up to these two youths to keep the Hindenburg stable in the air. Both were shining with sweat as they furiously whipped the wheels one way, then the other, panting, grunting, giving all they had to satisfy the gauges in front of them and the commander who stood watching. “That is good for them,” Eckener told the two Frenchmen. “Very good for them.” He also said that the duty at the wheels was so demanding that the helmsmen had to be replaced every thirty minutes.
Eckener inspired confidence. He was not just a flawless skipper. He was the leader of the airship transportation company, and—the ultimate credential—he had been trained by Count Zeppelin. Ferdinand von Zeppelin had conceived and developed the rigid airships. With the turn of the twentieth century, airship development splayed out in three directions. The sausage-shaped dirigible balloons of Alberto Santos-Dumont evolved into blimps, or non-rigid airships. The Lebaudy airships—long rubber bags with attached gondolas—evolved into semi-rigid airships (blimps with keels). Meanwhile, Count Zeppelin, of Friedrichshafen, decided that he would like to construct airships far too large to retain their shape on pressure alone. He built a huge floating hangar on Lake Constance, near his family estate. He hired metalsmiths and set them to work making transverse frames that would be joined together by longitudinal girders and covered with cloth. Zeppelin assumed a position sui generis in aeronautical history. From their early beginnings to their end, twenty years after his death, virtually all the big rigids ever built were of his design. His name became the name of his invention.
The Count was sixty-two when he completed, in 1900, Luftschiff Zeppelin 1. The idea had been in him for a long time. An entire career as a soldier was behind him. During the American Civil War, as a young German officer in his middle twenties, he had crossed the ocean with letters of introduction to President Lincoln and General Lee. He wished to participate in the war, and he did not care which way. He wanted experience. He called on President Lincoln, offered his assistance, and sought to impress the President by saying that his father before him had been the Graf Zeppelin, and his father before him, and his father before him, and so on. Lincoln told him to try not to let that get in his way. As things turned out, the war failed to interest the Graf. He went West. In Minneapolis, he was given his first ride in a free balloon. He must have liked it. If one balloon could give you a ride like that, he thought, why not a dozen, or fourteen, or sixteen balloons, arranged longitudinally and held within a rigid frame? Placing the lifting gas in multiple cells would help defeat the danger of punctures. In a rigid frame, it might be possible to build an airship four hundred feet long. He did so —thirty-five years later.
Luftschiff Zeppelin 1, 2, 3, and 4 were not uncomplicated successes. They broke, collapsed, and exploded, but they flew. They made unscheduled landings in the Rhine. It was the Graf who flew them, in his white cap, his wing collar, his wicked mustache. People ran through the streets of cities and villages cheering him, above. Church bells followed his flights. He even flew at night. He flew to Switzerland (the Schweizerfahrt), and cruised at forty miles per hour over Lucerne and Zurich. The Kaiser called him “the greatest German of the twentieth century.” Zeppelin Platz was dedicated in ceremonies in Berlin. The Graf had apparently solved his early technological problems. In 1909, at the age of seventy-one, he formed his transportation company—with Eckener, whose background was in economics—and began to fly passengers all over Germany. He built rigid airships for use as weapons in the First World War. They terrorized England. Whole populations fled provincial towns. The zeppelins, as they by now were called, sat up in the middle of the English clouds and each one reeled out a sma
ll “cloud car” until it hung in clear air, sometimes a thousand feet below. By telephone, the man in the cloud car directed the airship over targets and ordered the release of bombs. A hundred and fifty-seven rigid airships were all that were ever built in the world, and a hundred and thirty-eight of them were built in Germany. The first aircraft to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, an English rigid airship, was a zeppelin copy. The English built sixteen rigids in all. The United States Navy, in the course of time, had four. One of these, the Los Angeles, was a zeppelin built in Friedrichshafen and handed over as war reparations. Another, the Shenandoah, was a zeppelin copy. The Akron and the Macon were of American design. One fell into the Atlantic, the other fell into the Pacific. Meanwhile, under Hugo Eckener, the German Zeppelin Transport Company was continuing the perfect record of its founder, carrying passengers to domestic and foreign cities with no fatalities. In 1928, the company put into service the LZ-127, an extremely slender vessel (its fineness ratio was almost eight to one) that would compile, in the end, by far the most impressive log ever made by an airship, statistical proof for all time of the potentiality of the big rigids. Almost as if they knew how historically important this airship would be, the Germans named it the Graf Zeppelin. It flew one million fifty-three thousand three hundred and ninety-one miles. It once flew around the world, from Friedrichshafen to Tokyo to Lakehurst to Friedrichshafen. It carried, in its nine years, thirteen thousand passengers. It spent seventeen thousand hours in the air. The Graf Zeppelin was only twenty-nine feet shorter than the Hindenburg, and flying together, slowly going in and out of clouds, they were something to see—these phallic, Wagnerian rigids, brushed with mist. Hitler was only mildly inspired by them, but he knew propaganda when it floated by, and he ordered the big airships to present themselves overhead at outdoor rallies and sporting events—parading their immensity and the swastikas on their fins. The airship transportation company was operating at the sufferance of the Air Ministry, so the Hindenburg and the Graf Zeppelin generally appeared as requested, but not always. The company was not affectionate toward the government. Eventually, Eckener defied the Führer once too often, and he was removed from command of the Hindenburg, which flew without him to Lakehurst on May 4, 5, and 6, 1937. The Hindenburg burned while mooring there—a billowing holocaustal white fire. The Hindenburg completely burned up in thirty-four seconds. There was nothing left but fine gray ash and soft aluminum. The huge structure had crumpled instantly into tumbleweed heaps on the ground. The hydrogen burned at about three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. No one watching could imagine the possibility of there being survivors. Luck, though, seemed to run in variegated patterns under the flame. Some passengers and crewmen died at once, but the heat was driving upward, of course, and as the ship crashed the passengers were brought to ground level, where, even within the surrounding fire, there were cooler patches, avenues of escape. Some people came walking eerily out of the flames and fell dead. Others came out with minor burns. A number were completely unhurt. Sixty-one of ninety-seven survived. Thirteen of the dead were passengers—the only passenger fatalities in the history of commercial airships. No satisfactory explanation of the source of the fire ever emerged. It was a stormy day in New Jersey. Static electricity or some form of lightning were the official guesses. A reasonable theory has been advanced that a German saboteur, an anti-Nazi member of the crew, wishing to destroy this symbol of German power, blew it up with a flashbulb. The Graf Zeppelin, on the way home from Rio de Janeiro, was approaching the Canary Islands at the time. The radio operator picked up the news, and the captain decided not to inform the passengers. Their voyage was the last voyage of the rigid airships. The Air Ministry shut down Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei G.m.b.H. All schedules were cancelled. The ships were, before long, disassembled. At the height of their development, the height of their performance, the rigid airships disappeared.