Oh the Humanity!

I didn’t think I would be writing about two transportation disasters in a row, but hey, an anniversary is an anniversary. And as it turns out, 25 years and 3 weeks after the Titanic sank, wouldn’t you know it, the Hindenburg exploded in a ball of fire over the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey, on May 6^th 1937, making this the 75^th anniversary of its demise. 98 people died; 13 passengers and 22 crew on the airship, and one grounds crewman. Herbert Morrison made one of the most famous radio broadcasts in history which was aired the day after the event. It is not clear what the actual cause of the fire was, but the fact that the airship was filled with very flammable hydrogen meant that once it was ignited, it would be as they say, all she wrote. Like other well-known historic disasters, there are lots of theories about the actual cause, including sabotage. You can read more here.

 In this clip Morrison’s radio broadcast has been attached to film that was taken of the disaster.

The “golden era” of airships lasted from the early 1900s until almost 1940 and the world’s first passenger airline was DELAG (The German Airship Transportation Company Ltd) and was established in 1909 as an offshoot of the Zeppelin Company. Before WWI, DELAG carried some 34,000 passengers on 1500 flights between cities in Germany, all without injury. During the war, the airships were pressed into military service with mixed results. After the war the Graf Zeppelin made a round-the-world flight in 1929 and both it and the Hindenburg made numerous trans-Atlantic flights with very few problems, although there had been accidents, fires and deaths with other airships during the period.

The Hindenburg had sleeping accommodations for passengers, a dining room and lounge and could cross the Atlantic in a little over two days. Now days we can obviously do it much faster, but the amenities aren’t quite the same.

There is a small exhibit in Washington D.C. with a unique angle that has objects, documents and photographs relating to both the Titanic and Hindenburg. The American Postal Museum is hosting Fire and Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic with special emphasis on the postal aspects. Both the RMS (Royal Mail Ship) Titanic and the Hindenburg were floating post offices, one on the sea and one in the air.

Oscar Scott Woody, of Clifton, Virginia was one of five postal clerks that were on the Titanic when it sank, none of whom survived. His body was recovered and his postal keys on a chain are part of the exhibit along with a facing slip with clear postmark from the Titanic. There is also a letter and post card that were sent from the Titanic before it left Europe. The Titanic carried some 3000 bags of mail all of which are sitting two miles down with the wreck.

Hindenburg on May 6, 1937

For stamp collectors, mail stamped on the Hindenburg was and still is highly sought after and a number of the covers mailed on various trips it made are part of the exhibit. There is also a partially burned letter that survived the explosion as well as a postmark device and a postal scale. Some 160 pieces out of 17,000 survived the disaster. It’s poignant to see items that were handled by people who were part of these historic tragedies and brings them to life in a more personal way. The exhibit runs through January 6, 2014.


The website for Fire & Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic at the National Postal Museum is just below. By clicking on that link you will be taken away from Tripping on History and will be going to the museum site.
Fire & Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic

That One Hundred Year Old Sinking Feeling

So for those of you who didn’t get enough of all the Titanic stuff leading up to the

centennial of its sinking on April 15, this is for you. The National Geographic Museum in Washington DC is hosting an exhibit developed in cooperation with filmmaker James Cameron called, Titanic: 100 Year Obsession. Cameron himself seems to have carried that very obsession for at least twenty of those hundred years, including numerous dives to explore the wreckage. There are no actual Titanic artifacts in this exhibit, but some of the material from Cameron’s movie and explorations and other material make for an engaging visit. You can see photos of the exhibit at the Huffington Post here.

RMS Titanic in 1912

One of the highlights is a beautifully executed eighteen foot model of the ship, which took Fine Art Models of Royal Oaks Michigan seven years to make; the Titanic itself was built in three. An elevated platform allows viewers to look down on the top deck of the model. Considering that there were over 2,000 passengers and crew, I found myself thinking that it really didn’t look like there were enough lifeboats, just looking at the ones positioned on the top deck.  And speaking of lifeboats, there is one of the full-sized replica lifeboats used in the movie that does give visitors some idea of their size. In the early stages of the disaster, the crewmen loading the boats were not allowing men, only women and children into the boats, and there was some thinking that the boats were just going to ferry the passengers to another ship they thought they had seen nearby. It meant that the life boats leaving the ship early in the disaster had lots of empty seats.

Further along is the fifteen foot model that James Cameron used to depict the rusting hulk of the Titanic as it looks now, sitting two miles at the bottom of the Atlantic. In a dark room with large backlit photos of the site of the wreckage, one gets some sense of the watery graveyard that it represents. Bacteria now eating away at the steel may turn the entire ship into a pile of rust in another couple of decades.

There are several screens in the exhibit showing video clips including one with Robert Ballard, who with a small group of French scientists found the wreck in 1985.

The exhibit doesn’t go into it, but one of the more recent theories dealing with the disaster has to do with the temperatures on the night of the collision having caused a cold-weather mirage which prevented the lookouts from seeing the iceberg until they were right on top of it. It might also explain why the California, or another ship that some on the Titanic claimed they saw, may have been much farther away than it seemed or why the captain of the California claimed the ship he saw was much smaller than the Titanic or why the ships were unable to communicate by signal lamp or why the flares the Titanic set off went unnoticed. No doubt there are more theories to come.

I think one of the reasons that the Titanic disaster is so compelling besides the sheer scale, is the idea that existed when it was built that due to the advances in design and technology, it was “virtually unsinkable.”  In our current day and age we find ourselves relying more and more on advanced technology that we trust won’t fail and will keep us safe. The events of April 1912 are sobering reminder that what we expect, doesn’t always hold up.

The exhibit runs through September 9, 2012. For more all-things Titanic, check out NatGeo’s dedicated website and for other DC area Titanic-related locations, click here.