The Curious History and Science of Blimps

Transcript

Smiti: Welcome to Curiosity Meets the Past, a podcast for curious minds who love learning about the past. My name is Dr. Smiti Nathan, and I’m an archaeologist and your host.

In this episode, I’m speaking with geneticist and blimp enthusiast, Dr. Alex Dainis. Alex and I met a couple years ago at a festival put on by the Independent Media Initiative. As a science communicator, Alex exudes deep knowledge, curiosity, and enthusiasm for a wide variety of science related topics. But there is something about the way she talks about blimps. Yes, those balloon like ships of the sky.

In this episode, she shares some of the surprising ways that blimps have been used in the past, as well as her firsthand experience of what it’s like to go on an actual blimp. She starts us off with the surprising numerical reason that catalyzed her fascination with blimps.

Alex Dainis: So, I grew up next to a tiny municipal airport, so a little town airport, where every summer blimps would come in and land. There would be blimps almost the entire summer. Sometimes there’d be two at a time. You know, in the nineties they were always around. And I just thought they were part of everyone’s summer. And it wasn’t until I got older and moved away that I realized that these were not a common occurrence for everyone. People weren’t waving at the blimp pilots as they came in all summer.

But, maybe four or five years ago, I saw a comment online that there were only about 25 blimps left in the world. And I thought, that’s crazy. 25 is a number we can count. Why is it “about” 25? And I decided I was just gonna count them, and I was gonna figure out exactly how many blimps were left in the world. And that opened up a Pandora’s box of questions about what is a blimp? What is an airship? Where are they? What are they? What counts? What doesn’t count?

And, I stumbled into this realization that actually it is really hard to count what seems like a low number of objects. And everyone has different opinions and ideas. And it just opened up this whole world of blimps and their weird history, and their weird current moment in their weird future, and it really was just from that number of “about 25”. I thought that was something I could count, and then I realized pretty quickly it was a lot harder than that.

Smiti: You are speaking to archeologists everywhere who are trying to categorize things. I’m just getting flashbacks to times in the field. But you raised a lot of interesting questions about blimps that I definitely wanna get into.

But I’d love to start us off with their origins. Like where do they come from? What’s their origin story?

Alex Dainis: So blimps as I like to categorize them, and as I think many people do, really fall under the broader umbrella of dirigibles, which means “steerable”.

So, the history of blimps really starts with balloons. For a long time, you know 1600, 1700 hundreds, we had balloons that people were attaching baskets to, and they could go up and down, but they were at the mercy of the winds. And hot air balloons still today are at the mercy of the winds. You know, skilled hot air balloon pilots can try and use the wind to go where they wanna go, but there’s no steering ability.

And it wasn’t until sort of the mid to late 1700s that people started to add steering mechanisms to these balloons. And this is really where I feel like something approaching a dirigible, something approaching a blimp, starts to take form. But they were pretty lousy at actually steering around for a long time. And it wasn’t until the mid 1800s where people started to add powered engines. And there were steam powered blimps, and coal-fired blimps, and human powered blimps where people were manually turning rudders and propellers to get them to move. And they started to take off a little bit, you know, metaphorically and literally.

But what we really think of as modern blimps and airships started with Zeppelin in the early 1900s. And this was where the Zeppelin company in Germany named after Count Zeppelin started creating rigid and semi-rigid airships that were more reliable, that could take off, that could be truly steered, that were often lifted by hydrogen gas versus hot air. And through sort of the early 1900s through about World War I, they started to become both transportation, but mostly military airships. So, they were being used for scouting, reconnaissance, bombing for a while. And it was at this period where they were, for a while, the only reliable way to travel by air. This was sort of before the powered, you know, air flights of the Wright Brothers. You could take to the air and go someplace else that you wanted to go for the first time using blimps and airships.

But as World War I came around, airplanes had been developed again, sort of competing in the same sort of early 1900s period. They became much more powerful, much faster, much more controllable. But blimps were still pretty common and well used through sort of World War I and World War II. But they were not great at their jobs. They were helpful in recon. They were helpful as escorts to boats. But blimps are kind of big. They’re slow. They’re not very stealthy. So they were quickly overtaken by airplanes as the way that most air forces were gonna go. And they sort of hung around in the military for a little bit. They hung around in advertising. You know, Goodyear really shifted them towards a mostly advertising route. And they’ve now sort of stayed in that advertising, filming, uh, sometimes scientific mission route. But they went from being hundreds of them up in the air for the military and for sort of scouting missions in sort of World War I, World War II era. Now down to, maybe not exactly 25, but a low number of blimps still out there, out and about.

Smiti: Gotcha. And, you know, you mentioned some interesting use cases for blimps. And I’m wondering, can you tell us what has been the most surprising example to you personally, of how people have used blimps in the past or even the present?

Alex Dainis: Yes. So for me, I am fascinated by blimps that are used for sort of scientifically oriented missions. And so one of the good things that blimps have going for them is that they are relatively vibration free and they can hover in one place for a very long period of time.

So back in the, I believe late nineties, early two thousands, DeBeers, the diamond company was using blimps to search for diamonds. Because they could strap some instrumentation onto the bottom of the blimp that would look for density changes in the ground underneath them. And slowly fly these blimps over areas in Botswana, and look for changes in the underground density that would be indicative of diamond deposits. So that I thought was really fascinating as an incredible. Sort of bond villain-esque, scientific story of like, not only are we using blimps for science, we’re using them to search for diamonds. Right? Uh, which I thought was just so, so fascinating.

But there was also a French company that made a blimp that was used for botanists who were studying the canopies in high, like, treetops. And the blimp was essentially used to position this raft on the treetops in these canopies. And so they’d, like, fly the botanists in, drop this raft very gently down onto the canopies of these trees, let the botanists do their work, and then come back and pick up the raft and sort of go off again. Uh, and so those I think are just so, so weird and so out there.

And there are, that’s one of the ways that blimps are now being sort of used and proposed, is as, uh, both I will say surveillance of kinds that maybe are a little less, uh, friendly, but also as scientific, you know, weather ships and looking at sort of land surveillance and that kinda stuff. So I do, I do love though, that they were used to search for diamonds. That I think is just such a ridiculous use case for airships.

Smiti: Absolutely. It, you know, I’m having an interesting and fun time picturing that in my head. I from knowing you personally, I know you’ve made it a personal mission to go on as many blimps as possible. So I was wondering if you could tell us, you know, how many blimps you’ve been on so far, but also what it’s like to go on a blimp. So for example, if I go on an airplane, I know what that experience is like. You board, you sit, like, you put your seatbelt on, like that feeling of going up and then down, that’s a very specific feeling.

So in addition to, how many blimps have you been on, what’s it like going on a blimp?

Alex Dainis: So I have been on two blimps, so far, with very different experiences. So this is where I think I should drop the moment that the Goodyear blimps are no longer actual blimps, they’re semi-rigid airships. So, blimp purists will get, you know, very persnickety about the details here, that a blimp is something that can fully deflate. So you imagine the gondola underneath, which is where everyone sits, and then there’s sort of the big envelope on top. For a true blimp, that envelope can go flat. You can take all of the now helium out and it completely deflates, versus a semi-rigid airship, like the Goodyear Blimps are, which have a skeleton inside.

And so the two that I’ve ridden on, I’ve ridden on one of the current Goodyear blimps, which is a Zeppelin, semi-rigid airship. And I’ve also ridden on a much smaller true blimp that at the time was advertising subway sandwiches. And they are very different experiences.

The Goodyear airships are so quiet and so smooth, and it does feel like getting into an airplane. You get up inside of it, you put your seatbelt on, it’s got like 12 seats inside. You know, the two pilots give you a little spiel about what to expect. But the interesting thing is that it can go straight up and down. So you get onto this and I think the only thing that’s very similar to it is a helicopter where you’re sitting on the ground and then suddenly the ground is going away from you and you are just drifting quickly, but gently up into the air. And it is truly like a boat of the sky. It is smooth, it is calm. You are looking down at the ground below you, you can have the windows open and there’s a little bit of a hum, but it’s not overwhelming. Uh, and it’s just this very smooth experience.

On the other hand are the smaller blimps, which are a little more like flying in a tiny Cessna, right? So they’re louder. You have to sort of have the headphones on ’cause there’s not as much sort of sound dampening. They are also steered by what looks like a pirate wheel. So the person is sitting inside of them and you’re in this like tiny little compartment. There’s a giant wheel next to them, kind of like a wheelchair wheel, and that’s what tips it up and down. So you are watching someone tip it up and down, and then the foot pedals go left and right, and it is loud. And because it’s smaller, it’s kind of bobbing around in the air. It’s a little bit more of a rollercoaster ride than the big ones.

Both of them, I have to say, are such a unique way to see the ground, because of how slow they can fly. Even if you’re in a small aircraft or a helicopter, you have to go pretty fast to stay aloft in the air. But blimps can really slowly sort of pleasure cruise around. And it truly is, I’ve never been a billionaire on a yacht, but I understand why there are some billionaires who wanna build blimps as sky yachts. Uh, notoriously Sergey Brin’s blimp company started, word of mouth was that it started as like a sky yacht company. Now they’re trying to do humanitarian aid. But it is just like a beautiful, scenic way to look over the ground, and such a unique viewpoint that if you ever get the chance, I think everyone should try and go up in a blimp.

Smiti: Well, if you ever need someone to help you film, or keep you company the next, time you know who to call.

Alex Dainis: You know. Sounds Good.

Smiti: Well, you know, throughout our conversation so far, you’ve mentioned bits here and there about how blimps work, and I was wondering if there was another tidbit about maybe how blimps work or maybe how they historically worked that you find especially intriguing or important.

Alex Dainis: So the thing that I think is most fascinating about how blimps work, is that for ballast they use air. And typically when we think of ballast on something like a ship, right, they’re using water to make them heavier or lighter. But the thing that blimps use is air. Which, when we think about it generally does not seem like it has a lot of weight. It seems weird as something to use.

But the whole field of lighter-than-air aircraft, like hot air balloons, like blimps, the idea is that you have this main envelope of blimps and airships currently that’s filled with a gas that is lighter than air. So you fill up this giant balloon, essentially with helium and it wants to take off, but inside of blimps you have smaller balloons that are called, depending on who you ask, either ballonets or ballonets. There is disagreement over the pronunciation. But you can imagine if you took off that outside envelope of the blimp, there are two smaller envelopes inside that contain air, and so they can push out or pull in air to act as the ballast to help them go up or down. And that to me is just so crazy. That’s something that, you know, yes, technically the air is pressing down on us at all times, but we don’t feel it. We don’t think about it. It is fascinating to me that that is how they get to move up and down.

And it is rare. It is only in rare occasions that they actually have to vent the helium itself to try and get lift or to move down because helium is expensive and so they do not want to open up that helium valve. I believe, you know, the price fluctuates, but the last time I heard an estimate was that it was well into the six figures. You know, it was like a hundred to $150,000 to fill a blimp with helium. So once it is filled, you do not want to unfill it. You wanna use it for as long as possible without letting out that helium.

Smiti: Gotcha. And, you know, I think if someone’s listening to this. They might think, okay, well that is very costly. And you know, I’ve heard people describe blimps as strange, inefficient, perhaps obsolete, but they’re very curious and I think they can, you know, reveal something about us as humans and our relationship maybe to innovation or something else.

And I’m curious, what do you think our relationships with blimps reveal about us as humans?

Alex Dainis: So I think they do reveal our fascination with innovation, as you just said, because they are, and this is the reason why I love them, kind of terrible at their jobs, right? They’re slow. They’re very expensive. They can’t fly during very bad weather. And yet we are so fascinated by them and so mystified by them that whenever there is one flying above, people will point at it, they’ll look at it. And I think part of that is because they are unusual now. It is less common to see them and I think we’re kind of fascinated by that.

But I think additionally they hearken back to sort of an older age of this air travel that wasn’t the hurried, and bustled, and sort of tiring experience that it is now. Right? So, when we think of the Hindenburg, which now we think of, unfortunately due to its big crash, and it was a terrible disaster, but it was fitted as a cruise ship in the sky. There were lounges, there were bedrooms. It was this sort of big beautiful symbol of air travel at a time when that was still something sort of luxurious. And so I think for me it’s, it’s a little bit of their novelty. It’s a bit of this hearkening back to a time when air travel was something sort of fun and luxurious.

But they’re also kind of ridiculous. And I think people lean into that. There was a movie, Marty Supreme, last year that leaned into some sort of over the top ridiculous advertising, and they used a blimp. And the whole campaign, as I saw it from the outside around that blimp, was that Timothy Chalamet, who starred in the movie, was trying to think of like outlandish ideas. And one of the outlandish ideas he thought of, and this was all sort of a put on, was a blimp. And that that was just such a weird part of Americana that he was gonna lean into the blimp. And it worked. You know that blimp was flying around Los Angeles. It got tons of play on social media and it was from, its sort of ridiculous nature. That was sort of what people liked about it. That was what worked in this marketing campaign.

So I think there is something, it’s a little bit of an underdog, it’s a little bit of nostalgia, it’s a little bit of a Americana, but it’s hard to hate on a blimp.

Smiti: Fair enough. And, you know, as an archeologist, sometimes when we’re trying to reconstruct the past, we’re always thinking about like, okay, what was maybe the most efficient thing to do? Or, okay, if we’re not sure, maybe it’s a ritual. And, you know, we will often say that if we don’t know, but I think blimps are just so fascinating because, yeah, they’re a bit ridiculous in some ways. And, you know, they’re not optimized for certain thing that we might value today.

So I think it’s a good reminder, um, when we’re interpreting things, especially human behaviors.

So as we close here, what do you hope listeners take away about the history and science of blimps?

Alex Dainis: I hope that listeners appreciate the next time that they see a blimp, or the next time that they think about a blimp, sort of their resilience against all of the odds, that blimps should not still be around. We have better ways of advertising. We have better ways of transportation. But there is something so fun.

And I do love that you just brought up ritual. There’s something almost a little ritualistic about the fact that, you know, if you’re going to a sporting game, you kind of expect to see the Goodyear Blimp flying overhead. You know, you expect that you’re gonna see coverage by the Goodyear Blimp on your, you know, NFL broadcast.

I do think that people appreciate that not everything has to be the most efficient. Not everything has to be this hustle culture. We gotta get there fast, we gotta do it perfectly. We gotta get there in the least expensive way. You can lean into joy and you can lean into fun. And you don’t have to be the very best at your job to do an iconic job, right? You can be an icon without being perfect, and I love that for them.

Smiti: One of my biggest takeaways from this conversation is that our relationship with blimps and the fact that they’re still around highlights something really interesting about human curiosity.

If you’d like to follow Alex’s work, you can find her on most platforms as Alex Dainis, and Instagram is a good place to start. You’ll find those links in the show notes along with the link to a full transcript of this episode.

And if you’re curious to dig deeper and learn some of the current projects that Alex is up to, as well as her advice for folks thinking about getting started in science communication, she shares that and more in a Patreon exclusive video.

Our Patreon is free to join and gives you access to all of our bonus content. If you’d like to support the podcast monetarily, we of course, appreciate that too. Thanks so much for listening and cultivating your curiosity with us. We’ll see you soon.

Credits

Dr. Alex Dainis: Guest

Noor Hanania: Theme Music Creator

Laura Riveiro: Podcast Cover Art Creator

Brooke Norton: Production Support

Smiti Nathan: Host, Video Editor

Patreon Supporters

Thank you to our paid Patreon members for supporting the creation of this episode:

Nancy Fulton, Giancarlo Annese, Thomas Martin, Stuart A. Griffin, Tagg, Ann Brookens, Diana Madden, Cole Guinn, Chris, GeometryGirl, John McGrath, Carmen Guerrero