The author of this piece, Edward Tenner:
is an independent writer and speaker holding the titles of Distinguished Scholar in the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, and Visiting Scholar in the Rutgers University Department of History.
Sort of a free-range historian of technology & culture.
Via the American Enterprise Institute:
The historian of science Thomas Kuhn used to advise his students to read the books and papers of the past not for their insights into present-day science but, to the contrary, to notice what was strange about them. Those puzzling ideas, he believed, could reveal the hidden and deep assumptions of their age.
The same may apply to the technology and commerce of the past. And few of its innovations seem odder today than the smoking lounge on the airship Hindenburg, which caught fire upon landing at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey on May 6, 1937.
Wikipedia has an excellent summary of the facts of, and theories surrounding, the disaster. A ball of flame appeared as the great ship was docking at the mooring mast. It sank to earth, killing 35 of the 97 passengers and crew members, plus one worker on the landing field. Almost exactly 25 years earlier, when the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank at night, there were no photographs or outside witnesses. The Hindenburg’s crash, on the other hand, was broadcast the next day on network radio and memorialized in countless newsreels, television programs, and (more recently) Internet videos. (In a strange inversion of the Titanic tragedy, at least one crew member of the Hindenburg survived thanks to the bursting of a water ballast tank, saving him from the flames.)
Even after the nuclear meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima, the Hindenburg remains the most spectacular technological tragedy captured on film, outside military and terrorist attacks.
Despite revisionist theories, such as one claiming that the paint on the airship’s surface both sparked and fed the explosion, most experts still blame hydrogen. The Zeppelin company originally preferred the cheaper and more readily obtainable hydrogen, but after 48 of 56 passengers on a British airship were killed in a storm in 1930, Zeppelin’s engineers planned the new design for the safer, nonflammable helium. Unfortunately for Zeppelin, Congress had passed a law in 1927 banning the export of helium because it was a strategic gas with military aviation potential. There was thus no alternative to hydrogen, despite its risks. (Interestingly, the United States lifted the ban on helium after the Hindenburg disaster, although it was reinstated in 1938 after Nazi Germany annexed Austria.)
None of the half-dozen or more hypotheses and conspiracy theories on the cause of the fatal explosion and fire involves tobacco.
So how could the Zeppelin company have allowed smoking, even with the safeguards of negative air pressure to keep hydrogen out of the airlocked space? It’s true that matches and lighters were confiscated upon boarding; the smoking room was equipped with an electric lighter, similar to the kind of glowing coil that was once standard issue in automobiles. The bar steward was supposed to prevent guests from leaving absentmindedly with a lit smoke, since any fire could be catastrophic.
Still, hadn’t the Titanic’s sinking taught that a series of unlikely contingencies could defeat even multi-level defenses (in the Titanic’s case, those included watertight compartments, radio signaling, and sharp-eyed lookouts)? What could they have been thinking?
The Hindenburg episode actually teaches a lot about risk, markets, and fashion. Among Victorian men, high-wheel bicycles were notoriously prone to throwing riders into potentially lethal “headers,” yet it took decades for safer alternatives to replace them in the 1890s. The Dutch sociologist Wiebe Bijker has argued that for well-off young men—pennyfarthings weren’t cheap—the hazard was less a bug than a macho feature.
Even after the nuclear meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima, the Hindenberg remains the most spectacular technological tragedy captured on film, outside military and terrorist attacks.
In the 1920s and ’30s, cigarettes were the height of style. On the pre-war Titanic, affluent men in first class retired to a lounge filled with cigar smoke after dinner, while ladies had little choice but a writing room. By the 1930s, the luxury cigarette—machine-made, unlike hand-rolled Havanas—had become an icon of modernity in advertisements designed by leading artists and photographers. Smoking allegedly promoted creative thinking and helped keep weight down; aesthetic sophistication and slenderness had become the norms of the post-corset, post-Victorian wealthy.
The Hindenburg’s smoking room was thus a necessary concession to global travelers who could book a first-class cabin on the greatest ocean liner ever built (even to this day), the Normandie, at no more than half the price. Guillaume de Syon, author of a standard book on the zeppelins, points out that the room was extremely popular and travelers would otherwise have been oppressively bored, at least when no land was in sight. An open pack of premium cigarettes was thus a centerpiece of Hindenburg advertisements.....
....MUCH MORE
