August 28, 2014 • 45 mins
After newsreels captured the Hindenburg erupting in fire in 1937, the promising development of airship aviation was cut short. Today companies and militaries are taking another look at blimps and the unique qualities that may revive them.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know front House stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's with us, so
that makes this stuff you should know. How you doing,
I'm good man, this is I'm excited about this. Oh
(00:21):
are you sure? Blimps? Yeah, because they have like eight names, blimp, dirigible, zeppelin, yeah,
airship yeah. Uh well technically l t A I'm counting
that lighter than airship, yeah, which I think is ultimately
lighter than airship. L t A is the umbrella term
(00:43):
for all of those things which are slightly different. Yeah.
I think an l t A and an airship is
all of them. The dirigible is all of them, Zeppelin
is rigid, and a blimp is non rigid. Nice and
mostly we just said blimps. These days, not a lot
of rigid airships, aren't there? But would they would they
constitute Yeah? No, but there's they can be semi rigid
(01:04):
or non rigid, right, yeah, and I think the future
we'll talk about that obviously the end. But I think
those are some of those are more the semi rigid style, right, Yeah,
but they're made up some really lightweight but very strong
composite materials. Yeah. Boom so Chuck. Let's talk about the
history of blimps because I think when anybody thinks of
(01:26):
blimps they think Handenburg. They think they think the Handenburg
and then maybe concurrently or right after the Good Year blimp. Yeah,
those are the two that really laid it on the
line for blimp them. Uh. Yeah, you know what you
want to talk about the early history, I guess, and
(01:47):
then get to the tragedy. Yeah, because there wasn't that
much time in between the two to tell you the truth. Yeah,
I mean that all started, of course with hot air
balloons because uh, they're not so different. In a cup
of frenchees. Brothers Jacques Etienne and Joseph Michelle. They said
they were brothers, but they have different Last night, I
(02:08):
think Jacques Etienne is his first and middle name. Okay,
that makes sense. They all had three names, uh, Mom, Golfier.
They invented the hot air balloon, uh, an unmanned hot
air balloon in three and then later that same year
a French physicist last name de Rosier had the first
(02:29):
manned balloon flight and they were just floating around because
that's what our balloons do. You can go up and
then if you're really good, you can come back down.
But left and right that's up to mother nature right,
which is a little scary, although I think these days
can they steer them at all. We have a great
article on this on hot air balloon. No, you're you're
subject to the winds to the the um was the
(02:53):
god of wind that you know he comes out of
the cloud and blows wind. Yeah that guy. Yeah, you're
you're subject to his whim. So if if you're headed
towards something, it's go over it or hit it. Yes,
And you remember there's that terrible bloom hot air balloon
accident and I think Virginia last year earlier this year
at Yeah, like they hit a power line I think,
(03:15):
and then the basket caught fire and like they had
to jump. It was really bad. Um, But yeah, you
can go up and over and I imagine it it's
like a power line, yeah, or a tunnel if you're
really good, or you're in a cartoon like the laugh Olympics,
that's something they do in there totally. But the I
think if you're really good, you could probably know where
(03:37):
to steer into the wind to maybe use the wind.
But no. With the blimp, the big distinction is, aside
from its distinctive shape, is that you can maneuver like
a pro That's right. And that's what Henry uh Jaffar
did in eighteen fifty two when he finally someone said
we should steer these things. He built the first powered
(03:59):
airship and it was cigar fielled like the classic shape
that we know and love now, had a propeller like
they have now, and a little engine although it was
a steam engine which they don't use now. Three horsepower
steam engine. Yeah, they're not huge engines. Still didn't take
a lot apparently, No, it really doesn't. Um And those
were rigid airships. Uh, it's a it's a metal framework.
(04:22):
And in nineteen hundred count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. That name
sounds familiar, Zeppelin of Germany. Uh, and that's where they
got the name, of course. Because but I never understood
the Led the lead Well it was I think someone
said as a joke, you guys are gonna go over
like a led Zeppelin, or they did when they played
on the BBC. Is that it? But why take the
A out Because the same reason you take the A
(04:45):
out of def Leppard. I've never understood that either in
the same wings you put it um out over Motley Crue.
This makes you cool, you know, different, different. You gotta
mispel something in your band. I think I was just
looking too deeply into it. It's the problem. Yeah. L
E A d. Zeppelin would be weird. Yeah, but I
think like our paradigm would have adjusted. We would think
(05:06):
L E. D. Zeppelin would be weird if we were
used to led Zeppelin with an A, or if the
Beatles was spelled B E T L E S. Yeah,
instead of their penny name very penny. All right, boy,
we get sidetracks so easy with music stuff. Not really
Zeppelin was I think people saw that coming before their
press play. Uh So that was the rigid airship, the
(05:28):
first one, and those have a metal framework, and it
had tail fins and rudders, had combustion engines and could
cruise at about feet with up to five people. Yes,
not bad. You could bring the whole family as long
as you encounter, as long as you total no more
than five, as long as you paid off the captain.
Well then you just have to be a family of four.
(05:50):
That's right, because the captain's gotta sit somewhere, right, they
got their little captain's chair. So everything was going quite swimmingly. Actually, Um,
around the turn of the twentieth century, there there was.
It was just widely assumed that we would have a
future where blimps that blinds were just a regular feature
(06:10):
of the sky. Well they were up until the Hinderberg
went down. There were more than two thousand flights carried um,
tens of thousands of passengers over a million miles. Like
that was air travel, we should say, ultra wealthy passengers
at the time. Um. The Hinderberg in particular was it
was high class. It was the pride of Nazi Germany. Yeah,
(06:32):
And it was on its maiden voyage, wasn't it. It
was almost called the Hitler by the way, was it really? Yeah?
But Hitler was like, I don't want my name on
that thing. Really yet, not that he like foretold the future,
He just didn't. I don't know. He just didn't want
to him named after an airship. He didn't believe Freud's
idea that sometimes the cigars just a cigar, yeah, or
(06:52):
a cigar shaped airship is just a cigar shaped there
and it crashed and burned too, So he was probably
pretty stoked that he'd have his name on it. Yeah,
he very famously went yeah when he heard the news exactly. So, uh,
we should probably stopped making light of this nearly eighty
year old tragedy because people did die, you know. Yeah,
(07:15):
I mean, should we tell the story? All right? Well,
it took off on May three seven, had thirty six
passengers and officers and crew members and trainees, left Frankfort
at about seven fifteen and then crossed out over the
Atlantic at about two am the next day. It's not
super fast travel. It was compared to the ship travel
(07:38):
at the time. It was it took about half the
time to cross the Atlantic as it did in a boat. Yeah,
but compared to what we're used to Oh yeah, you
were just it was leisurely. Um And apparently after reading
more about the Hindenburgh, it's not as um And I
guess ship travels sort of the same way, like we're
going to get there when we get there, like we're heading,
we're trying to get there and then but you never
(07:59):
know what gonna happen, right, That's why they called them
the leisure class, that's right. Uh, it follows followed a
northern track across the ocean. Um eventually crossed uh into
North America, over the coast of Newfoundland and arrived in
lake Hurst, New Jersey about twelve hours late. And um, Germans,
(08:20):
they're always late, they're famous for it. And basically arrived
there at the Naval air station, and because of poor weather,
the captain and the commanding officer on the ground said,
you know what, the weather is not so great. Let's
wait a little bit, um, because they can fly around
forever in those things. And he said, all right, well,
(08:40):
the Jersey shore is nice. Let's just go fly about
that and tell everyone to look around and look at
all those old timey bathing suits and they're up to
the ankles and water. Um. By six pm, UM conditions
had improved and at six twelve he sent a message
sand it's suitable for landing. Recommended landing now. About seven
eight he finally UH pulled the blimp in. It was
(09:03):
a bit of a dodgy approach, but he eventually, you know,
got it down towards the ground pretty you know, uh skillfully, which,
as we'll see, it's not as easy as you'd think,
even though it's not in practice. No, they dropped the
landing lines and then things went south like really fast. Yeah.
(09:23):
It was filled with hydrogen, which is the lightest element, right, Yeah,
and uh it's also probably the most flammable or one
of them. Yes, inflammable was a big error at the time. Um,
a lot of blimps had caught on fire. This was
not the first accident, and uh there was you know,
(09:45):
people testified afterward, because not everyone died. We'll get to
the numbers here at the end of the story. But um,
there was testimony that, um, it appeared as if gas
was pushing against the cover. Maybe it escaped from a
gas cell. The first visible aimes appeared, and it varies,
but most of witness to say that the first flames
(10:05):
are either at the top of the hall uh, forward
of the vertical fin or between the rear port engine
in the port fin. And they described it as a
mushroom shaped flower. And it pretty much engulfed the tail
like right away, and it was able to remain steady
for a little while. Like people could start jumping out
at this point. Well, those are the people who died,
(10:26):
correct Now, That's what I always heard, or that's what
I have heard is that the people who stayed in
the gondola lived and the people who jumped were the
ones that died because the flames, because the hydrogen is light,
they were burning upward. Well, it says here basically it
was all depended on where you were. If you were
(10:47):
close to a means of exit, you generally survived. Um,
if you were deep inside the ship, like in the
power room along the keel, or in the smoking room.
Smoking room in the end, I'm supposed it wasn't all smoking,
big blimpful of hydrogen. Oh yeah, yeah, it's not a
good yet. They had apparently a double um air locked door,
(11:11):
one electric lighter and um you were allowed to smoke
as long as you put it out before you left.
And UM, so, like I said, if you were in
the smoking room on B deck, you're in big trouble. Um.
If you were one of the nine men closest to
the front of the ship, you definitely didn't survive. Yeah.
(11:32):
So out of the ninety seven people on board sixty
two survived. I think when you see the footage, I
mean you can watch it on YouTube, it looks like
how in the world could anyone survive it? Because it
goes I mean it's fully burned in less than a
minute and on the ground went up fast. But sixty
two to survive, thirteen of the thirty six passengers and
twenty two of the sixty one crew. And there's still
(11:54):
two guys alive today. Yeah, we checked two years ago,
but they don't like to talk about it. I can
imagine there's one kinetic experience. They're both named Verner, Verner
Franz and wernerd Doner. The two Verner and one was
a little cabin boy and one was a passenger with
his family. And uh, they were contacted for like the
(12:15):
you know, the ceremony. I guess you don't call it
an anniversary. I guess, uh memorial. Yeah, it just sounds
like a party, you know. But they said, no, we're
not coming. We don't like to talk about it. Yeah.
So it's been a long standing mystery exactly what happened.
And I found an article in the UK Independent from
(12:36):
two thousand thirteen about a study from that year that
found they said they they figured it out. They built
like scale models of the Hindenburg, which was like two
and a half football fields long. By the way, they
were building scale models that were like like sixty ft long,
so good sized ones, and they tried to blow them
up because there was a rumor that it was sabotage.
(12:57):
You know that everybody hated the Nazis even then. Um
and uh, they tried all all manners stuff, and what
they finally figured out was that probably what happened was
from being in that stormy weather, that exterior the envelope
of the blimp became um electrified, and when the ground
(13:18):
crew ran up and grabbed the cables, they completed the
current from the blimp to the ground, which caused a
spark which actually um ignited a hydrogen leak that fire
caused out. Yeah. Yeah. One thing they say it definitely
isn't which they long thought it was, was the actual
fabric was like painted in this flammable stuff, and that's
(13:39):
not true. It was the standard fabric. It was just
a big balloon fill of hydrogen. Yeah. So when that happened, Um,
the future of blimps were just pretty much like that
was it for blimps. That wasn't the immediate end. But
as far as like commercial blimp travel, that's tough for
(14:02):
an industry to get over. So it kind of fell
on the wayside, although they did continue on UM in
a couple of forms. Up until the sixties, the US government,
especially the Navy, maintained blimps. One of the UM I
think that I guess the Air Force. I don't know
is the Navy, but one of the branches of the
U s military use blimps as UM giant aircraft carriers
(14:24):
of the air, not not the sea, the air, which
is pretty awesome. And apparently they had them so you
could connect like a light plane to what's called like
a trapeeze mechanism coming out of the bottom of the
blimps and just like hook your plane on, climb up
and say, hey, guys, where are we going? Or you
can take off from there too. What yes, how do
(14:47):
you take off? You just drop I think you just
released the hook from the trapeez and starting of free
fall and then you just go often to the distance
and go thanks for the ride, lady. That sounds really weird. UM.
And they had even bigger plans that were never realized
because the Navy scrapped the program, and I think nineteen
two UM to have like a landing strip on top
(15:07):
of the blimp so you could have just like planes
takeoff and land and then be stored like in the blimp,
which would have been pretty awesome. Well, cargo airships are
the wave of the future, perhaps, so we'll see. So,
but that was the military was involved in blimps for
most of the first half of the twentieth century and
(15:28):
then um, our friends a good Year came up with
a blimp that has really served them well. Like they
were making blimps for the military, and then um they
started using them for commercial purposes and everybody knows about
good Year thanks to those blimps. Yeah, and they're going
to figure in here, of course, because you can't talk
about blimps a lot without a ton of buzz marketing
(15:49):
for good Year. Um. But you know that's where they
make their name. In fact, my in laws almost wrote
on the one based out of Akron because that's where
they're from. And they think he was going to put
in a bid on a like an auction bid to
win a trip Nate, And I think it never happened.
The trip never happened. I think he either lost the bid.
(16:11):
I'll have to ask him, but I don't think they
ever wrote on the blimp. Okay, I was gonna say
if the trip never happened. That doesn't sound like the
good Year I know. No, No, they're very uh, they're
like the Germans. So they've got there's three, um good
Year blimps. Actually there's one and I believe Texas, there's
one in California. There's one in Ohio orres A, Florida, California,
(16:31):
and Ohio is what it is. I'm sorry. Um, the
spirit of good Year, the spirit of America, the spirit
of innovation, and chuck. About the time this episode comes out,
Robin Roberts, the TV personality, is going to be christening
the newest member of the fleet, the wing foot one. Nice.
So they're gonna have four, Yeah, because there's a lot
(16:52):
of sporting events there. Sure, and you can't watch a
big sporting event without hearing the words uh aerial coverage
provided by good Year. Yeah. And those shots, man, they're
pretty great, they really are. We haven't been around forever.
It was I think an Orange Bowl in Miami where
the first one was broadcast and what like the sixties
maybe I don't know, something like that, and it changed America. Yeah,
(17:14):
well it um certainly gives them a lot of press
and saves well, I don't know about saves some money.
I haven't seen their balance sheet, but it's they don't
have to spend money on that thirty second spot. They
still do to tie into the blimp, but it's great
advertising for them. Yeah. Um. They also were good Sports
in a movie called Black Sunday. Did you ever see
(17:37):
that movie? Of course I never saw it. Um, but
apparently they provided Um, they provided some of the footage
for the movie, and UM let their blimps be used. Uh,
and let their name be used even like it wasn't
like the the Good Wire blimp. You know, they didn't
try to have to change it just enough. They used Goodyear,
(17:59):
which made the whole thing even more terrifying and realistic. Yeah,
they wanted to kill everyone at the super Bowl. That
was the plot. Uh, with a blimp right that shot darts,
which is weird. But it was written by the guy
who wrote Silence of the Lambs. Oh. Yeah, he's a
good writer. Have you ever read any of his books?
Oh he was the book writer. Oh no, I didn't
(18:21):
know that. No, I haven't read any of Silence at
the way. He does very good research. Interesting guy. Um. Anyway,
so good Year good Year in the military. After the Hindenburg.
That was the two cases of blimps. But like you said,
there is potentially a future for blimps, which we'll talk about.
But first let's talk about how blimps work in general.
(18:42):
After these messages, you want to know how blimps work, buddy,
I do it pretty simple. This was the delight to
learn because it was like, oh, I thought would be
just that little to it. And that's really kind of
(19:02):
the case, right, Yeah, yeah, there's not like oh and
here's where it gets really hard. They're like the pontoon
boats of the sky. Yeah. Like the most complicated thing
on the blimp is probably the gyroscopic camera on the
front of it to film the football stadium. I think
you're right. Uh So, let's talk about the anatomy of
a blamp you have. You mentioned the envelope earlier. That
is the thing that you're looking at. That is key
(19:24):
big cigar shaped balloon. It's filled nowadays with helium. It
is that shape because of aerodynamics, of course, and they
are super lightweight and super strong. Like you were saying,
neoprene to ply neoprene polyester generally, is that what the
envelopes made of. There's a company um called the i
(19:45):
LC Dover Corporation. They make a lot of skins UM
and they use the same material that they make UM
space suits out of for NASA for blimps. Too good
enough for Neil Armstrong, Buddy, good enough for my blimp.
This is like all about Ohio. This one. Oh was here, Ohio? Yeah, yeah,
I let have done it. So it was good here. No,
(20:07):
No I knew that. Um, there were your in laws.
That's right. The envelopes they hold UM. And it depends
on the blimps for all of these statistics, of course.
But between sixty seven thousand and two hundred and fifty
thousand cubic feet of helium and um, it's not super
The pressure is really low inside point zero seven pounds
per square inch. So that's why if you shot a
(20:29):
blimp it wouldn't like fall. No, I just leak very
slowly and you just land it and patch it up.
I guess, yeah, very slowly. Yeah. British Ministry of Defense
fired hundreds of bullets into an airship just for fun, well,
not to see what if it would could be shot
down in battle basically, and uh it took many hours
(20:49):
to deflate and land. So and they don't even deflate them.
They just leave them that way, so they're they're natural
structure will not natural, but their original structure UM events
them from being shot down. That's one big benefit. Because
I was wondering about that. I was like, you're just
providing a target for every teenager with a gun in
any country that you hover a blimp over. UM. Now
(21:12):
I understand. But secondly, as we'll see, it also has
to do with the dynamics of the flight of UM
hovering in the atmosphere. UM. So you've got the envelope,
and the envelope also has something called nose cone battons,
which is basically like a support structure for the nose
the front of it just the very very tip, and
(21:32):
it keeps the the the the blimps front from being
mashed in as it moves forward, which is pretty smart. Yeah,
I think I misspoke. The nose cone is on just
the very tip, and then the batons are like the
fingers that distribute the stress over the front of the cone. Okay,
so they're like the the the structure that comes out
of the nose, right, and then also on the nose
(21:55):
as the mooring um hook. Because you've got to hook
a blimp up to something. Yeah, it's got a little
spindle there, and it's got a little wheel under the
tail rudder, and that's basically how it sits. You just
tie it down. Yeah, very simple. Um, just like a balloon.
That's right. So there's here's where it gets a little craftier,
(22:18):
like nineteen century crafty, but still neat nonetheless. Um, there's
something called balonetts, right, and these are basically air bladders
that are located within the envelope, and you inflate or
deflate them depending on whether you want the blimp to
go up or down. If you wanted to go up,
you deflate these balonets. You wanted to go down, you
(22:39):
inflate them. And the reason that works is because you're
inflating or you're inflating these balonettes with air and helium,
which blimps fly using now is lighter than air. So
more air means the blimps heavier, so it goes down.
Less air means it's lighter, so it goes up. Yeah,
it's pretty easy. It's sort of like how a submarine
(22:59):
opera rates. Um. And there's one in the four and
one in the aft, so that's how you control your trim.
You can just knows it up or knows it down,
filling up or deflating. That's the pitch axis, that's right,
or trim Okay, well, the trim is the levelness okay. Yeah.
(23:20):
And the axis where the nose and the back go
up and down, that's the trim axis. You know, the
pitch axis, right, yeah, okay, no one can see not
in agreement, okay, um chuck. Then there's the caternary curtain
and the suspension cables, which I didn't get the caternary
(23:41):
curtain really I understood. The suspension cable is just fine. Uh.
It's on the on the inside about off center. Um.
And it basically if you look, it sort of looks
like the where you attach the basket to the hot
air balloon. They all, um, you know, there's a number
of these lines that run down and I'll meet at
(24:03):
a single point, um near the gondola, right, and that's
what you attach the gondola to the blimp using right. Yeah.
So basically, if if you if the blimp envelope wasn't there,
it would sort of look like a hot air balloon.
It would have these lines that run up from the
gondola a k A basket up to the top, so
they would be like the um vertical lines are the
(24:26):
horizontal lines. Okay, I understand exact amundo. Um. Then you've
got the really technical stuff, the flight control surfaces. So
everything we've just described as basically balloons and then the
structure that gives the balloon it's shape, right and then um,
the flight control surfaces are basically a rudder and elevators
(24:46):
and they're the things that you can control to make
the balloon till upward or side to side. That's pretty
much it. Yeah, there's that one rudder on the top
and bottom and that controls your yaw and you do
it with little If you look at the captain's sherry,
he's got a little little foot pedals. It's like a
clutch pedal you would put in, push in and um.
(25:07):
On the bottom very bottom back of the rudder, there's
something called a boost tab and that's just a little additional, uh,
sectioned off piece of the rudder that's also controllable. It's
like a little mini rudder and um it assists with
the rudder I think to make an even tighter turn.
So if you imagine just the smaller rudder as part
of the main rudder, just to give you that extra boost,
(25:30):
I guess when you need to turn. Uh. And then
there's two elevators and they um. If you are sitting
in your little captain's chair, imagine a car steering wheel
placed vertically like by your side. And that's just a
wheel that you turn up and turn down. It's really
very basic. It sounds like the Wizard of Oz. The curtain,
(25:50):
like all the machineries messing with it looks very steampunky
when you look at it. Uh. So you steer up
or down with that wheel, and uh, that's pretty much it.
I don't know. Don't forget the engines. Oh well yeah,
I mean as far as like driving this puppy. Yeah.
The flight control Yeah, this is what separates it from
hot air balloons. Don't forget the engines. Know the hot
(26:12):
the well, yeah, the engines, but also the flight control services.
But the engines are turbo prop engines. Right. There's twin ones,
which means there's two one on each side of the
gondola at the rear, and they're pretty cool because they
propeled the thing forward but very cleverly. There's also something
called air scoops that are basically these funnels that face
(26:36):
the back of the turbo prop and they catch the
vented air out of the props and they use those
to inflate the balonetts. Yeah, that's called prop wash. This
is all the lingo I've learned. That's good stuff. Uh.
And the engines are just six cylinder engines. Like I
said that, you don't need a ton of power to
power these things. And you can go at about thirty
(26:59):
the seventy This says miles per hour, not knots. So
how about that? And seventies cruising apparently, like fifty is
where you want to be get this. I did the calculations.
So one of the um one of the great advantages
blimps have, which is the reason we've been talking about
these things, or anybody's talking about still making blimps, is
(27:20):
that they can stay aloft for days, weeks, even um,
which gives them a huge advantage of our airplanes, which
have to stop and refuel and stop and refuel. But
going seventy miles per hour chuck, a blimp NonStop at
that rate could travel the circumference of the Earth around
the equator in fourteen days. That in the fuel, yeah,
(27:43):
which I think is not very hard. No, they at
thirty knots. The sky ship, which is this one example.
UM consumes about eight gallons of fuel per hour, so
apparently during an entire week of operations, it consumes less
fuel than a seven sixties seven commercial jet uses to
move away from the gate. So it's super green, which
(28:06):
is kind of cool. You can understand why cargo companies
are looking at them too. Yeah, and that's it runs
on av gas, of course, not just regular old gas.
You couldn't pull it up to a gas station like
your car because I think av gas is still leaded
or a lot of it is. Oh and that's the
diff that's not that cream. Yeah, true, but they're not
(28:27):
burning much of it. Uh. So let's see what else
is there. The valves. You've got to be able to
let air in and out. You also want to be
able to let air in and out of the envelope
itself in case things become too pressurized. You don't want
to pop. Yeah, that's true. So you've got your air
valves for the UM for the bladders inside, and they're underneath.
(28:49):
Uh to tow up front, two in the back, and
then you have your helium valve and you can either
vent it and you don't have to do this much
because you should have it pretty like the pressure set um.
But if something does happen, you can either manually do
it or it's set to automatically release. And if you
look at the good Year blimp, it's sort of been
the y of a Year, just looks like a little
(29:11):
gas cap. You really know you're blimps man. Well, I
mean I went to the good Year site. It's awesome.
You can like there's all sorts of animated jifts and
or is it gifts? I never could yeah, yeah, graphic interface. Yeah,
but there is a correct way. I just don't know
what it is. Well, the guy who created gifts says
(29:32):
he pronounces it Jeff oh wrench in the works, but
I disagree with him. Morgellons give the good Year Blimp gondola,
which is where we are now, is twenty two point
seven five ft long. It is aluminum on welded steel
frame and that's where everyone rides. Um. Depending on your blimp,
(29:56):
it's gonna hold up to well. It depends on how
big the blimp, but usually you don't see a blimp
with more than twelve passengers or so. Yeah, and it's
not even necessarily passengers. The gondola can also be the
place where it holds all of the surveillance equipment to
depending on what you use it for, or it can
also be the massive cargo hold. Yeah, you've got your
communications up there, your flight surface controls, any KNAB equipment,
(30:20):
UM propeller controls. That's where all the there's there's not
much else to it besides what what you got there
in the gondola. What's funny is um I always thought
blimps were basically like, you know, you you get the
blimp in the air and it takes off and then
that's it. But it's it's at least with good Year.
(30:42):
It's kind of like UM got helicopter parents almost because
when the blimp. When you see the blimp, if you
look around, you'll also find a ground crew with a bus,
uh eighteen wheeler and a bunch of vans that follow
it everywhere because I guess those things break down. Yeah,
and apparently the pilots to their f A certified and
(31:05):
Goodyear pilots also have another training program. But the pilots
are even it's all sort of everyone is cross trained.
It sounds like to work on the ground or make
repairs and um, yeah, it's like a little self contained unit,
all just traveling around together like a like h tornado chasers.
Oh and you talked about um the end. You know,
(31:28):
if they just took off and floated around, if the
engines did stop, that's exactly what you're doing. You're basically
a hot air balloon at that point, so you lose
control of the flight service controls. Yeah. Well, I mean
if it's they call it a free balloon, so it's
buoyant um, and it's kept aloft obviously, But if they
lose all the power, then all you can do is
(31:48):
ascend and descend. Because I think I guess the rudders
and the elevators are also powered mechanisms, just not just
attached to a cable attached to a pedal attached to
a wheel of the ne's It sounds like it is though,
And as far as weather goes, they compare it to
roughly operating is about as similar as a helicopter. Like
(32:09):
we can fly in bad weather, um, but we try
to avoid super bad weather. Yeah. I don't blame them
because I mean, that's not fun you want to be
above the rose bowl in like seventy degree weather. So
coming up, we're gonna talk about how blimps fly, and
then also the future of blimps and if there is
(32:29):
such a thing after this. So chuck. The way blimps
flies pretty simple and beautiful and elegant if you ask me, yeah, yeah,
So you have helium, right, yeah, which is they used
(32:49):
to use hydrogen. Helium slightly heavier than um hydrogen, but
not that much more. You don't notice the difference, I
would guess, Yeah, I mean you get why they use hydrogen.
They weren't dummies. It was lighter than air, the lightest
of all the gas of all the elements from what
I understand um. And when hydrogen blew up, they said, okay,
not hydrogen. What else do we have? And they said, well,
(33:11):
helium works, and so they started using helium. And helium
has a lift of lift capacity of point seventy pounds
per square foot, right, which is one point one kilograms
per square meter um, which means it can lift a
pretty decent amount of wait for just a little bit amount.
(33:35):
And since they're filling these balloons with hundreds of thousands
of cubic feet or cubic meters of these um of helium.
They can look tons and tons of weight, and they
do it by just simple physics, since helium is lighter
than air. As long as the helium has enough lifting
power to lift whatever the envelope and the gondola and
(33:58):
all of the mechanisms way, and it will rise more
than the air. It will rise into the air. Yeah,
it's called positive buoyancy, and what you want as a
blimp pilot is neutral buoyancy. So that's why you're gonna control,
like we talked about your air bladders to uh get
that thing where it's Once you've got your cruising altitude,
you just want to be at the same level you
(34:19):
want and you want to fill it up by blowing
exhausted into your air scoops which fill up your balonets.
And the higher you get into the atmosphere, the less
pressure there is, which means the higher up you could
float conceivably, So you want to make sure you get
that air in so you don't just float away and
you achieve is it negative buoyancy or neutral buoyancy? You said,
(34:40):
that's what you want, and then when you want to land,
you do just the opposite. Um, you fill it up
with even more air and then you make the blimp
heavier than the helium inside can lift and it just
slowly comes down to the ground. And I mean that's it.
That's how blimps rise and fall. Yeah, it is pretty simple.
And when they're on the ground, they just tie it
(35:02):
to that little spindle. You've got your little wheel under
the rear. You got a little tractor to tow it around,
maybe a hanger. And uh, that's the life of a blimp.
And it's like I said, they don't inflate and deflate these.
I'm sure it's a time and expense. Uh. And I
think they're running out of helium too. Didn't we learn that? Yeah?
Do you know much about that? Well, we we covered
(35:23):
it and uh, the probably the Mars turbine up Mars turbine. Yeah,
that was it. But I read a really interesting article
and I think the New Republic, I can't remember. I
found it online last night, and um, it's about the
helium shortage and why we have a helium shortage and
apparently the US has had a reserve, a strategic helium
(35:45):
reserve since in a cave in Texas and Apparently during
the Clinton era, the government said, let's make some money
off of this, or let's make our money back off
of it, so they passed it all that said start
selling the stuff off Bureau of Land Management, but only
make enough money off of it to recoup whatever we've
(36:09):
put into it over the years, which is like one
billion dollars. So they started selling it, and by setting
the price artificially, they created an artificial market. Because this
is like of the world's helium reserves in this cave
in Texas. So whatever the BLM was selling it for,
that's how much the market value was. But it was artificial,
(36:29):
so you had artificially cheap helium flooding the market, which
had a two pronged effect. One, it led to these
scarcities that we're running into now because they just started
selling it off in a fire sale the private industry.
But the other more positive effect it had was that
it spurred all of this technological innovation because nuclear magnetic resonance,
(36:52):
the technology behind m ri I superconductivity UM molecular analysis,
uses helium two super cool magnets to turn them into superconductors, right,
so you need helium for that. So all these industries
were using this helium from the Beer of land management
to like advanced technology by leaps and bounds, which is
(37:12):
one of the big reasons why we are where we
are right now technologically speaking because of helium. But now
we're starting to run out. There's I think nine billion
cubic feet of helium left in the reserve in Texas,
which is about a third of what they had when
they started selling it off in the nineties, which would
be fine if we just clamped it out and said, okay,
(37:34):
this is a reserve again. But instead, for some reason,
the government just doubled down and issued another decree to
the beer of land management is like, keep selling this stuff.
Let's just get rid of all of it for no
good reason. I don't understand why. Like it made sense
in the nineties maybe, and it had all these great effects,
but now it's like, okay, we understand that helium is
(37:55):
literally irreplaceable, as the article put it, like there's once
there's no helium. There's no helium, Like we can't go
get it anywhere else for manufacturer, and we have no
technology to recycle it. I wonder what the reason is.
I guess money private industry has a lot of interest
in it, and there's good interest too, like using it
for m R S or pharmaceutical researcher that kind of parties. Well,
(38:17):
that's the thing. So med, the med and pharma sectors
use tent of helium worldwide welding used. The seventeen percent
because they use helium to weld party balloons equals eight
percent of worldwide helium use. I have a feeling that
party balloons are going to go the way of the
dinosaur very soon, if they haven't already. And half of
(38:38):
that is the stoner kid who operates the helium tank, right,
just talking funny. Yeah, So that's the helium shortage. That's
the skinny on it. So that I wonder if there's
any other gas they could use for blimps. I don't know.
It seems like a giant waste. Or I wonder if
they could, Like, do you like a hybrid so it's
(39:00):
fueled by hot air like a balloon? Huh? Probably wouldn't.
I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. Uh. Well,
I guess we are at the future then in the future,
and depending on who you ask, the future of airships
is either super exciting and awesome and when you look
(39:21):
at these they are or it's not going to be
funded enough to really Um, there's not a lot of
money being pumped into it. Well, the government was for
a little while with the Afghanistan war. The Department of
Defense was like, give us new blimps. We want these
things now. And all these companies ran in and we're like,
here's your blimps, here's your blimps, give us some money.
(39:42):
The problem is is the whole program got scrapped because
nobody could fulfill the enormous orders. The d D was
placing four helium Well that makes sense. Uh. And the
military is interested because they basically, um could be uh
a satellite function as a satellite like a ten ft satellite. Yeah,
pretty much. Um. There are people doing it though. Lockheed
(40:05):
Martin has a P seven ninety one UM that is
super cool looking. It is a try hall. If you
look at it from the front, it looks sort of
like three blimps squashed together. Um. And it has four
big it looks like feet these disc shaped cushions that
apparently for landing and these are also cool. There's um
(40:26):
another one in California from Worldwide Aeroscorp. Called the dragon
Dream and it's different look and it sort of looks
like a whale shark. Did you see it. It's a
single hall, I guess, but it's sort of kind of
flattened out. Um, yeah, it looks like a whale shark.
They they actually submitted that design to the d o
D and when the d D scrapped the program. Um,
(40:47):
they bought their design back because they want to go
commercial like cargo carrier with it. Yeah. Well they're in
trouble though, because the dragon died well, it had a
roof collapse and a hangarya and they don't know if
they have the money to even fix it and then continue. Well,
they have another model called the mL eight sixties six
that it sounds like they're putting their energy into. It's
(41:08):
supposedly can carry two and fifty tons, which is more
than twice the cargo payload of a cargo seven seventy twice.
And again you mentioned how little fuel it takes to
power these things. So it'll take a little while for
you to get your package, but the company shipping it
isn't going to spend too much money delivering it. I
(41:28):
still say, if it's a military like to use as
a cargo plane. I know you can't shoot a hole
in it, but what if you launched the surface to
air missile at it. You know it's still full of helium.
That's doesn't sound like I don't know. They're so high
up there you can't the fact that we have satellites
and drones. It seems to me like the surveillance uses
(41:50):
of blimps or preposterous, especially considering that we could be
using that helium for medical purposes instead. You know, I agree,
you got anything else on blimps? We got nothing else. Um,
I got one other thing. If you were fascinated by
the um the way blimps float, I think it's cool
for some reason. I did a brain stuff video about that.
(42:16):
You can calculate how many balloons it would take, like
regular party balloons to lift yourself into the sky, and
I made a video about it. So you go to
a brain stuff show dot com and check it out. Uh,
And if you want to read this article, you can
go to how stuff works dot com type in how
blimps work and it will bring it up. And I said,
(42:37):
how stuff works. I think So that means it's time
for listener, ma'am. I'm gonna call this, uh, sterilizing addicts.
Remember that Old One did a show on whether or
not it's legal to sterilize addicts. It turns out it is, yeah,
and that's the thing. Uh. And this is from someone
who had a personal uh stake in it. Um. It's long,
(42:58):
but I'm gonna edit it in my head as I go. Hey, guys,
just recently listen to your podcasts and sterilation sterilization of
addicts had a personal story to share. Um. Until my
mother is a fully recovered heroin addict and I'm grateful
just to be alive. Until I was six, she was
only an alcoholic. However, a drug addiction set in fast.
My mother, brother, and myself, along with whatever scumbag boyfriend
(43:22):
she had at the time, were constantly on the run
from the police, looking for shelter and searching for food.
My father is an upper middle class blue collar worker
who always had a sound home environment. When my mother
was sent to prison when I was ten, I was
sent to live with my father. Always had food, a shower,
and clean clothes. Was never in fear for being homeless. Uh.
I live with my father for three years until I
finally ran away. Once I regained contact with my mother.
(43:44):
My father, even with his financial support, instability was never there,
even though he was only a few feet away. My mother,
even while on drugs, always listened and always cared about
my thoughts and feelings, and that was what was important
as a child. My mother eventually overcame her adictions cold
Turkey because she could see it was damaging to me
and my brother. And she's been cleaned for eleven years
(44:06):
now and it's an amazing mother, an amazing grandmother to
my nephew. I like to believe that seeing the harder
side of life made me appreciate, uh, such things and
be more humble and responsible, uh and fearful of what
could happen if I slipped or did not take care
of myself. I don't want to be the poster child
for children of addicts. Whoever, I do believe that we
are all in control of our own lives. Uh. And
(44:30):
that is anonymized as Cornelius Jacobs, the seventh Corney Jake seven. Yeah,
he said, yeah, you can read it. And I said,
all anonymous anonymous size it is there some sort of
name anonymizer on the internet. Now? He said, please do
just make it something awesome, like Cornelius Jacobs the seventh,
that's great and that's a cool ps. I've been secretly
(44:52):
wanting Jerry to be the Tyler Dirden of your podcast.
That even means like made up, but like we think
she's real, but she's not. Okay, are you real, Jerry?
Jerry says no, Nope, that answers that. Cornelius Jacobs the
seventh and you read the Roman numerals correctly. Chuck this time?
Good going? I I yeah. Uh. If you want to
(45:15):
get in touch with me and Chuck to tell us
any story like Cornelius Jacobs the seventh, um, please do.
You can tweet to us at s y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always,
go to our cool home on the web, Stuff you
Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands
(45:41):
of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com
Welcome to stuff you should know front House stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's with us, so
that makes this stuff you should know. How you doing,
I'm good man, this is I'm excited about this. Oh
(00:21):
are you sure? Blimps? Yeah, because they have like eight names, blimp, dirigible, zeppelin, yeah,
airship yeah. Uh well technically l t A I'm counting
that lighter than airship, yeah, which I think is ultimately
lighter than airship. L t A is the umbrella term
(00:43):
for all of those things which are slightly different. Yeah.
I think an l t A and an airship is
all of them. The dirigible is all of them, Zeppelin
is rigid, and a blimp is non rigid. Nice and
mostly we just said blimps. These days, not a lot
of rigid airships, aren't there? But would they would they
constitute Yeah? No, but there's they can be semi rigid
(01:04):
or non rigid, right, yeah, and I think the future
we'll talk about that obviously the end. But I think
those are some of those are more the semi rigid style, right, Yeah,
but they're made up some really lightweight but very strong
composite materials. Yeah. Boom so Chuck. Let's talk about the
history of blimps because I think when anybody thinks of
(01:26):
blimps they think Handenburg. They think they think the Handenburg
and then maybe concurrently or right after the Good Year blimp. Yeah,
those are the two that really laid it on the
line for blimp them. Uh. Yeah, you know what you
want to talk about the early history, I guess, and
(01:47):
then get to the tragedy. Yeah, because there wasn't that
much time in between the two to tell you the truth. Yeah,
I mean that all started, of course with hot air
balloons because uh, they're not so different. In a cup
of frenchees. Brothers Jacques Etienne and Joseph Michelle. They said
they were brothers, but they have different Last night, I
(02:08):
think Jacques Etienne is his first and middle name. Okay,
that makes sense. They all had three names, uh, Mom, Golfier.
They invented the hot air balloon, uh, an unmanned hot
air balloon in three and then later that same year
a French physicist last name de Rosier had the first
(02:29):
manned balloon flight and they were just floating around because
that's what our balloons do. You can go up and
then if you're really good, you can come back down.
But left and right that's up to mother nature right,
which is a little scary, although I think these days
can they steer them at all. We have a great
article on this on hot air balloon. No, you're you're
subject to the winds to the the um was the
(02:53):
god of wind that you know he comes out of
the cloud and blows wind. Yeah that guy. Yeah, you're
you're subject to his whim. So if if you're headed
towards something, it's go over it or hit it. Yes,
And you remember there's that terrible bloom hot air balloon
accident and I think Virginia last year earlier this year
at Yeah, like they hit a power line I think,
(03:15):
and then the basket caught fire and like they had
to jump. It was really bad. Um, But yeah, you
can go up and over and I imagine it it's
like a power line, yeah, or a tunnel if you're
really good, or you're in a cartoon like the laugh Olympics,
that's something they do in there totally. But the I
think if you're really good, you could probably know where
(03:37):
to steer into the wind to maybe use the wind.
But no. With the blimp, the big distinction is, aside
from its distinctive shape, is that you can maneuver like
a pro That's right. And that's what Henry uh Jaffar
did in eighteen fifty two when he finally someone said
we should steer these things. He built the first powered
(03:59):
airship and it was cigar fielled like the classic shape
that we know and love now, had a propeller like
they have now, and a little engine although it was
a steam engine which they don't use now. Three horsepower
steam engine. Yeah, they're not huge engines. Still didn't take
a lot apparently, No, it really doesn't. Um And those
were rigid airships. Uh, it's a it's a metal framework.
(04:22):
And in nineteen hundred count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. That name
sounds familiar, Zeppelin of Germany. Uh, and that's where they
got the name, of course. Because but I never understood
the Led the lead Well it was I think someone
said as a joke, you guys are gonna go over
like a led Zeppelin, or they did when they played
on the BBC. Is that it? But why take the
A out Because the same reason you take the A
(04:45):
out of def Leppard. I've never understood that either in
the same wings you put it um out over Motley Crue.
This makes you cool, you know, different, different. You gotta
mispel something in your band. I think I was just
looking too deeply into it. It's the problem. Yeah. L
E A d. Zeppelin would be weird. Yeah, but I
think like our paradigm would have adjusted. We would think
(05:06):
L E. D. Zeppelin would be weird if we were
used to led Zeppelin with an A, or if the
Beatles was spelled B E T L E S. Yeah,
instead of their penny name very penny. All right, boy,
we get sidetracks so easy with music stuff. Not really
Zeppelin was I think people saw that coming before their
press play. Uh So that was the rigid airship, the
(05:28):
first one, and those have a metal framework, and it
had tail fins and rudders, had combustion engines and could
cruise at about feet with up to five people. Yes,
not bad. You could bring the whole family as long
as you encounter, as long as you total no more
than five, as long as you paid off the captain.
Well then you just have to be a family of four.
(05:50):
That's right, because the captain's gotta sit somewhere, right, they
got their little captain's chair. So everything was going quite swimmingly. Actually, Um,
around the turn of the twentieth century, there there was.
It was just widely assumed that we would have a
future where blimps that blinds were just a regular feature
(06:10):
of the sky. Well they were up until the Hinderberg
went down. There were more than two thousand flights carried um,
tens of thousands of passengers over a million miles. Like
that was air travel, we should say, ultra wealthy passengers
at the time. Um. The Hinderberg in particular was it
was high class. It was the pride of Nazi Germany. Yeah,
(06:32):
And it was on its maiden voyage, wasn't it. It
was almost called the Hitler by the way, was it really? Yeah?
But Hitler was like, I don't want my name on
that thing. Really yet, not that he like foretold the future,
He just didn't. I don't know. He just didn't want
to him named after an airship. He didn't believe Freud's
idea that sometimes the cigars just a cigar, yeah, or
(06:52):
a cigar shaped airship is just a cigar shaped there
and it crashed and burned too, So he was probably
pretty stoked that he'd have his name on it. Yeah,
he very famously went yeah when he heard the news exactly. So, uh,
we should probably stopped making light of this nearly eighty
year old tragedy because people did die, you know. Yeah,
(07:15):
I mean, should we tell the story? All right? Well,
it took off on May three seven, had thirty six
passengers and officers and crew members and trainees, left Frankfort
at about seven fifteen and then crossed out over the
Atlantic at about two am the next day. It's not
super fast travel. It was compared to the ship travel
(07:38):
at the time. It was it took about half the
time to cross the Atlantic as it did in a boat. Yeah,
but compared to what we're used to Oh yeah, you
were just it was leisurely. Um And apparently after reading
more about the Hindenburgh, it's not as um And I
guess ship travels sort of the same way, like we're
going to get there when we get there, like we're heading,
we're trying to get there and then but you never
(07:59):
know what gonna happen, right, That's why they called them
the leisure class, that's right. Uh, it follows followed a
northern track across the ocean. Um eventually crossed uh into
North America, over the coast of Newfoundland and arrived in
lake Hurst, New Jersey about twelve hours late. And um, Germans,
(08:20):
they're always late, they're famous for it. And basically arrived
there at the Naval air station, and because of poor weather,
the captain and the commanding officer on the ground said,
you know what, the weather is not so great. Let's
wait a little bit, um, because they can fly around
forever in those things. And he said, all right, well,
(08:40):
the Jersey shore is nice. Let's just go fly about
that and tell everyone to look around and look at
all those old timey bathing suits and they're up to
the ankles and water. Um. By six pm, UM conditions
had improved and at six twelve he sent a message
sand it's suitable for landing. Recommended landing now. About seven
eight he finally UH pulled the blimp in. It was
(09:03):
a bit of a dodgy approach, but he eventually, you know,
got it down towards the ground pretty you know, uh skillfully, which,
as we'll see, it's not as easy as you'd think,
even though it's not in practice. No, they dropped the
landing lines and then things went south like really fast. Yeah.
(09:23):
It was filled with hydrogen, which is the lightest element, right, Yeah,
and uh it's also probably the most flammable or one
of them. Yes, inflammable was a big error at the time. Um,
a lot of blimps had caught on fire. This was
not the first accident, and uh there was you know,
(09:45):
people testified afterward, because not everyone died. We'll get to
the numbers here at the end of the story. But um,
there was testimony that, um, it appeared as if gas
was pushing against the cover. Maybe it escaped from a
gas cell. The first visible aimes appeared, and it varies,
but most of witness to say that the first flames
(10:05):
are either at the top of the hall uh, forward
of the vertical fin or between the rear port engine
in the port fin. And they described it as a
mushroom shaped flower. And it pretty much engulfed the tail
like right away, and it was able to remain steady
for a little while. Like people could start jumping out
at this point. Well, those are the people who died,
(10:26):
correct Now, That's what I always heard, or that's what
I have heard is that the people who stayed in
the gondola lived and the people who jumped were the
ones that died because the flames, because the hydrogen is light,
they were burning upward. Well, it says here basically it
was all depended on where you were. If you were
(10:47):
close to a means of exit, you generally survived. Um,
if you were deep inside the ship, like in the
power room along the keel, or in the smoking room.
Smoking room in the end, I'm supposed it wasn't all smoking,
big blimpful of hydrogen. Oh yeah, yeah, it's not a
good yet. They had apparently a double um air locked door,
(11:11):
one electric lighter and um you were allowed to smoke
as long as you put it out before you left.
And UM, so, like I said, if you were in
the smoking room on B deck, you're in big trouble. Um.
If you were one of the nine men closest to
the front of the ship, you definitely didn't survive. Yeah.
(11:32):
So out of the ninety seven people on board sixty
two survived. I think when you see the footage, I
mean you can watch it on YouTube, it looks like
how in the world could anyone survive it? Because it
goes I mean it's fully burned in less than a
minute and on the ground went up fast. But sixty
two to survive, thirteen of the thirty six passengers and
twenty two of the sixty one crew. And there's still
(11:54):
two guys alive today. Yeah, we checked two years ago,
but they don't like to talk about it. I can
imagine there's one kinetic experience. They're both named Verner, Verner
Franz and wernerd Doner. The two Verner and one was
a little cabin boy and one was a passenger with
his family. And uh, they were contacted for like the
(12:15):
you know, the ceremony. I guess you don't call it
an anniversary. I guess, uh memorial. Yeah, it just sounds
like a party, you know. But they said, no, we're
not coming. We don't like to talk about it. Yeah.
So it's been a long standing mystery exactly what happened.
And I found an article in the UK Independent from
(12:36):
two thousand thirteen about a study from that year that
found they said they they figured it out. They built
like scale models of the Hindenburg, which was like two
and a half football fields long. By the way, they
were building scale models that were like like sixty ft long,
so good sized ones, and they tried to blow them
up because there was a rumor that it was sabotage.
(12:57):
You know that everybody hated the Nazis even then. Um
and uh, they tried all all manners stuff, and what
they finally figured out was that probably what happened was
from being in that stormy weather, that exterior the envelope
of the blimp became um electrified, and when the ground
(13:18):
crew ran up and grabbed the cables, they completed the
current from the blimp to the ground, which caused a
spark which actually um ignited a hydrogen leak that fire
caused out. Yeah. Yeah. One thing they say it definitely
isn't which they long thought it was, was the actual
fabric was like painted in this flammable stuff, and that's
(13:39):
not true. It was the standard fabric. It was just
a big balloon fill of hydrogen. Yeah. So when that happened, Um,
the future of blimps were just pretty much like that
was it for blimps. That wasn't the immediate end. But
as far as like commercial blimp travel, that's tough for
(14:02):
an industry to get over. So it kind of fell
on the wayside, although they did continue on UM in
a couple of forms. Up until the sixties, the US government,
especially the Navy, maintained blimps. One of the UM I
think that I guess the Air Force. I don't know
is the Navy, but one of the branches of the
U s military use blimps as UM giant aircraft carriers
(14:24):
of the air, not not the sea, the air, which
is pretty awesome. And apparently they had them so you
could connect like a light plane to what's called like
a trapeeze mechanism coming out of the bottom of the
blimps and just like hook your plane on, climb up
and say, hey, guys, where are we going? Or you
can take off from there too. What yes, how do
(14:47):
you take off? You just drop I think you just
released the hook from the trapeez and starting of free
fall and then you just go often to the distance
and go thanks for the ride, lady. That sounds really weird. UM.
And they had even bigger plans that were never realized
because the Navy scrapped the program, and I think nineteen
two UM to have like a landing strip on top
(15:07):
of the blimp so you could have just like planes
takeoff and land and then be stored like in the blimp,
which would have been pretty awesome. Well, cargo airships are
the wave of the future, perhaps, so we'll see. So,
but that was the military was involved in blimps for
most of the first half of the twentieth century and
(15:28):
then um, our friends a good Year came up with
a blimp that has really served them well. Like they
were making blimps for the military, and then um they
started using them for commercial purposes and everybody knows about
good Year thanks to those blimps. Yeah, and they're going
to figure in here, of course, because you can't talk
about blimps a lot without a ton of buzz marketing
(15:49):
for good Year. Um. But you know that's where they
make their name. In fact, my in laws almost wrote
on the one based out of Akron because that's where
they're from. And they think he was going to put
in a bid on a like an auction bid to
win a trip Nate, And I think it never happened.
The trip never happened. I think he either lost the bid.
(16:11):
I'll have to ask him, but I don't think they
ever wrote on the blimp. Okay, I was gonna say
if the trip never happened. That doesn't sound like the
good Year I know. No, No, they're very uh, they're
like the Germans. So they've got there's three, um good
Year blimps. Actually there's one and I believe Texas, there's
one in California. There's one in Ohio orres A, Florida, California,
(16:31):
and Ohio is what it is. I'm sorry. Um, the
spirit of good Year, the spirit of America, the spirit
of innovation, and chuck. About the time this episode comes out,
Robin Roberts, the TV personality, is going to be christening
the newest member of the fleet, the wing foot one. Nice.
So they're gonna have four, Yeah, because there's a lot
(16:52):
of sporting events there. Sure, and you can't watch a
big sporting event without hearing the words uh aerial coverage
provided by good Year. Yeah. And those shots, man, they're
pretty great, they really are. We haven't been around forever.
It was I think an Orange Bowl in Miami where
the first one was broadcast and what like the sixties
maybe I don't know, something like that, and it changed America. Yeah,
(17:14):
well it um certainly gives them a lot of press
and saves well, I don't know about saves some money.
I haven't seen their balance sheet, but it's they don't
have to spend money on that thirty second spot. They
still do to tie into the blimp, but it's great
advertising for them. Yeah. Um. They also were good Sports
in a movie called Black Sunday. Did you ever see
(17:37):
that movie? Of course I never saw it. Um, but
apparently they provided Um, they provided some of the footage
for the movie, and UM let their blimps be used. Uh,
and let their name be used even like it wasn't
like the the Good Wire blimp. You know, they didn't
try to have to change it just enough. They used Goodyear,
(17:59):
which made the whole thing even more terrifying and realistic. Yeah,
they wanted to kill everyone at the super Bowl. That
was the plot. Uh, with a blimp right that shot darts,
which is weird. But it was written by the guy
who wrote Silence of the Lambs. Oh. Yeah, he's a
good writer. Have you ever read any of his books?
Oh he was the book writer. Oh no, I didn't
(18:21):
know that. No, I haven't read any of Silence at
the way. He does very good research. Interesting guy. Um. Anyway,
so good Year good Year in the military. After the Hindenburg.
That was the two cases of blimps. But like you said,
there is potentially a future for blimps, which we'll talk about.
But first let's talk about how blimps work in general.
(18:42):
After these messages, you want to know how blimps work, buddy,
I do it pretty simple. This was the delight to
learn because it was like, oh, I thought would be
just that little to it. And that's really kind of
(19:02):
the case, right, Yeah, yeah, there's not like oh and
here's where it gets really hard. They're like the pontoon
boats of the sky. Yeah. Like the most complicated thing
on the blimp is probably the gyroscopic camera on the
front of it to film the football stadium. I think
you're right. Uh So, let's talk about the anatomy of
a blamp you have. You mentioned the envelope earlier. That
is the thing that you're looking at. That is key
(19:24):
big cigar shaped balloon. It's filled nowadays with helium. It
is that shape because of aerodynamics, of course, and they
are super lightweight and super strong. Like you were saying,
neoprene to ply neoprene polyester generally, is that what the
envelopes made of. There's a company um called the i
(19:45):
LC Dover Corporation. They make a lot of skins UM
and they use the same material that they make UM
space suits out of for NASA for blimps. Too good
enough for Neil Armstrong, Buddy, good enough for my blimp.
This is like all about Ohio. This one. Oh was here, Ohio? Yeah, yeah,
I let have done it. So it was good here. No,
(20:07):
No I knew that. Um, there were your in laws.
That's right. The envelopes they hold UM. And it depends
on the blimps for all of these statistics, of course.
But between sixty seven thousand and two hundred and fifty
thousand cubic feet of helium and um, it's not super
The pressure is really low inside point zero seven pounds
per square inch. So that's why if you shot a
(20:29):
blimp it wouldn't like fall. No, I just leak very
slowly and you just land it and patch it up.
I guess, yeah, very slowly. Yeah. British Ministry of Defense
fired hundreds of bullets into an airship just for fun, well,
not to see what if it would could be shot
down in battle basically, and uh it took many hours
(20:49):
to deflate and land. So and they don't even deflate them.
They just leave them that way, so they're they're natural
structure will not natural, but their original structure UM events
them from being shot down. That's one big benefit. Because
I was wondering about that. I was like, you're just
providing a target for every teenager with a gun in
any country that you hover a blimp over. UM. Now
(21:12):
I understand. But secondly, as we'll see, it also has
to do with the dynamics of the flight of UM
hovering in the atmosphere. UM. So you've got the envelope,
and the envelope also has something called nose cone battons,
which is basically like a support structure for the nose
the front of it just the very very tip, and
(21:32):
it keeps the the the the blimps front from being
mashed in as it moves forward, which is pretty smart. Yeah,
I think I misspoke. The nose cone is on just
the very tip, and then the batons are like the
fingers that distribute the stress over the front of the cone. Okay,
so they're like the the the structure that comes out
of the nose, right, and then also on the nose
(21:55):
as the mooring um hook. Because you've got to hook
a blimp up to something. Yeah, it's got a little
spindle there, and it's got a little wheel under the
tail rudder, and that's basically how it sits. You just
tie it down. Yeah, very simple. Um, just like a balloon.
That's right. So there's here's where it gets a little craftier,
(22:18):
like nineteen century crafty, but still neat nonetheless. Um, there's
something called balonetts, right, and these are basically air bladders
that are located within the envelope, and you inflate or
deflate them depending on whether you want the blimp to
go up or down. If you wanted to go up,
you deflate these balonets. You wanted to go down, you
(22:39):
inflate them. And the reason that works is because you're
inflating or you're inflating these balonettes with air and helium,
which blimps fly using now is lighter than air. So
more air means the blimps heavier, so it goes down.
Less air means it's lighter, so it goes up. Yeah,
it's pretty easy. It's sort of like how a submarine
(22:59):
opera rates. Um. And there's one in the four and
one in the aft, so that's how you control your trim.
You can just knows it up or knows it down,
filling up or deflating. That's the pitch axis, that's right,
or trim Okay, well, the trim is the levelness okay. Yeah.
(23:20):
And the axis where the nose and the back go
up and down, that's the trim axis. You know, the
pitch axis, right, yeah, okay, no one can see not
in agreement, okay, um chuck. Then there's the caternary curtain
and the suspension cables, which I didn't get the caternary
(23:41):
curtain really I understood. The suspension cable is just fine. Uh.
It's on the on the inside about off center. Um.
And it basically if you look, it sort of looks
like the where you attach the basket to the hot
air balloon. They all, um, you know, there's a number
of these lines that run down and I'll meet at
(24:03):
a single point, um near the gondola, right, and that's
what you attach the gondola to the blimp using right. Yeah.
So basically, if if you if the blimp envelope wasn't there,
it would sort of look like a hot air balloon.
It would have these lines that run up from the
gondola a k A basket up to the top, so
they would be like the um vertical lines are the
(24:26):
horizontal lines. Okay, I understand exact amundo. Um. Then you've
got the really technical stuff, the flight control surfaces. So
everything we've just described as basically balloons and then the
structure that gives the balloon it's shape, right and then um,
the flight control surfaces are basically a rudder and elevators
(24:46):
and they're the things that you can control to make
the balloon till upward or side to side. That's pretty
much it. Yeah, there's that one rudder on the top
and bottom and that controls your yaw and you do
it with little If you look at the captain's sherry,
he's got a little little foot pedals. It's like a
clutch pedal you would put in, push in and um.
(25:07):
On the bottom very bottom back of the rudder, there's
something called a boost tab and that's just a little additional, uh,
sectioned off piece of the rudder that's also controllable. It's
like a little mini rudder and um it assists with
the rudder I think to make an even tighter turn.
So if you imagine just the smaller rudder as part
of the main rudder, just to give you that extra boost,
(25:30):
I guess when you need to turn. Uh. And then
there's two elevators and they um. If you are sitting
in your little captain's chair, imagine a car steering wheel
placed vertically like by your side. And that's just a
wheel that you turn up and turn down. It's really
very basic. It sounds like the Wizard of Oz. The curtain,
(25:50):
like all the machineries messing with it looks very steampunky
when you look at it. Uh. So you steer up
or down with that wheel, and uh, that's pretty much it.
I don't know. Don't forget the engines. Oh well yeah,
I mean as far as like driving this puppy. Yeah.
The flight control Yeah, this is what separates it from
hot air balloons. Don't forget the engines. Know the hot
(26:12):
the well, yeah, the engines, but also the flight control services.
But the engines are turbo prop engines. Right. There's twin ones,
which means there's two one on each side of the
gondola at the rear, and they're pretty cool because they
propeled the thing forward but very cleverly. There's also something
called air scoops that are basically these funnels that face
(26:36):
the back of the turbo prop and they catch the
vented air out of the props and they use those
to inflate the balonetts. Yeah, that's called prop wash. This
is all the lingo I've learned. That's good stuff. Uh.
And the engines are just six cylinder engines. Like I
said that, you don't need a ton of power to
power these things. And you can go at about thirty
(26:59):
the seventy This says miles per hour, not knots. So
how about that? And seventies cruising apparently, like fifty is
where you want to be get this. I did the calculations.
So one of the um one of the great advantages
blimps have, which is the reason we've been talking about
these things, or anybody's talking about still making blimps, is
(27:20):
that they can stay aloft for days, weeks, even um,
which gives them a huge advantage of our airplanes, which
have to stop and refuel and stop and refuel. But
going seventy miles per hour chuck, a blimp NonStop at
that rate could travel the circumference of the Earth around
the equator in fourteen days. That in the fuel, yeah,
(27:43):
which I think is not very hard. No, they at
thirty knots. The sky ship, which is this one example.
UM consumes about eight gallons of fuel per hour, so
apparently during an entire week of operations, it consumes less
fuel than a seven sixties seven commercial jet uses to
move away from the gate. So it's super green, which
(28:06):
is kind of cool. You can understand why cargo companies
are looking at them too. Yeah, and that's it runs
on av gas, of course, not just regular old gas.
You couldn't pull it up to a gas station like
your car because I think av gas is still leaded
or a lot of it is. Oh and that's the
diff that's not that cream. Yeah, true, but they're not
(28:27):
burning much of it. Uh. So let's see what else
is there. The valves. You've got to be able to
let air in and out. You also want to be
able to let air in and out of the envelope
itself in case things become too pressurized. You don't want
to pop. Yeah, that's true. So you've got your air
valves for the UM for the bladders inside, and they're underneath.
(28:49):
Uh to tow up front, two in the back, and
then you have your helium valve and you can either
vent it and you don't have to do this much
because you should have it pretty like the pressure set um.
But if something does happen, you can either manually do
it or it's set to automatically release. And if you
look at the good Year blimp, it's sort of been
the y of a Year, just looks like a little
(29:11):
gas cap. You really know you're blimps man. Well, I
mean I went to the good Year site. It's awesome.
You can like there's all sorts of animated jifts and
or is it gifts? I never could yeah, yeah, graphic interface. Yeah,
but there is a correct way. I just don't know
what it is. Well, the guy who created gifts says
(29:32):
he pronounces it Jeff oh wrench in the works, but
I disagree with him. Morgellons give the good Year Blimp gondola,
which is where we are now, is twenty two point
seven five ft long. It is aluminum on welded steel
frame and that's where everyone rides. Um. Depending on your blimp,
(29:56):
it's gonna hold up to well. It depends on how
big the blimp, but usually you don't see a blimp
with more than twelve passengers or so. Yeah, and it's
not even necessarily passengers. The gondola can also be the
place where it holds all of the surveillance equipment to
depending on what you use it for, or it can
also be the massive cargo hold. Yeah, you've got your
communications up there, your flight surface controls, any KNAB equipment,
(30:20):
UM propeller controls. That's where all the there's there's not
much else to it besides what what you got there
in the gondola. What's funny is um I always thought
blimps were basically like, you know, you you get the
blimp in the air and it takes off and then
that's it. But it's it's at least with good Year.
(30:42):
It's kind of like UM got helicopter parents almost because
when the blimp. When you see the blimp, if you
look around, you'll also find a ground crew with a bus,
uh eighteen wheeler and a bunch of vans that follow
it everywhere because I guess those things break down. Yeah,
and apparently the pilots to their f A certified and
(31:05):
Goodyear pilots also have another training program. But the pilots
are even it's all sort of everyone is cross trained.
It sounds like to work on the ground or make
repairs and um, yeah, it's like a little self contained unit,
all just traveling around together like a like h tornado chasers.
Oh and you talked about um the end. You know,
(31:28):
if they just took off and floated around, if the
engines did stop, that's exactly what you're doing. You're basically
a hot air balloon at that point, so you lose
control of the flight service controls. Yeah. Well, I mean
if it's they call it a free balloon, so it's
buoyant um, and it's kept aloft obviously, But if they
lose all the power, then all you can do is
(31:48):
ascend and descend. Because I think I guess the rudders
and the elevators are also powered mechanisms, just not just
attached to a cable attached to a pedal attached to
a wheel of the ne's It sounds like it is though,
And as far as weather goes, they compare it to
roughly operating is about as similar as a helicopter. Like
(32:09):
we can fly in bad weather, um, but we try
to avoid super bad weather. Yeah. I don't blame them
because I mean, that's not fun you want to be
above the rose bowl in like seventy degree weather. So
coming up, we're gonna talk about how blimps fly, and
then also the future of blimps and if there is
(32:29):
such a thing after this. So chuck. The way blimps
flies pretty simple and beautiful and elegant if you ask me, yeah, yeah,
So you have helium, right, yeah, which is they used
(32:49):
to use hydrogen. Helium slightly heavier than um hydrogen, but
not that much more. You don't notice the difference, I
would guess, Yeah, I mean you get why they use hydrogen.
They weren't dummies. It was lighter than air, the lightest
of all the gas of all the elements from what
I understand um. And when hydrogen blew up, they said, okay,
not hydrogen. What else do we have? And they said, well,
(33:11):
helium works, and so they started using helium. And helium
has a lift of lift capacity of point seventy pounds
per square foot, right, which is one point one kilograms
per square meter um, which means it can lift a
pretty decent amount of wait for just a little bit amount.
(33:35):
And since they're filling these balloons with hundreds of thousands
of cubic feet or cubic meters of these um of helium.
They can look tons and tons of weight, and they
do it by just simple physics, since helium is lighter
than air. As long as the helium has enough lifting
power to lift whatever the envelope and the gondola and
(33:58):
all of the mechanisms way, and it will rise more
than the air. It will rise into the air. Yeah,
it's called positive buoyancy, and what you want as a
blimp pilot is neutral buoyancy. So that's why you're gonna control,
like we talked about your air bladders to uh get
that thing where it's Once you've got your cruising altitude,
you just want to be at the same level you
(34:19):
want and you want to fill it up by blowing
exhausted into your air scoops which fill up your balonets.
And the higher you get into the atmosphere, the less
pressure there is, which means the higher up you could
float conceivably, So you want to make sure you get
that air in so you don't just float away and
you achieve is it negative buoyancy or neutral buoyancy? You said,
(34:40):
that's what you want, and then when you want to land,
you do just the opposite. Um, you fill it up
with even more air and then you make the blimp
heavier than the helium inside can lift and it just
slowly comes down to the ground. And I mean that's it.
That's how blimps rise and fall. Yeah, it is pretty simple.
And when they're on the ground, they just tie it
(35:02):
to that little spindle. You've got your little wheel under
the rear. You got a little tractor to tow it around,
maybe a hanger. And uh, that's the life of a blimp.
And it's like I said, they don't inflate and deflate these.
I'm sure it's a time and expense. Uh. And I
think they're running out of helium too. Didn't we learn that? Yeah?
Do you know much about that? Well, we we covered
(35:23):
it and uh, the probably the Mars turbine up Mars turbine. Yeah,
that was it. But I read a really interesting article
and I think the New Republic, I can't remember. I
found it online last night, and um, it's about the
helium shortage and why we have a helium shortage and
apparently the US has had a reserve, a strategic helium
(35:45):
reserve since in a cave in Texas and Apparently during
the Clinton era, the government said, let's make some money
off of this, or let's make our money back off
of it, so they passed it all that said start
selling the stuff off Bureau of Land Management, but only
make enough money off of it to recoup whatever we've
(36:09):
put into it over the years, which is like one
billion dollars. So they started selling it, and by setting
the price artificially, they created an artificial market. Because this
is like of the world's helium reserves in this cave
in Texas. So whatever the BLM was selling it for,
that's how much the market value was. But it was artificial,
(36:29):
so you had artificially cheap helium flooding the market, which
had a two pronged effect. One, it led to these
scarcities that we're running into now because they just started
selling it off in a fire sale the private industry.
But the other more positive effect it had was that
it spurred all of this technological innovation because nuclear magnetic resonance,
(36:52):
the technology behind m ri I superconductivity UM molecular analysis,
uses helium two super cool magnets to turn them into superconductors, right,
so you need helium for that. So all these industries
were using this helium from the Beer of land management
to like advanced technology by leaps and bounds, which is
(37:12):
one of the big reasons why we are where we
are right now technologically speaking because of helium. But now
we're starting to run out. There's I think nine billion
cubic feet of helium left in the reserve in Texas,
which is about a third of what they had when
they started selling it off in the nineties, which would
be fine if we just clamped it out and said, okay,
(37:34):
this is a reserve again. But instead, for some reason,
the government just doubled down and issued another decree to
the beer of land management is like, keep selling this stuff.
Let's just get rid of all of it for no
good reason. I don't understand why. Like it made sense
in the nineties maybe, and it had all these great effects,
but now it's like, okay, we understand that helium is
(37:55):
literally irreplaceable, as the article put it, like there's once
there's no helium. There's no helium, Like we can't go
get it anywhere else for manufacturer, and we have no
technology to recycle it. I wonder what the reason is.
I guess money private industry has a lot of interest
in it, and there's good interest too, like using it
for m R S or pharmaceutical researcher that kind of parties. Well,
(38:17):
that's the thing. So med, the med and pharma sectors
use tent of helium worldwide welding used. The seventeen percent
because they use helium to weld party balloons equals eight
percent of worldwide helium use. I have a feeling that
party balloons are going to go the way of the
dinosaur very soon, if they haven't already. And half of
(38:38):
that is the stoner kid who operates the helium tank, right,
just talking funny. Yeah, So that's the helium shortage. That's
the skinny on it. So that I wonder if there's
any other gas they could use for blimps. I don't know.
It seems like a giant waste. Or I wonder if
they could, Like, do you like a hybrid so it's
(39:00):
fueled by hot air like a balloon? Huh? Probably wouldn't.
I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. Uh. Well,
I guess we are at the future then in the future,
and depending on who you ask, the future of airships
is either super exciting and awesome and when you look
(39:21):
at these they are or it's not going to be
funded enough to really Um, there's not a lot of
money being pumped into it. Well, the government was for
a little while with the Afghanistan war. The Department of
Defense was like, give us new blimps. We want these
things now. And all these companies ran in and we're like,
here's your blimps, here's your blimps, give us some money.
(39:42):
The problem is is the whole program got scrapped because
nobody could fulfill the enormous orders. The d D was
placing four helium Well that makes sense. Uh. And the
military is interested because they basically, um could be uh
a satellite function as a satellite like a ten ft satellite. Yeah,
pretty much. Um. There are people doing it though. Lockheed
(40:05):
Martin has a P seven ninety one UM that is
super cool looking. It is a try hall. If you
look at it from the front, it looks sort of
like three blimps squashed together. Um. And it has four
big it looks like feet these disc shaped cushions that
apparently for landing and these are also cool. There's um
(40:26):
another one in California from Worldwide Aeroscorp. Called the dragon
Dream and it's different look and it sort of looks
like a whale shark. Did you see it. It's a
single hall, I guess, but it's sort of kind of
flattened out. Um, yeah, it looks like a whale shark.
They they actually submitted that design to the d o
D and when the d D scrapped the program. Um,
(40:47):
they bought their design back because they want to go
commercial like cargo carrier with it. Yeah. Well they're in
trouble though, because the dragon died well, it had a
roof collapse and a hangarya and they don't know if
they have the money to even fix it and then continue. Well,
they have another model called the mL eight sixties six
that it sounds like they're putting their energy into. It's
(41:08):
supposedly can carry two and fifty tons, which is more
than twice the cargo payload of a cargo seven seventy twice.
And again you mentioned how little fuel it takes to
power these things. So it'll take a little while for
you to get your package, but the company shipping it
isn't going to spend too much money delivering it. I
(41:28):
still say, if it's a military like to use as
a cargo plane. I know you can't shoot a hole
in it, but what if you launched the surface to
air missile at it. You know it's still full of helium.
That's doesn't sound like I don't know. They're so high
up there you can't the fact that we have satellites
and drones. It seems to me like the surveillance uses
(41:50):
of blimps or preposterous, especially considering that we could be
using that helium for medical purposes instead. You know, I agree,
you got anything else on blimps? We got nothing else. Um,
I got one other thing. If you were fascinated by
the um the way blimps float, I think it's cool
for some reason. I did a brain stuff video about that.
(42:16):
You can calculate how many balloons it would take, like
regular party balloons to lift yourself into the sky, and
I made a video about it. So you go to
a brain stuff show dot com and check it out. Uh,
And if you want to read this article, you can
go to how stuff works dot com type in how
blimps work and it will bring it up. And I said,
(42:37):
how stuff works. I think So that means it's time
for listener, ma'am. I'm gonna call this, uh, sterilizing addicts.
Remember that Old One did a show on whether or
not it's legal to sterilize addicts. It turns out it is, yeah,
and that's the thing. Uh. And this is from someone
who had a personal uh stake in it. Um. It's long,
(42:58):
but I'm gonna edit it in my head as I go. Hey, guys,
just recently listen to your podcasts and sterilation sterilization of
addicts had a personal story to share. Um. Until my
mother is a fully recovered heroin addict and I'm grateful
just to be alive. Until I was six, she was
only an alcoholic. However, a drug addiction set in fast.
My mother, brother, and myself, along with whatever scumbag boyfriend
(43:22):
she had at the time, were constantly on the run
from the police, looking for shelter and searching for food.
My father is an upper middle class blue collar worker
who always had a sound home environment. When my mother
was sent to prison when I was ten, I was
sent to live with my father. Always had food, a shower,
and clean clothes. Was never in fear for being homeless. Uh.
I live with my father for three years until I
finally ran away. Once I regained contact with my mother.
(43:44):
My father, even with his financial support, instability was never there,
even though he was only a few feet away. My mother,
even while on drugs, always listened and always cared about
my thoughts and feelings, and that was what was important
as a child. My mother eventually overcame her adictions cold
Turkey because she could see it was damaging to me
and my brother. And she's been cleaned for eleven years
(44:06):
now and it's an amazing mother, an amazing grandmother to
my nephew. I like to believe that seeing the harder
side of life made me appreciate, uh, such things and
be more humble and responsible, uh and fearful of what
could happen if I slipped or did not take care
of myself. I don't want to be the poster child
for children of addicts. Whoever, I do believe that we
are all in control of our own lives. Uh. And
(44:30):
that is anonymized as Cornelius Jacobs, the seventh Corney Jake seven. Yeah,
he said, yeah, you can read it. And I said,
all anonymous anonymous size it is there some sort of
name anonymizer on the internet. Now? He said, please do
just make it something awesome, like Cornelius Jacobs the seventh,
that's great and that's a cool ps. I've been secretly
(44:52):
wanting Jerry to be the Tyler Dirden of your podcast.
That even means like made up, but like we think
she's real, but she's not. Okay, are you real, Jerry?
Jerry says no, Nope, that answers that. Cornelius Jacobs the
seventh and you read the Roman numerals correctly. Chuck this time?
Good going? I I yeah. Uh. If you want to
(45:15):
get in touch with me and Chuck to tell us
any story like Cornelius Jacobs the seventh, um, please do.
You can tweet to us at s y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always,
go to our cool home on the web, Stuff you
Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands
(45:41):
of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com
Stuff You Should Know News
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Josh Clark
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