When I was about eleven, I went through a period of fascination with dirigibles (rigid airships). What technology could be more emblematic of futures that never were?
The photo above comes from a site devoted to photos of the US Navy’s Macon, which was based at Moffett Field on the San Francisco Peninsula in the early 1930s.
It is rare to see pictures of the interior: the bridge, the sick bay, the sailors’ bunks. (The Macon crashed off Big Sur in 1935.)
It’s still possible to tour the California coast by airship. I should do that some time.
(Via Roberta X.)
Actually, in terms of fuel use, airships overcome the disadvantages of both ships and aeroplanes. Ships use most of their energy overcoming water resistance, whereas aeroplanes, in a fluid offering massively less resistance than water, use most overcoming gravity. Airships do not have to overcome either.
The problems with airships are, of course, the gas, because hydrogen is inflammable, and helium is expensive and scarce (I wonder whether the total content of helium in the atmosphere would be enough to supply fleets of airships?), and also the fact that they are slower than aeroplanes. Nevertheless, I wonder whether airship technology will come back into its own, if sufficiently safe ways of handling hydrogen can be developed.
There are quite a few examples of old technologies being made competitive again by a combination of new supportive technologies and changes in the economy. I was reading recently an article about how sail is now becoming economically viable again for freighters, as a result of high fuel costs, low maritime labour costs, and a high level of automation. I suppose wind generation of electricity is in this category as well – when I was a kid, wind power meant windmills, on the flat farmlands of Lincolnshire – a technology that had gone out when my grandparents were children.
The United States was able to fill its airships with helium in the 1930s, since it was extracted from a field in the Southern Plains. You may visit the Helium Monument in Amarillo, Texas.
For reasons of national security, the government refused to sell it to Germany, hence the Hindenburg disaster. Our airships, meanwhile, were usually knocked down by unexpected wind shear events near thunderstorms and that sort of thing.
Way back in the days of college some of my folk and old timey musician friends entertained small crowds with songs like “Come Take A Trip In My Airship!”
http://www.lyon.edu/wolfcollection/songs/applemy1262.html
Even before then, growing up a few miles up the road from Moffett Field in its later incarnation, the hangers looking like HUGE curiousities and the news occasionally marveling at weather inside them, I did dream of the Art-y Deco-ish airship-oid future as predicted in the techno-optimistic pre WII past…
The sleek, sinister black-hulled nuclear attack and missile subs built in my home town, part and parcel of my daily scene, portended a vastly more threatening Cold War goes HOT possibility than those
silvery airships…
Pitch–I would not mind seeing Moffett Field someday. That airship hanger was an architectural marvel of its time, although unfortunately not easily re-purposed.
Other dirigible and blimp hangers remain. Check out Hanger Number 1 at Lakehurst, NJ, at the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society site, for instance–
http://www.nlhs.com/hangarno.htm
I never got to get closer to Moffett than nearby roads. I remember it mostly when it was still a working Naval Air Station with anti-sub responsibilities. Plus, whatever the Air Force was up to with their “Blue Cube: and all. But the hangers were visible from quite a ways.
http://www.nlhs.com/hangarno.htm