I hadn’t anticipated spending part of a recent weekend suspended from a moving gasbag 800 feet above Times Square. As a rule, I never anticipate spending part of a weekend suspended from a moving gasbag 800 feet above Times Square, so imagine my surprise when I found myself doing just that.
In popular parlance, of course, moving gasbags suspended over cities are known as blimps, and New York certainly has its share. On any given weekend, the skies over the five boroughs are crisscrossed by a veritable exhalation of airships, including the Goodyear blimp, the Fuji blimp, the Sea World blimp, and the MetLife blimp. To be sure, in an era of Lockheed wide-bodies and Air France Concordes, any aircraft that can fit comfortably behind Bullwinkle in a Thanksgiving Day parade is not going to cut an especially dramatic figure, and few people would choose the plump and poky ship when other means of travel are available. But could the blimp be getting a bad rap? Is there more to these stately sky whales than meets the eye?
The history of lighter-than-air flying ships began in 1783 when the Montgolfier brothers--Manny, Moe, and Jacques--launched the first working hot-air balloon, in Annonay, France. At the time there was not actually much demand for hot-air balloons, but the Montgolfier brothers had apparently shown up late for Career Day, and after the Wright brothers and the Smith brothers got dibs on airplanes and cough drops, they had to settle for what they could get. Despite this, the Montgolfiers’ achievement was impressive: they built a balloon of fabric backed by paper that was 75 feet tall and 49 feet wide and contained 77,000 cubic feet of hot air, which was heated by burning straw and wool.
Hot-air balloons definitely had drawbacks, not the least being keeping the air hot. An alternative was to fill the bladder of the craft not with air but with hydrogen. Hydrogen is the lightest of all elements and thus the most buoyant. The problem is that hydrogen is also one of the most temperamental elements, given to exploding in the presence of a flame, a spark, or even an ill-considered remark:
Bystander: Hey, has that hydrogen put on a little weight or something?
