Hell Yeah: Airships! 🌀

The premise of this newsletter is implied by its title: continuity. Often, the past resembles today. In an amnesiac industry like podcasting, in an amnesiac country like the United States, it’s nice to know we are not the first ever to confront our problems. Our predecessors also asked: How are we supposed to get paid for things we give away for free? Will everything we love about audio be replaced by crummy video? Will xenophobic, litigious tech bros always be with us?

So yes, the past is like the present in many regards. Except one. Airships.

We no longer look to the skies and expect to see giant balloons the length of a stadium, but shaped like suppositories, carrying people to and fro. I am fascinated by these blimpey anachronisms. One of the favorite podcast episodes I ever got to edit was Tim Harford’s The Deadly Airship Race, part of his Pushkin show Cautionary Tales. Harford and his team work with the genius sound designer and composer Pascal Wyse, who manages to recreate the sonic world not only of airships on the move, but also an airship under construction in a cold and leaky British hangar plagued by rats. No one ever recorded the sound of rats gnawing on an airship in the rain, but Pascal evokes it via his magic-of-audio tricks™. (I do wish he could ™ them!)

Lighter than air, on the air

Airships are all over the history of early radio. The two innovations developed side by side. After all, it would have been hard, if not impossible, to navigate and dock an airship without wireless communications. This was before radar — airship pilots needed constant communication with the ground to adjust their bearings.

And in return, airships brought a lot to radio. Mainly in ways that were really bad for airships.

Oh the humanity!

Not only did announcer Herb Morrison’s description of the crash of the Hindenburg on May 6, 1937 become an iconic radio moment — it was a recorded moment, not a live broadcast. Morrison and his engineer Charles Nehlson had lugged heavy disk-recording equipment from their home station WLS in Chicago to the landing base in Lakehurst, New Jersey, basically as part of an airline junket. Much of his descriptive recording, as the airship glided down for a landing, resembled ad copy more than a news report.

Then, of course, it turned dramatic and grim. The hydrogen-filled Hindenburg exploded as Morrison watched and narrated in horror. As soon as they could, he and the engineer abandoned their equipment, grabbed the disk recordings and rushed back to Chicago. 

The next day NBC’s president decided to make an exception to the network’s ban on recorded sound in order to interview Morrison and play a portion of the recordings. (Yes, both NBC and CBS banned recorded sound over their air, and would continue to do so for another decade. More on that here). 

It’s telling that the lesson America’s big radio networks took from this incredible eye-witness recording was simply, “Nope, no more of that!” As sound scholar Michael Biel pointed out, “This is…the first time that a recording was allowed to be broadcast on NBC, and I can count on my fingers the other times that NBC broadcast recordings — knowingly and unknowingly — until the middle of WWII.”

I found Biel’s remarks in an email exchange published following an NPR piece on an anniversary of the disaster. Apparently NPR got some stuff wrong, especially concerning the recording aspect. History is confusing! Meanwhile, Biel is a one-man campaign for studying recordings as the physical artifacts that they are. His forensic understanding of old recording equipment offers great insight into how listeners formed their impressions of Morrison’s reporting on disaster. Biel believes the original recording was distorted by the disaster itself.

The whole Hindenburg story is, of course, legendary — up there with the Titanic disaster, in which radio (or the lack thereof) also played a starring role.

The distress call of 1924

I came across another airship story in the radio archives that is less well-known, probably because it involves disaster averted, not disaster recorded. It happened many years before the Hindenburg explosion. And it’s fascinating because it shows us how much early broadcasting was intertwined with emergencies. Radio as entertainment was starting to split from radio as navigation tool, but the two worlds still collided in bizarre ways.

The night of January 16, 1924, a gale hit the East Coast. Down at Lakehurst, a gigantic helium-filled dirigible called the Shenandoah, built by the US Navy, was blown from its moorings. There were 21 crew members on board. Thrust into the clouds, they couldn’t see land, and nor could they communicate with their base — its radio tower had also blown down. The ship sent out a general distress call, an SOS.

This was still the era when radio stations had to go off the air when they picked up or received a report about a distress call in their area. Federal law was clear about this.

Over in Newark, radio station WOR was preparing to go on the air with its evening program. The station lived on the sixth floor of Bamberger’s Department Store. Many radio stations were licensed by department stores back then — the stores wanted to demonstrate to skeptical customers how radio worked, and the same people running the station would also sell radio receivers.

The night of January 16, 1924 — according to a great book by media historian Erik Barnouw — a few dozen singers and instrumentalists had assembled in the store, waiting for their turn to go on the air. When the station’s engineer told WOR manager Joseph Barnett about the distress call, he took the station off the air. Then he called Lakehurst and found out their radio tower had been blown down. 

The New York Times published a long piece about the lost airship the following day. In that account — which would seem more accurate, though who knows? —WOR didn’t play a central role. Rather, the Times reported, it was the Navy that mobilized the help of all radio stations in the area, and their listeners:

In all versions of the incident, the Shenandoah eventually found its bearings as the storm abated. Barnouw quotes oral histories that claim the engineer of WOR, Jack Poppele, ran to the roof of Bamberger’s and actually saw the airship cross overhead. “All of a sudden there was a rift in the clouds and there she was!” The Naval airship safely docked back at Lakehurst in the middle of the night.

Perhaps we can use this story as feel-good antidote to all the air-traffic-control miseries over Newark today. We too could be crowd-sourcing flight paths for the beleagured airplanes. (See: “make do with less.”)

Unfortunately, the Shenandoah herself didn’t last too much long after its dramatic radio-rescue. In 1925 the Navy, ignoring warnings about summer storms, sent its flagship airship on a publicity tour to state fairs around the Midwest. On September 3rd of that year, the Shenendoah crashed in a storm over Ohio. All 14 crew members died.

A songwriter named Maggie Andrews wrote a mournful song about it, recorded by folk singer Vernon Dalhart. 

Her sides were torn asunder, her cabin was torn down

The captain with his brave men went crashing to the ground

And fourteen lives were taken, but they've not died in vain.

Their names will live forever within the Hall of Fame.