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krpalmerI’ve made some good use of my municipal library’s ebook lending services over the past months, but their selection of titles can sometimes feel like “if you do find something you’ve already heard of, you’re lucky.” As the library itself moved back from “online holds and curbside pickup” to “entry with precautions,” I made a half-curious search of its catalogue for a book noticed months before in a Sunday supplement book review section with the thought this could save the cost of an ebook, and it turned out Alexander Rose’s Empires of the Sky really was available. The only problem once I had the book was that where “exposure to others” can be somewhat controlled, mere thoughts of “contaminated surfaces,” however overwrought they may now be, are harder to shake. I wound up keeping the book in my entry hall, reading it in sessions sitting on the steps right next to the hall and washing my hands immediately after each one. It did take me a while to get through the book for all the interest I took in its subject.
So far as “modes of transport in the first half of the twentieth century slower but seemingly more civilized than jet airliner economy seats” go (with the constant ambiguities of “nostalgia” to be remembered), ocean liners and passenger trains do seem safer than lighter-than-air rigid airships. Even the US Navy’s helium-inflated dirigibles (and helium has enough uses expending it in airships may not be the wisest thing to use up its limited quantities for) kept getting caught in storms and breaking up. Still, it could be a subject that can be covered in full in a single volume. Rose’s book then went so far as to contrast airships against the steady evolution of airplanes. Ultimately pitting Hugo Eckener, who took over the zeppelin business after Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s death, against Juan Trippe of Pan American Airways strengthened the narrative even as I wondered about “overland passenger flights” as part of something larger, before getting to Pan Am pioneering its Pacific route and zeppelins being considered safest flying over water.
There’s an obvious climax to “the story of zeppelins,” but where I’d been supposing the book would list theories at the risk of an “it’s all very mysterious” conclusion a definitive “small problems adding up in just the wrong way” explanation was provided for the explosion of the Hindenburg. I did a bit of checking on the sources listed in the back and noticed one of them being a little less certain. So far as another thing I’ve been wondering about went, the book did relate von Zeppelin seeing balloons during the American Civil War, but didn’t mention something I’d once happened on in a single book with something of an American focus, namely tales of an American inventor who could manage to turn an elongated balloon against the wind during the Civil War only to go bankrupt afterwards. With that accomplishment not to be found in many other sources I do keep feeling a bit skeptical (and remembering hard-pushed theories about inventors who got airplanes in the air before the Wright brothers only to vanish from the narratives afterwards), but in managing to return to the book I noticed Solomon Andrews’s Aeron was described as having to ascend or descend to turn; with limited ballast and gas it would have a limited range.
So far as “modes of transport in the first half of the twentieth century slower but seemingly more civilized than jet airliner economy seats” go (with the constant ambiguities of “nostalgia” to be remembered), ocean liners and passenger trains do seem safer than lighter-than-air rigid airships. Even the US Navy’s helium-inflated dirigibles (and helium has enough uses expending it in airships may not be the wisest thing to use up its limited quantities for) kept getting caught in storms and breaking up. Still, it could be a subject that can be covered in full in a single volume. Rose’s book then went so far as to contrast airships against the steady evolution of airplanes. Ultimately pitting Hugo Eckener, who took over the zeppelin business after Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s death, against Juan Trippe of Pan American Airways strengthened the narrative even as I wondered about “overland passenger flights” as part of something larger, before getting to Pan Am pioneering its Pacific route and zeppelins being considered safest flying over water.
There’s an obvious climax to “the story of zeppelins,” but where I’d been supposing the book would list theories at the risk of an “it’s all very mysterious” conclusion a definitive “small problems adding up in just the wrong way” explanation was provided for the explosion of the Hindenburg. I did a bit of checking on the sources listed in the back and noticed one of them being a little less certain. So far as another thing I’ve been wondering about went, the book did relate von Zeppelin seeing balloons during the American Civil War, but didn’t mention something I’d once happened on in a single book with something of an American focus, namely tales of an American inventor who could manage to turn an elongated balloon against the wind during the Civil War only to go bankrupt afterwards. With that accomplishment not to be found in many other sources I do keep feeling a bit skeptical (and remembering hard-pushed theories about inventors who got airplanes in the air before the Wright brothers only to vanish from the narratives afterwards), but in managing to return to the book I noticed Solomon Andrews’s Aeron was described as having to ascend or descend to turn; with limited ballast and gas it would have a limited range.