When Blimps, Dirigibles and Airships Ruled the Sky

‘Here is my new post submission. I am calling it “When Blimps/ Dirigibles/Airships Ruled the Sky”,’ writes Robert E. Jackson. ‘It is a rather awkward title but I am not sure these are all “blimps”, etc. I think the photos feature a combination of what the title indicates.’ They do. They show a time when people pointed to the skies when they saw a big ballon fly over head. I had to look up what difference between a blimp, a dirigible and an airship. Non-rigid airships are blimps. An airship, like the Zeppelin, the device named after German general Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin, is rigid. Blimps advertise tyres. On 19 January 1915, an airship dropped bombs on Norfolk, England. Killing people was fine in wartime and led to a boom in business for companies making airships but when the Hindenberg disaster of 1937 saw paying passengers die, the age of elegant, lighter-than-air flight was as good as over.

 

 

 

“The blue distance, the mysterious Heavens, the example of birds and insects flying everywhere —are always beckoning Humanity to rise into the air.”
— Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

 

 

“Nobody can be uncheered with a balloon.”
— A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

 

 

“Old Tom giggled, “Fooled ya, huh, Ma? We aimed to fool ya, and we done it. Jus’ stood there like a hammered sheep. Wisht Grampa’d been here to see. Looked like somebody’d beat ya between the eyes with a sledge. Grampa would a whacked ‘imself so hard he’d a throwed his hip out–like he done when he seen Al take a shot at that grea’ big airship the army got. Tommy, it come over one day, half a mile big, an’ Al gets the thirty-thirty and blazes away at her. Grampa yells, ‘Don’t shoot no fledglin’s, Al; wait till a growed-up one goes over,’ an’ then he whacked ‘imself an’ throwed his hip out.”
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

 

 

“Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.”
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

 

 

 

More from the excellent Robert E. Jackson here – and on his Instagram page.