Posted on 04/21/2023 11:14:58 AM PDT by nickcarraway
The mystery of the Hindenburg disaster, the destruction of the largest aircraft ever constructed by mankind, on May 6, 1937, in Manchester Township, New Jersey has baffled scientists for decades.
The airship Hindenburg was nearing the end of a three-day voyage across the Atlantic Ocean from Frankfurt, Germany before it went up in flames. Merely watching the gigantic airship making its way across the skies was a newsworthy spectacle, and onlookers and news crews gathered to watch the 800-foot-long behemoth touch down.
Suddenly and horrifyingly, in less than half minute, it was all over. Flames erupted from the airship’s skin, fed by the flammable hydrogen gas that kept it aloft, and consumed the entire structure, ending 36 lives.
The ship, already famous before its demise, was seared into the world’s memory.
Greek scientist Hindenburg Public Domain The disaster, despite having occurred nearly one hundred years ago, has remained one of the iconic tragedies of the 20th century alongside other accidents that captured the public’s imagination, such as the sinking of the Titanic, the Challenger explosion, and the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
Grecian Delight supports Greece Greek scientist unravels the cause of the Hindenburg explosion But what was the cause of the explosion? Caltech’s Konstantinos Giapis, a professor of chemical engineering, recreated the ship’s final moments and unraveled its secrets for NOVA, the popular PBS science television show.
Giapis, who obtained his diploma from the National Technical University of Athens in 1984 and completed his Ph.D. studies at the University of Minnesota in 1989, began looking into historical records of the accident and soon realized that no one before had undertaken any form of research to discover the cause of the incident.
What has always been known is that the zeppelin, which was designed by the Zeppelin Company, a German firm known for its large and luxurious airships, contained 7 million cubic feet of flammable hydrogen.
Imagine a cigar-shaped balloon as large as a skyscraper filled with explosive gas. Combine that hydrogen with oxygen from the air and a source of ignition, and you “literally [have] a bomb,” Giapis said, according to an interview with Caltech.
The key but long-unanswered question was how the fire even began. The Greek scientist built a model of a portion of the zeppelin’s outer surface in his laboratory on the Caltech campus in his attempt to gain insights.
Greek scientist Hindenburg disaster The Hindenburg flying over New York City just before disaster struck. Public Domain Building a model of the Hindenburg airship The Greek scientist attests that after the ship was grounded, it became more electrically charged. When the mooring ropes were dropped, electrons from Earth’s surface spread to the frame, giving the ship a positively-charged skin and a negatively-charged frame.
In other words, by grounding the frame with the mooring ropes, the landing crew had inadvertently made more “room” for positive charge to gather on the ship, setting the stage for the disaster.
“When you ground the frame, you form a capacitor—one of the simplest electric devices for storing electricity—and that means you can accumulate more charge from the outside,” Giapis says. “I did some calculations and I found that it would take four minutes to charge a capacitor of this size!”
With the ship now acting as a giant capacitor, enough electrical energy to produce the powerful sparks required for igniting the hydrogen gas could be acquired. This, based on eyewitness accounts, may have been leaking from the rear end of the ship located near its tail.
“Hydrogen was leaking at one specific location in this humongous thing. If there is a spark somewhere else on the ship, there is no way you would ignite a leak hundreds of feet away. A charge could move on wet skin over short distances, but doing that from the front of the airship all the way to the back is more difficult,” he says. “So how did the spark find this leak?”
Any place where a part of the frame was in close proximity to the skin would have formed a capacitor, and there were hundreds of these places all over the ship, Giapis says.
“That means the giant capacitor was actually composed of multiple smaller capacitors, each capable of creating its own spark. So I believe there were multiple sparks happening all over the ship, including where the leak was,” he says.
Giapis’ work could help exploration of Mars The Greek scientist was also the head of a team of US scientists which has developed a small, portable device that can generate oxygen from carbon dioxide.
His brilliant idea could become the foundation of future human missions to Mars, as it could provide breathable oxygen to astronauts who will travel on long space missions to reach the Red Planet.
After completing his Ph.D. studies at the University of Minnesota in 1989, Giapis was employed as a Lacey Instructor in Caltech between 1992 and 1993; as an assistant professor between 1993 and 1998; and an associate professor between 1999 and 2010. Since 2010, he has worked as a professor at Caltech.
He is currently teaching Chemical Engineering Design Laboratory and Heterogeneous Kinetics and Reaction Engineering at Caltech.
Yes...but what actually set it off? Was it caused by leaking? Someone mentioned a camera flash bulb. I am not familiar with the timeframe involved, but as soon as they grounded that thing bad things were on the horizon. Should’ve kept it in Zeppelinheim!
Are you on the ground or in the helicopter? Air is a good insulator, so I would think the whole helicopter would acquire a different charge than the ground as it flies.
THey did
Can anyone here listen to radio broadcaster Herbert Morrison’s eyewitness account of the disaster without thinking about Les Nessman?
eyeamok wrote: “Hard to believe it wasn’t climate change...”
Possibly, but more likely to be the vaccine.
Highly disappointed that the smart Germans didn’t think of it before launching the Hindenburg. It’s called Titanic syndrome or Yamato syndrome.
Mr. Tesla was alive at that time. He could’ve given us the answer in one sentence.
I enjoy reading the research of intelligent scientists as opposed to the propaganda of democrat party “scientists”.
I’m on the ground when I need to handle the cable.
I wonder if there was any arcing between the mooring cables and the tower or the ground.
Um, this episode aired in 2021. They report it like it just happened. Lousy article? Lazy writer?
Hard to understand how greekreporter.com is so out of touch, considering this thing I learned about recently (internet). /s
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/hindenburg-the-new-evidence/
Shocking that it could be something that simple, isn't it?
It was obviously a bomb that George C. Scott was unable to defuse in time.
It is a common and mandatory safety procedure to connect a ground cable to any aircraft as soon as it is parked and before anyone touches it other than the person connecting the cable.
The problem with the Hindenberg is that a wet rope does not constitute a reliable low resistance ground connection (5 ohms or less required in the USAF).
See #36
I read somewhere years ago that LI farmers were known to take pot shots at it during 1936 travel season.
The Germans probably had it figured out 5 minutes later.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.