Thread by @ADalassio

By the end of 1936, Hindenburg had crossed the Atlantic 34 times, carrying over 3,500 passengers and more than 66,000 pounds of mail and freight, and the ship’s highly successful 1936 season seemed to indicate that regular transatlantic air service had arrived.

Imagine a world in which luxury travel was not only available to everyone, but was also affordable. In its day, airship travel was twice as fast as steamship travel and didn't require one to spend days adjusting to the tossing and turning of the ocean.

As a matter of fact, according to the writings of Kenneth Price Jr, 1lb of coal could carry one person and their luggage from Berlin to NYC at the cost of $1/lb!
So not only do airships like the Hindenburg utilize anti-gravity tech (Helium is lighter than air), they are also more

fuel efficient than any modern jet airliner or vehicle! Each of Hindenburg’s four LOF-6 (DB-602) 16-cylinder engines had an output of 1320 hp @ 1650 RPM (maximum power), and 900 hp @ 1480 RPM. The normal cruise setting was 1350 RPM, generating approximately 850 hp

this setting was usually not adjusted during an ocean crossing.The engines were started with compressed air, and could be started, stopped, and reversed in flight. Using 2:1 reduction gearing each engine drove a 4-bladed fixed-pitch 19.7′ diameter metal-sheathed wooden propeller

There were plans, never implemented, to add a fifth engine car containing a Daimler-Benz diesel adapted to burn hydrogen.The proposed installation would have been an experiment to improve the ship’s economy and efficiency by burning hydrogen which would otherwise have been valved

Hindenburg valved between 1 and 1-1/2 million cubic feet of hydrogen on an average north Atlantic crossing.
An engine designed to burn the valved hydrogen? That's damn near a free energy device, or about as close as you can get when it comes to travel of this scale. Guess what?

One ton of coal has the same thermal energy as 188 gallons of petroleum?
The Hindenburg was capable of flying around the world in 1936 without stopping for fuel?
One modern Airbus carries enough fuel to power the Hindenburg 6 times across the Atlantic?
So its safe efficient cheap

luxurious, and well received by the public. What could possibly go wrong?
The usual suspects, of course...

More to follow.
Good night.

The "accident" at Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937 brought an end to the age of the rigid airship. The disaster killed 35 persons on the airship, and one member of the ground crew, but miraculously 62 of the 97 passengers and crew survived. After more than 30 years

of passenger travel on commercial zeppelins — in which tens of thousands of passengers flew over a million miles, on more than 2,000 flights, without a single injury — the era of the passenger airship came to an end in a few fiery minutes.

Almost 80 years of research and scientific tests support the same conclusion reached by the original German and American accident investigations in 1937: It seems clear that the Hindenburg disaster was caused by an electrostatic discharge, a spark, that ignited leaking hydrogen

The spark was most likely caused by a difference in electric potential between the airship and the surrounding air: The airship was approximately 60 meters (about 200 feet) above the airfield in an electrically charged atmosphere, but the ship’s metal framework was grounded by

its landing line; the difference in electric potential likely caused a spark to jump from the ship’s fabric covering (which had the ability to hold a charge) to the ship’s framework (which was grounded through the landing line).

It was over after this, after hundreds of successful flights and a track record for safety (pretty amazing that anyone survived that crash, they were clearly designed with safety in mind) airship travel was, on the whole, removed from the public. Nothing suspicious, of course.

If you've made it this far in this post, you could see how a technology like the Hindenburg threatens the petroleum oligopoly of the day.
Isn't it a bit curious that right after the Titanic and Hindenburg disasters you have a concerted effort to standardize transportation

to running off petroleum almost exclusively? And that standard has neither changed nor evolved in over 100 years?
On October 1, 1908, the first production Model T Ford is completed at the company's Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit.

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