This is the airship Hindenburg, burning up while trying to land in New Jersey
in 1937.
97 people were trapped inside.
It was a big deal at the time.
The Hindenburg was the greatest passenger airship ever built.
Imagine something the size of an ocean liner, but in the air.
And it could make the journey from Europe to the US in half the time.
It was a shining example of the future of commercial air travel.
And all it took was a spark to bring the whole thing down.
Air travel was on everyone’s minds in the early 20th century.
Aviators like Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart became huge celebrities after they
conquered the Atlantic in airplanes.
But airships were something else entirely.
Just two years after Lindbergh famously crossed the Atlantic in a cramped monoplane,
a giant German zeppelin flew around the world,
carrying paid passengers, who ate comfortably in a full-service dining room and slept in
private berths.
And in 1936, the biggest and grandest airship yet was built — the German LZ129, named
the Hindenburg.
There she is, a fine example of simplicity and economy of design.
A triumph of lighter-than-aircraft, the likes of which the world has never seen before.
It was a monstrous feat of engineering, and a symbol of Germany’s rising prominence in the
early years of the Nazi party.
The world’s greatest lighter-than-air ship, the Hindenburg!
That superliner of the sky made her first trip to America from Germany in March, 1936.
That year, the Hindenburg made 17 intercontinental round trips carrying passengers.
It had a dining room, too.
And a reading room.
And a separate lounge.
It even had a smoking room.
A separately-ventilated space where passengers could smoke under the supervision of the maitre’d,
who held the only lighter.
Which brings us to a very important element in this story – hydrogen.
Hydrogen gas is lighter than air — and people had used it for centuries to lift aircraft
like hot air balloons.
It’s highly flammable but cheap and easy to make – as opposed to its safer, non-flammable
cousin, helium.
But the United States, who at this time produced the rare gas almost exclusively, embargoed
its sale in 1925.
Countries around the world developing lighter-than-air programs had to rely on hydrogen — and their
airships were blowing up.
In the US, the hydrogen-powered Roma exploded and killed 34 in 1922.
In 1923, the French Navy airship Dixmude did too – 52 dead.
And in 1930, the UK ship R101 went down — 48 dead.
But the Germans weren’t worried.
By the time the Hindenburg embarked on its first North American flight of 1937, not a
single German passenger airship had crashed.
On May 6, 1937, that’s not what they did.
The ship was 12 hours late.
And what’s worse – the crew had good reason to believe it was leaking hydrogen – the
back end was dipping toward the ground and they couldn’t properly balance the ship.
For three hours, the dirigible circled the landing field at Lakehurst New Jersey, dumping
more water ballasts than ever before in vain efforts to level off.
Plus, the air was charged with electrostatic activity due to a recent thunderstorm – and
another one was on the way.
That means they were trying to quickly land an enormous hydrogen-filled airship, in electrically
charged conditions, that was likely leaking flammable gas.
And… well...
“It’s burst into flames!
Get this Charlie, get this Charlie!
And it’s crashing!
It’s crashing, terrible!
Oh this is the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world.
Oh the humanity!”
When the Hindenburg caught fire, a crew of reporters gathered for a routine photo opp
sprung into action.
Photojournalist Sam Shere only had time for a single exposure, but of all the press photos
taken that day, it’s this one that’s most remembered.
It somehow manages to perfectly frame the entire disaster.
The panicked crowd running in view of newsreel cameras, with the hastily-dumped water ballasts
still visible in the background.
The name “Hindenburg” - barely illuminated by the bright flames lighting up the entire top of
the ship.
And the faulty tail, now completely engulfed — just moments before the flames burst out
of the nose and brought the ship crashing to the ground.
The image of the Hindenburg burning was unlike anything people had seen before – a disaster
photographed as it was taking place.
In the end, out of 97 people on board, only 35 — plus one crewman on the ground — died.
That means that about two-thirds of the people inside of that actually escaped.
But the numbers didn’t matter.
Hydrogen airships never flew paid passengers again after that day.
The Hindenburg wasn’t the first or even the deadliest passenger airship disaster.
It was just the one that was caught on film — and that’s why it was the last.
The last episode of Darkroom was about Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole.
But there's some photos that we didn't include - and one in particular - that I really want
to show you, and they're in this book.
That's going to appear next week in Video Lab, our YouTube membership program.
Just go to vox.com/join to learn more.
And as always, thanks for watching.
I’m looking at you insane the entire time.