The Hindenburg Disaster

In 1937, the airship Hindenburg—filled with hydrogen gas—exploded at its mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey. It took just 30 seconds to turn the floating airship into twisted wreckage. Those who died were 13 passengers, 22 crew, and one person on the ground below. Multiple theories have been put forward to explain how it started, and controversy continues today. However, none of these theories denies the central role hydrogen gas played in the explosion.

But the Hindenburg wasn’t the only disaster of its kind. In the decades before, 26 airships—also filled with explosive hydrogen gas—came down in flames, some killing all of their passengers. None of these other tragedies, however, were captured on camera like the Hindenburg. Why did hydrogen airships continue to be built and risk lives once people knew of their hazards? The hubris of the businessmen behind the hydrogen airships blinded them to the high risks and tragic price to be paid trying to make their fantasy a reality.

But the analogy between the hydrogen airships and a massive multi-state hydrogen hub doesn’t end there. Hydrogen-filled airships couldn’t last because they were expensive to build and operate, required extraordinary precautions, and they were very inefficient: they could only hold a few passengers, requiring more crew than paying customers. They were designed for the wealthy, putting many people—particularly workers—at risk for the benefit of few. 

From Monsters: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Birth of Pathological Technology by Ed Regis:

 “Plainly, there was something deeply wrong with an oversize technological artifact that regularly put millions of cubic feet of explosive gas into close proximity with live and innocent human beings. The Hindenburg was a prototypical example of a pathological technology, one whose obvious and sizable risks were ignored, discounted, minimized, swept under the rug by the influence of what amounted to an overriding, all-consuming, and almost irresistible emotional infatuation. That mental aberration produced a cognitive blindness to the craft’s systemic defects. The Hindenburg and other zeppelins were built because the bigger these leviathans got the more they acquired a spellbinding, mesmerizing, hypnotizing, practically immobilizing sway over human minds and emotions—not only those of the public and the paying passengers, but also of their designers, builders, and crew members.”

Watch newsreel footage with Herbert Morrison’s famous radio account (on YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ4XsHRZmpw