Before airplanes and rockets, but right after manned balloons, there were airships—basically, balloons with rudders and a means of propulsion. Some were blimps, their shape maintained entirely by the pressure of the lifting gas within; others had rigid or semi-rigid hulls. Many were designed to carry passengers. The Hindenburg made more than sixty successful transatlantic flights before May 6, 1937, when it crashed and exploded in Lakehurst, New Jersey. That disaster, and the improving economy of fixed-wing aircraft, ended the dream of passenger airships. But a new generation of airship engineers, some backed by significant government and private investment, is convinced that, given new technologies and new materials, airships have a future as cargo haulers. As Jeanne Marie Laskas writes in this week’s issue of the magazine, “Today’s airship designers share a vision: magnificent amounts of trucking going on in the sky—regular convoys of enormous airships carrying timber, coal, wind turbines, prefabricated homes, or an entire summer harvest, puttering gently along at about a hundred miles an hour, ten thousand feet over our heads.”
The Origins of Aerial Photography
In 1858, Nadar captured the first aerial photographs, photographing Paris from a tethered balloon at an altitude of sixteen hundred feet.
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