Alright
♪♫ The Lucy Nation Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
The one who's always left behind
Will there ever come a day
When I can turn around and say
It's all right now
It's all right now, yeah, yeah
It's all right now
I don't wanna be the one
The one who's always left undone
Losing more and more
I'm drained of everything
I'm falling down
I'll go see through in the sun saying
Waiting, watching, restoration for those who stay
Waving to those that walk away
I don't wanna be the one, huh
If I could only see it
If I could only feel it
Will there ever come a day
Yeah
, yeah, yeah
When I can turn around and say
It's all right now
It's all right now, yeah, yeah
It's all right now
In these lyrics, the singer is expressing their fears and frustrations of constantly being left behind and feeling incomplete. They long for a day when they can confidently say that everything is okay, that they have overcome their hardships and no longer feel drained of everything. The repetition of "It's all right now" serves as a mantra of hope for the singer, a way to convince themselves that things will get better.
The lines "Waiting, watching, restoration for those who stay / Waving to those that walk away" suggest a sense of determination and resilience. The singer is willing to wait and watch for the restoration they deserve, and they acknowledge that not everyone will be there to support them along the way. However, they remain steadfast in their pursuit of happiness and fulfillment.
Overall, the lyrics of "Alright" convey a message of hope and perseverance in the face of adversity. It's a reminder that even when things seem bleak, there is always a possibility for things to turn around and for us to find happiness once again.
Line by Line Meaning
I don't wanna be the one
I don't want to be the person who is constantly left behind or forgotten
The one who's always left behind
I don't want to be the individual who is constantly left alone or neglected
Will there ever come a day
Is there a chance that things will improve in the future
When I can turn around and say
When I can confidently state or express
It's all right now
Things have improved, and everything is fine at the moment
It's all right now, yeah, yeah
Things have improved, and everything is fine at the moment
I don't wanna be the one
I don't want to be the individual who is constantly struggling and unfinished
The one who's always left undone
I don't want to be someone who is incompletely finished or neglected
Losing more and more
Continuing to lose or decline without any sign of improvement
I'm drained of everything
I'm completely devoid of energy, motivation, and resources
I'm falling down
I'm losing control and sinking
I'll go see through in the sun saying
I'll emerge from my struggles and declare my strength and resilience proudly
Waiting, watching, restoration for those who stay
There will be redemption and healing for those who persevere through tough times
Waving to those that walk away
Saying goodbye to those who have given up and moved on
I don't wanna be the one, huh
I don't want to be the person who is always stuck at the bottom
If I could only see it
If there was a way for me to understand the bigger picture
If I could only feel it
If I could experience the improvement and positive change that awaits
Will there ever come a day
Is there a possibility that I will get to experience something better someday
Lyrics © Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd., Universal Music Publishing Group
Written by: Markus Johnson
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind
@ApolloApplications
Hey guys! Thanks for a genuinely great episode. Some background – I’m a professional airship historian, and I did my thesis on the sociopolitical history of airships in Germany. I’m way too used to listening to airship histories that get pretty much everything wrong, and this one got a LOT of stuff right! (given your other episodes, that shouldn’t be a surprise). Anyway, I wanted to drop a comment, completely unrequested – who doesn’t like that, right? …right? - listing off some nitpicks and minor corrections, but the episode did such a good job that it ended up being mostly just extra information that you didn’t have time to include.
…I ended up writing about 5,300 words, so, uh, yeah, don’t click see more if you don’t want to scroll for a while.
44:50 – That’s the modern Zeppelin logo.
45:00 – He was more forced out of the cavalry, which he regretted for the rest of his life.
46:40 – So the two main people who thought up rigid airships were Zeppelin and Schutte-Lanz, the latter of which got screwed over by sharing patents during wartime that Zeppelin just sort of kept after the fact.
50:10 – Zeppelin was basically almost always going bankrupt : P
57:00 – Ey, DELAG! The first airline!
57:55 – They also had limited point-point travel.
59:40 – All modern Goodyear Blimps are technically Zeppelin NTs built by Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik, which also operates a pair of NTs in Germany. The only NT lost thus far was owned by the De Beers mining corporation and was destroyed after it got torn off its mooring mast in high winds, mainly because the airship wasn’t handled properly (the reason for a lot of crashes).
1:01:05 – It ought to be noted that, until the Hindenburg, no paying passenger ever suffered any significant harm on a Zeppelin.
1:01:35 – Yes, they were embarrassing. They bombed the wrong city all the time. On at least one occasion they accidentally bombed the wrong country.
1:03:45 – Even worse is the fact that, as I’ve mentioned above, *that’s the slogan they came up with after World War II*.
1:04:25 – Yeeeeaah they were a lot more useful as psychological weapons, not so much strategic ones.
1:06:05 – At one point in the war, they just jumped a bunch of construction numbers to make the Allies think that they had more airships than they did.
1:06:40 – See above : P
1:07:40 – Yes!!
1:08:10 – Well, they got harder to shoot down for several reasons. First off, the Germans got better at building them, second off, they got better at building them very light, which meant they could fly much higher (at the expense of unimportant things like supplemental oxygen and parachutes), and also it’s just kind of really hard. To make a Zeppelin blow up when you want it to (no, seriously. Incendiary bullets didn’t do much, since hydrogen needs to be fairly impure to ignite. The strategy the British settled on was pumping a few rounds of normal bullets through a ship to get the gas cells leaking, then fly around, avoiding the antiaircraft guns on the top of the hull and waiting for the mixture to go ripe, then pop a few incendiary bullets in).
1:08:35 - Bravo to Alice for a delightfully obscure story. There was also at least one time that a Zeppeliner jumped out of his crashing ship and through the thatched roof of a convent into a recently-vacated bed. He literally just got up and politely asked ‘which way to the German border?’.
1:08:48 – [Insert gas-related joke here].
1:10:07 – Heh, footnotes…
1:11:15 – I mean, on World-War-One Zeppelins, absolutely. On later ships, there were semi-decent toilet facilities. LZ-126 (USS Los Angeles) had a bathroom with three toilets facing each other and no privacy screens. Fun!
1:11:32 – This is definitely all a German fetish.
1:12:33 – I mean, again, they were pretty useful as psychological weapons. Conversely, they were insanely useful in British recruitment posters.
1:14:23 – MAJOR pet peeve. Zeppelins are not blimps. If they were nonrigid, they’d be blimps, but they’re not, so they aren’t. Side note, the origin of the word “blimp” comes from World War One when a particular British inspector examined airship envelopes by flicking the side, which produced a really distinctive sound. He ended up mimicking it back after each check, just constantly repeating “blimp! Blimp! Blimp!” like a sociopath.
1:14:56 – So this is a really convoluted bit of history. *Initially*, they were completely banned, but then the restrictions were slightly lifted so that they could make a pair of very small, purely civilian airships – LZ-120 and 121. The Allies then promptly turned around and confiscated those, too.
1:17:30 – “fucking vulcaniz[ed] rubber” – also definitely a German fetish.
1:21:50 – No, this is wrong. Luftschiffbau-Zeppelin built LZ-126, but only to replace a pair of Zeppelins that had been scuttled at Nordholz (and the only way the Americans convinced the other Allies to let it happen was to have LZ put in passenger fittings so it was technically a civilian ship …that they promptly delivered to the US Navy.) Goodyear-Zeppelin only ever made two large airships, ZRS-4 and 5 (USS Akron and Macon), and these were not built for reparations.
1:22:25 – Also a big no. Goodyear-Zeppelin, as mentioned above, only made two ships, both for the US Navy. Other countries dabbled with rigid airships for military use, but only the British made any, and only for themselves. Beyond that, the only large rigid airships produced thereafter were, in Britain, R-100 and R-101, and, in Germany, LZ-127 (Graf Zeppelin), LZ-129 (Hindenburg), and LZ-130 (Graf Zeppelin – yeah, real creative), all of which were civilian, although LZ-130 did some spy shenanigans in the leadup to World War II.
1:23:42 – Ehhhhh, the whole mooring spire on the Empire State was much more of a publicity ploy than an actual idea. No mooring equipment was ever installed or, in fact, designed in any detail. The “landing” you reference resulted in some poor city official being held down by his legs, grabbing onto the gondola of the blimp and being suspended over the drop to the 86th floor.
1:23:57 – Blimps are airships. Airship and dirigible are blanket terms, under which fall nonrigid (blimps), semirigid (modern Zeppelin NTs and a few other really cool ships like Norge, Roma, and Italia), and rigid (Hindenburg, Graf Zeppelin, etc.).
1:24:05 – As mentioned above, no mooring equipment was ever installed. The blimp more just sort of got really close to the building and may’ve bumped into it briefly.
1:24:12 – That’s a composite shot, yeah, of LZ-126 – the Los Angeles.
1:24:40 – So any kind of sex on an airship was a bad idea, although it definitely still happened. On ships like the Hindenburg, the walls were basically silk and chintz stretched over a metal framework, so you could hear pretty much anything that happened in the next cabin. In any case, the possibility came up in conversation – on one occasion, Harold Dick, Goodyear-LZ liaison, recalled a conversation with the then-captain of the Hindenburg, Ernst Lehmann, in which they discussed the fact that the cabins were made very small in order to maximize the space of the public rooms, in which passengers were expected to spend most of their time. While ruminating on that, it occurred to them that one activity could be accomplished in the cabins that couldn’t happen in the public rooms, and that the result thereof ought to be called “helium” if a boy, and “shelium” if a girl. These are shit names.
@ApolloApplications
1:25:25 – Eh, this isn’t really fair. The Hindenburg-class ships could handle bad weather fairly well, and they were the fastest means of transoceanic transport by a factor of two (although the Hindenburg was also somewhat obsolete by the time it flew, with the advent of ocean-hoppers. Still, they had a useful niche for a while – it just so happened to be a really short one that didn’t last long).
1:26:00 – This is why tall mooring masts were a bad idea if they weren’t used properly (the British attached huge rollers to cables suspended from their ships, keeping them level on the mast. That said, the US Navy was kind of universally bad at keeping their ships not-wrecked. The Los Angeles ended up being the only one that made it to scrapping, mainly because it was built by LZ. Also, the Los Angeles didn’t really suffer any significant damage from its nose-stand (side note, it never made it fully vertical – the photos that show it are a product of perspective), minus some cutlery going through the nose.
1:27:47 – Quick aside, quite a few ships experimented with carrying, launching, and recovering aircraft (a sound idea when you need to scout out vast amounts of territory in an era when airplanes don’t have that great a range). USS Shenandoah was due to experiment with the concept, although it crashed in Ohio before it could. The Los Angeles tested it, as did some British ships. The Akron and Macon, the two ZRS ships, streamlined the concept and were due to be superseded by the never-built ZRCV class. The Hindenburg also tested the idea in early 1937.
1:27:54 – They were designed to be reconnaissance aircraft, not parasite fighters in the case of the American ships (later, unbuilt designs included spaces for bombers), and they were carried in the belly of the ship, not the side. The Spirit of Adventure, from the movie UP, is actually an insanely good representation of the concept, minus the bit where it has a full onboard museum and survived with no maintenance for, like, 80 years (a big rigid like the Hindenburg, had it not wrecked, had a useful service life of between 10 and 15 years).
1:28:10. No, they did work. Crews on the Akron and Macon got so adept at recovering their Sparrowhawk planes that they got rid of the landing gear and substituted in extra fuel tanks.
1:28:54 – The wrecks of the Akron and Macon were both examples of ships crashing because of known flaws. In the case of the Akron, one of the fins failed because the design didn’t include a full, strong cruciform structure connecting all of the fins. The ship was so unproven, and it was deemed so essential to keep it flying that it was never laid over for reengineering in one go. Instead, they reworked each fin, one at a time. The one that failed was the only one that hadn’t been replaced.
1:29:44 – Akron wrecked off of New Jersey, Macon went down off Pont Sur, California (and is still there). Almost everyone on the Macon survived because, A, the water was a lot warmer, and B, they actually bothered to include rafts and life preservers.
1:30:30 – The Imperial Airship Scheme was basically peak British, with planned routes to Ceylon, New Zealand, bits of South America, the bits of Africa that had been so forcibly British-ed for racists to be okay with visiting, India, and a bunch of other places. Also, R-101, built by the government, was known in the popular press as “The Socialist Ship,” whilst R-100, built privately by Vickers, was “The Capitalist Ship.”
1:30:40 – Neither of the British IAS ships were really capable of what the government wanted them to do – it’s only by sheer luck that R-100 made it back from Montreal (with the upper cover having failed, resulting in an electrical failure in both the heating system and kitchen, which meant passengers had to eat canned food and sleep huddled together in the lounge). Granted, they were both highly experimental prototypes, but still.
1:31:35 – Decommissioning large rigid airships usually involved suspending them by their hangar cables (which were normally for holding the ship up when it wasn’t full of lifting gas), and just sort of cutting them. R-100 got flattened by a steamroller, which is why I somehow have a cribbage board made out of its control gondola.
1:32:58 – Since there’s been a bit of a hullaballoo of what kind of degree you should have to call yourself a doctor, I’ll note that Eckener’s PhD was in philosophy.
1:37:25 – Eckener’s political [non]-career is actually pretty interesting, if irrelevant. There’s a decent chance he could’ve beaten Hitler in the election. That being said, he gets this image of being a virulent anti-Nazi which is quite unearned. He privately abhorred Nazism, but was also willing to accept money and control from Hitler’s government when it suited LZ’s ends. He also kinda stayed on as chairman of LZ when, during World War II, it used slave labor to make V-2 components, although it’s not entirely clear how much he knew about it.
1:45:12 – Okay, so the Graf’s empennage is kind of convoluted. It had the swastika against an entirely red background on one side and the tricolor on the other from 1933-1935, when DZR, the purpose-incorporated German state airline took over. From 1935-1936, it had the swastikas on both sides, against a vertical red stripe, and then, from 1936 to its scrapping in 1940, it sported the smaller full-flag variant that the Hindenburg used.
1:46:00 – This story gets bandied around a lot, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it confirmed. As stated before, Eckener was fulling willing to work with and accept money from the Nazis to further his aims. Hell, the Hindenburg was basically funded by Goebbels and Göring feuding over who could give Eckener the most money.
1:47:52 – Ehhhh, ‘reliably’ is a bit generous. LZ/DZR basically never turned a profit, and weather often forced delays (case and point, the Hindenburg’s last flight). They expected to have a reliable, profitable service with the 1938 introduction of the second Hindenburg-class ship, LZ-130, although the Hindenburg burning kind of screwed that plan up.
1:48:20 – Göring is a bit of a contradiction – thought Zeppelins were nothing more than flying gasbags, but was actually quite fond of Eckener, which probably saved Eckener’s life.
1:49:00 – It’S iN tHe NaMe.
1:50:00 – Rey-der-eye.
1:50:55 – NOT A BLIMP.
1:51:10 – They also definitely bought wreck metal from the R-101 and either used it for testing or just fully melted it down to build into the Hindenburg.
1:52:05 – Eckener was listed for Denazification and was briefly interned by the French. He was saved by his American/Goodyear friends and secreted to the US on a C-47.
1:53:30 – It was supposed to be 816 feet long, but the fully just forgot to ask the people at Lakehurst how long their hangar was and ended up having to chop 12 feet off the design by rounding the tail off. On the one occasion it was hangered in New Jersey, there was exactly a foot of clearance on either end of the ship.
1:54:00 – Hitler got annoyed by how much attention the ship was getting as opposed to him at the opening ceremonies, so a call was made and the ship flew off.
1:54:55 – Duralumin, or prototype versions thereof, were used for most Zeppelins.
1:57:25 – This reasoning was directly linked to the R-101 crash. It’s why there’s a missing LZ-128 in the model listings. That design couldn’t operate usefully with helium, so it was scrapped in favor of the larger LZ-129.
1:58:55 – There’s a common misconception that the US didn’t sell helium to the Nazis on account of them being Nazis. That’s not true – helium had been a protected national asset since the enactment of the Helium Control Act of 1924 (which you mention). Had the British asked for it for R-101, the Americans wouldn’t’ve given it to them, either.
1:59:18 – The eight cabins were added in 1937, so they weren’t original to the ship, but you’re right to say that they were due to the ship using hydrogen. Also, dammit, Roz stole my favorite random fact about the Hindenburg! That said, as mentioned above, it was 12 feet, not 20.
@ApolloApplications
2:02:00 – Going along with the whole “Zeppelins can be safe if you don’t do dumb things with them” from earlier, LZ-127 managed 590 flights, spent a full two years of its service life in the air, and only suffered one serious mishap very early on in its career.
2:03:00 – You missed out on the funniest line from Zeppelins, wherein Eckener, this generally quiet, genteel, old-fashioned monarchists excoriate Lehmann for his eagerness to take the ship out in bad conditions to satisfy the Propaganda Ministry. Eckener, in his own words, quotes himself as saying ‘…this idiotic flight!’ but the actual phrase used was “DAS SCHEISSEFAHRT!”
2:03:08 – This isn’t really a fair comment. The ship had, and mostly adhered to published, regular timetables.
2:05:00 – That’s not a photo of the damaged tail (all photographs of which were destroyed by the Nazi government, except one that was secreted out by Harold Dick), it’s of the tail after it was repaired and shortened.
2:05:08 – ‘luxurious’ is a huge stretch, and it’s honestly a relief to hear you not talk about how palatial they supposedly were like basically everybody else does. Airships were cramped and uncomfortable (the Hindenburg, designed to primarily operate on the North Atlantic route, lacked any cooling system, and the cabins heated up to near-sauna temperatures about a day out from Brazil). Additionally, there were no private restrooms, and the public restrooms each had one towel that was shared and not washed the entire flight. Similarly, each passenger got a napkin that was expected to last them the whole trip. On the next ship, LZ-130, it was even worse – weight savings in expectation for the ship using helium eliminated the restroom washbasins, which meant that anyone who had an accident had to run back to their cabin to use the one there. Airships were never a luxurious alternative to ocean liners, they were basically to liners what Concorde was to the 747 – claustrophobic, tiny seating, but a fantastic view and good catering.
2:05:30 – This is actually one significant advantage that airships had over airplanes. The passenger decks were located so far forward of the engines that, at most, the only sound was a very quiet whisper.
2:05:34 – Alice actually makes a good point (that sounds like I’m saying she usually doesn’t make good points. I promise I’m not : P ). One of the changes that Harold Dick and Lehmann recommended was to include more continental and American food to offset the rather thick German offerings.
2:08:33 – The piano was installed during the construction of the ship and was bolted to the floor. It was also covered in yellow pigskin. Ew. After it was removed to save weight with the addition of the new cabins in 1937, it was stored in a Bluthner warehouse where it was almost certainly destroyed thereafter in a bombing raid.
2:08:40 – Aside from general fed-uppedness with Lehmann’s accordion, a significant takeaway from the earlier Graf Zeppelin was the need for a piano to lighten the atmosphere, which seems ironic, all things considered.
2:09:08 – Another really useful comment from Alice! So passengers were barred from smoking anywhere but in the pressurized smoking room on B Deck (they also had to give up all of their nicotine paraphernalia to be stored and given back upon arrival), although this was really an abundance of caution and a bit of security theater – the roof of the passenger decks was fireproofed with asbestos, and if hydrogen is somehow not behaving like the lightest known element and traveling down into the decks, you’ve got a bigger problem than the risk of fire.
@ApolloApplications
2:11:07 – While Lehmann was not in command of the last flight, he was aboard as an observer and probably contributed to the haste with which the landing was attempted.
2:11:50 – Flights over Manhattan were a trip highlight, and the ship made a point of making a low circle around the then-new Empire State Building to greet the tourists waving from the observation deck. On the last flight, they returned to New York, and then went down the coast.
2:16:45 – The ship was well over seven hours past due by this point.
2:16:57 – The main floor of Hangar 1 has a giant mock-aircraft-carrier deck for training now. I believe the last US Navy airship was decommissioned in 2006, although I could be wrong. There might be an aerostat or a spare blimp envelope packed up in boxes somewhere in there, but that’s about it. It’s actually pretty cluttered, mostly by stuff not related to aviation (although they have the control gondola from the godawful George C. Scott film “Hindenburg”).
2:19:27 – American Airlines also offered connecting airliner service from Lakehurst.
2:21:00 – There was good reason to try and get the ship down as quickly as possible, since the return trip was fully booked by people looking to be in London for the coronation of George VI. The next fastest ship making the crossing, the Rex, would only be halfway across the Atlantic in time for the investiture.
2:21:28 – Well, importantly, not quite ‘suddenly.’ In addition, some minutiae on the kind of landing they were trying – Germans preferred the ‘low-moor’ technique, in which you would bring the ship down, and then the ground crew would walk it to the mooring mast. The landing they attempted on 7 May was a ‘high-moor’ landing, which was riskier but more efficient, since it involved just dropping the mooring line, letting the ground crew connect it up to the masthead, and winching the ship in.
2:21:52 – Not quite as large a crowd as there was in the previous year, on account of how regular the landings had become.
2:22:30 – There were four newsreel films that recorded the disaster, although Morrison was the only person commentating.
2:23:47 – So, as other commenters have noted, the recorder was running fast, which pitched Morrison’s voice up. Quick tidbit, he panics, shouting “get this, Charlie! Get this, Charlie!” because the shockwave of the initial conflagration was bouncing the recording disks and Morrison’s sound engineer was trying to keep them on the turntable and recording.
2:24:54 – To Morrison’s credit, as you commented, he got his composure back a few minutes later and did some pretty good reporting, including interviewing passengers and, later in the day, broadcasting the first list of survivors.
2:26:23 – This wasn’t a propaganda flight, guys! There were no reporters onboard. The ship was in its second season, and it wasn’t making much news (as evidenced by Morrison being the only reporter onsite).
2:26:54 – Much faster, actually. It only took about 32 seconds from initial fire to resting on the ground, although the engine diesel fires kept burning through to the next day.
2:27:22 – Quite a few people survived by jumping, actually! Most who did were smart enough to wait until the ship was fairly close to the ground. One older couple, however, just sat calmly in their cabin and walked down the gangway when it was jammed open by the shock of the framework settling to the ground. Evidently they got out completely unharmed.
2:27:35 – Ehhh, we have a pretty good idea of what happened – Roz describes this as “Eckener’s theory” (although it was also accepted by the US board of inquiry), so I’ll just go into a little more detail here. So airships naturally gain static electricity as they fly. The conditions at Lakehurst were very wet, which meant that the landing lines the ship dropped were highly conductive. The framework of the ship discharged pretty much instantly, while the outer fabric was much less conductive, thus providing the perfect conditions for significant amounts of static sparking. Crucially, in order to line the ship up into the wind for the high-moor landing I described earlier, Pruss performed a very tight turn that was almost certainly beyond the ship’s design limitations. That tight of a turn could have very easily snapped an interior bracing wire, which sliced open a gas cell. It is important to note that the most likely place for this to have happened – the ship’s weakest point – was just forward of the upper fin, which is exactly where the fire started. Additionally, the time between the turn and the start of the fire is pretty much exactly how long it would’ve taken for the hydrogen-oxygen mix to reach flammability.
2:27:42 – The rocket fuel paint hypothesis is one of the most repeated and ridiculous theories about the disaster. No, the ship wasn’t painted with rocket fuel. The doping compound contained powdered aluminum, which forms a small part of the mixture for the Shuttle’s SRBs, but it didn’t have an oxidizer. Large quantities of the fabric survived the wreck, and can be seen not catching fire, even as there’s clearly fire behind it. As it is, on the next ship, LZ-130, the only adjustment made to the outer covering was to make the top third more conductive in order to avoid the issues I set out in my immediate previous point.
2:28:32 – He later publicly recanted the sabotage theory (although there’s evidence to suggest that he privately held onto the belief until his death in 1956).
2:29:20 – Okay, so on sabotage, the opportunities to down the ship were minimal, and pretty much all of the major figures who forwarded the sabotage theory all had a vested interest in making airships seem basically sound.
@ApolloApplications
2:29:32 – Spah, not Sprahl, and he was up on a ladder painting his house when the FBI came to question him. He was so surprised by the accusation that he fell off, almost injuring himself worse than he did jumping from the ship. Also, for those of you who’ve watched the movie “Marathon Man,” Spah has a brief appearance as an angry driver near the beginning of the film. He's billed as Ben Dova.
2:31:19 – Sorry, Alice, the dog – an Alsatian - didn’t survive.
2:31:39 – Spehl, not Sprehl. He was unfairly maligned by the sabotage theories, which significantly tarnished an otherwise good and loyal career with Zeppelin.
2:32:57 – Dammit, guys, I spent all that time typing that explanation out, too!
2:33:24 – Eh, you say that, but there were people back there when the fire started – one crewmember described the gas cell as “lighting up like some tremendous Chinese lantern” before it disintegrated in fire.
2:33:56 – I dunno if that was “attitude” or “altitude,” so I’ll just note that the windows could be opened on the Hindenburg, and, due to the aerodynamics of the airship, you could put your hand out and only feel a bit of a breeze, instead of an 85-mph slipstream.
2:34:24 – Lightning is very unlikely as an ignition source. Both the Hindenburg and previous airships had flown through electrical storms with some regularity, with no real issue besides the necessity of sending a crew of sailmakers outside to patch up a few burned-away sections of fabric.
2:34:31 – As noted above, the flammable paint theory is pretty much bunk, forwarded by a Dr. Addison Bain who, while a really nice guy, is also a major proponent of hydrogen technology and has a vested interest in discounting hydrogen as the primary accelerant of the Hindenburg fire. His hypothesis has been disproven a dozen times or more. Also, the compound was somewhat more complex than powdered aluminum, etc. (read: too complex for me to remember : P ).
2:35:14 – Aw, but the seaside in Margate (the Kent one) is really nice… The rest of it is godawful, in fairness.
2:38:59 – So LZ-130 was finished in 1938, and brochures were put out to advertise for a new North American service. Eckener never got helium, though, and refused to allow commercial flights with hydrogen. Clara Adams, a rather famous Zeppelin groupie, actually made a down payment to reserve her place on the maiden flight of LZ-130, with a receipt dated early May 7, 1937, which is ironic.
2:40:02 – Mia is absolutely right.
2:40:41 – Eh, that wasn’t really a certainty because of the disaster. There were still significant proposals for rigid airships, both civilian and military. World War II, which gets mentioned in a few seconds, so sped up aviation development that, in the course of five years, rigid airships went from only somewhat obsolete for passenger service to having no immediately-economical use whatsoever.
2:41:28 – Minor nitpick, LZ-130 was just “Graf Zeppelin.” For a while, there were plans to call it “Graf Zeppelin 2,” which progressed as far as painting the fabric with the Arabic numeral, but the original Graf was retired before LZ-130 first flew, and it was decided that the numeral was unnecessary.
2:41:32 – Not quite. There were 130 ships designed, and, like, 120 built, with most of the discrepancy being World-War-One ships that were either never built due to the armistice, or banned under the conditions thereof. Additionally, LZ-131 was under construction when the two Grafs Zeppelin were destroyed, and its frame was scrapped alongside the two.
2:41:45 – LZ-130 survived long enough to make a fair few propaganda flights, as well as some espionage flights of Poland, and over the Channel, to try and figure out the capabilities of the Home Radar system (they had basically all of their electronics set up wrong, though, and came back to Germany thinking that Home Radar was incapable of detecting bomber fleets. There is, however, a really great photo that was taken by a British fighter – this flight was only a few months before the outbreak of war – of the Zeppelin whose engines alone were larger than it.
2:41:52 – Yep, pretty fair description of Eckener. If anything, he was smart [if not ethical] enough to tone down his criticism of the people who basically needed just the tiniest excuse to have him offed.
2:42:13 – Huh, I didn’t know that! It makes sense, though – Eckener was a journalist by trade. His association with Zeppelin came when he wrote several critical articles about the first flights of LZ-1. Zeppelin (the person not the giant hydrogen thing), instead of retaliating, sought him out and was evidently so charismatic that Eckener pretty much immediately switched sides, quit his newspaper, and went to work building and flying airships.
2:42:51 – And, as was mentioned before, headed a company that used slave labor to help build V-2s, as one does.
2:43:43 – Yeah, Goodyear was willing to design large rigid airships for years after the war, as long as they didn’t have to pay for building them. They even went so far as to publish the totally-not-desperate-sounding book “Why? Why Has America No Rigid Airships?”
2:43:58 – Less “blew up” more pitifully deflated without anyone noticing : P
2:44:00 – Even Eckener conceded that point by the end, saying “the airplane has replaced the airship. A good thing has been replaced by a better. What has the airship got to offer the businessman of today in a hurry?”
2:44:14 – They made aluminum plates and vases for a while.
2:45:19 – Yeah, long-haul freight transport to remote locations is pretty much the only vaguely viable use left for big airships.
2:45:29 – Oy, do you class “turned said massive hangar into an indoor waterpark” as “failed miserably”?? …Fair enough.
2:45:33 – Eh, truth be told, they’re more mostly used for sightseeing flights and advertising (Mia might know what I’m talking about, but DLZ-ZF, until recently, was adorned with a massive, truly-terrifying image of the Europaparks mascot).
2:45:53 – I mean, basically every hangar built in the US during World War II was required to be capable of handling a 10,000,000 cubic-foot rigid airship.
2:46:02 – Yes, Mia! The Cardington hangars, which were used to build R-101 and to store it and R-100 have been used for filming for quite some time now, most famously for Star Wars)
2:47:14 – No. Goodyear is very particular about this. They’re blimps (albeit only by trademark. Why yes, I did once have this argument for over an hour in the Friedrichshafen NT hangar. No, I did not win.)
2:47:47 – Damn accordions…
2:48:02 – Okay, Ride of The Valkyries, but either slowed down to a ridiculous tempo, or composed entirely of balloon fart noises. Your pick.
2:48:34 – Actually not the most unlikely thing. You can literally lift up an NT with one hand, assuming its been weighed off. I was once lucky enough to have lunch with a man whose father was the chief aerodynamic engineer on the Hindenburg project, and he, at the age of six, got to lift the fin of the Hindenburg clear over his head before a test flight, so an airship bouncing into a building is definitely gonna be a bigger problem for the airship.
2:59:34 – CITYBUILDER GAMES?! :D
3:01:49 – Mia suggested this episode? That’s it, she’s my favourite [not technically full-time but who cares : P ] WTYP host.
Okie that’s everything. Again, thank you so much for this episode! You all went far above and beyond the effort that’s usually put into videos/podcasts/articles/MySpace posts from 2007 about this subject. Bravo, etc. Looking forward to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge episode. Again. Again… again...
@AndrewGillard
That warning is still being shown today (Jan 2024) and, yeah, it seems a little unnecessary to me…
I'm guessing it's due to this, at 36:14:
“… and in 1882 [Baptiste Jules Henri Jacques Giffard] killed himself.”
In context, that seemed completely fine and unlikely to be problematic (it wasn't glorifying or encouraging it), but I'm thankfully not triggered by that subject — despite my various mental health issues — so it's not really my place to judge the merit of that warning's placement…
(Gods, Internet culture has totally ruined “triggered”, hasn't it? I feel kinda gross using that term correctly, sincerely, and in its proper context 😣)
…
… oh, there's also mention of self-harm in the last 3 minutes (or ~1.6%) — at 3:00:05. Given that, I suppose the warning is slightly more justified 🤷♀️
@TemplarOnHigh
0:00 - Alice the Second
5:06 - Shall we invade Norway today, sir?
8:44 - Reject the Airship Gender Binary
13:00 - Liam actually knows what the Nuclear Triad is.
18:10 - Make Love, not War - or - Make War into Love.
21:17 - Inflamable Air, can or cannot be lit afire?
34:15 - F the Yankees
36:28 - Ben Franklin was not around to offer some French guy a pair of bifocals
39:25 - Prussia = Learning from the American War of Unification
46:40 - Alice preempts a God-awful mispronounciation of der Deustch by the Swedish Chef - who has not invaded Norway.
55:34 - Zepplin is a member of the Prussian Secret Service
59:40 - Roz forgets about the Army blimp that Maryland "lost" and which invaded Pennsylvania - which the Pennsylvania State Police shot down.
1:05:25 - Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
1:19:20 - We miss a chance to ask why there is not an EV called the Musk Model 3 and why it is instead named after someone not related to the company.
1:32:46 - Polandball Blitzkrieg with Airships
1:39:30 - Literally Hitler
1:55:16 - I feel attacked.
1:57:35 - Liam's van makes an introduction - again
2:04:10 - Is the Sheetz' Beer Cave a bar?
2:07:05 - One day I will make it the whole way through Der Ring des Nibelungen
2:23:25 - It's Hardcore History
2:36:05 - Rutter's Egg Nog is Best Egg Nog
2:37:12 - Sheetz' knows their tobacco
2:37:13 - Can Royal Farms attack York?
2:49:02 - Justice John Roberts Dies
@NukaLemonade
Imagine trying to do 9/11 with a blimp and it just gently presses up against the tower then bounces off
@KSignalEingang
BOOP
@TurboSpaceKitten
More gently presses into the tower, crumples and bursts before sliding sadly down the entire length of the building. Then either catching fire or being taken by the wind.
@mimisezlol
If only
@sideways5153
It deforms like that clip of the guy punching a water balloon
@piccalillipit9211
AHAHHAHAHAHAH
@k4pacific
Ships typically float on top of the ocean and don't travel underwater. A proper airship thus should float at the very top of the atmosphere, with its superstructure in the vacuum of space. A more proper name for these things is "air submarines."
@gabes1733
Subairines
@catinthebox9400
@@gabes1733 GIVE THIS MAN A FUCKING MEDAL
@nsnick199
A supermarine, if you will.