Our theme for the month of November is “the periodic table.”

I picked helium by mistake.

When the sign-up went around for elements for this month’s theme, I had a vague idea involving the noble gases and the German airship Hindenburg, pre-disaster, which always seemed magical to me, and I figured I’d sign up for helium and do a little research on this story, which is a good one and overlooked. It’s the Titanic of the air, really, minus the lifeboats and the nude modeling. But then I finally read the Wikipedia page for the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin aircraft manufacturing company and realized that the Hindenburg was not, after all, full of helium. It was full of hydrogen, which is much more flammable and is in fact why the blimp went down in flames in New Jersey in 1937 with 36 passengers and 61 crew members on board.

Hydrogen, H, atomic number 1; helium, He, atomic number 2—pot-ay-to, pot-ah-to. Close enough right until your rigid airship lights on fire. Possibly because of sabotage! But probably because of leaking hydrogen which is, again, a flammable gas. There are a number of theories, which have been variously explored by crash investigators, NASA scientists, and Mythbusters. None are definitive. But it was a gigantic bubble of flammable gas, floating through the atmosphere, which is full of static electricity, being propelled by engines. A fire is not automatically suspicious in this scenario. But before it caught on fire, the Hindenburg was glorious. 

I think the Hindenburg holds some fascination for me because it seems to exist outside of time. It’s like these postcards from the 1900 Paris World Fair, representing what people imagined the year 2000 would be like: personal flying machines, portable city blocks, vacationing at the North Pole, balloons that enable you to walk on water. It’s all part of a much more optimistic vision of history than even the one a classroom textbook presents. We’re taught in school to think about the 1930s as a decade of deprivation in America, marked by unemployed parents trying to feed nine kids who own, collectively, six pairs of shoes. Meanwhile: airships. An alternative timeline in which transatlantic travel involved a cruise through the sky in a gigantic blimp that also contains young Nelson Rockefeller, a dedicated cigar smoking room, and a grand piano.

Like everything magical, though, the airship project was riddled with realities. The airships were heavily developed for and used in World War I as scouts and (maddeningly inaccurate) bombers. The Treaty of Versailles required Germany to hand over their Zeppelins (mostly they didn’t; the crews destroyed them instead) and specifically prohibited Germany from building more until another treaty was established in 1925. A lot of people died developing airships, flying them during the war, flying them in thunderstorms, riding in them, from bombs they dropped, etc., etc. And the whole reason that the Hindenburg was full of (again! extremely flammable!) hydrogen was because the USA had a near-monopoly on helium production and the National Munitions Control Board refused to license its export to Germany in the first place. Because Germany might use it to continue building their military power. Because Nazis. (After the Hindenburg went down, the scrap metal was hauled back to Germany and used by the Luftwaffe.)

So, really, what makes the Hindenburg and all airships compelling is precisely the thing that destroyed them: fantastical possibility in tension with reality. The absurd, boyish confidence of filling a gigantic blimp with a flammable gas and loading up a bunch of passengers and cargo and mail to set off across the globe, trusting in the promise of one’s own technical ingenuity.

One of the flaws of our historical imagination, of course, is to look back on all of these things as inevitable. We hear Germany and 1937 and we know what happens next, and we hear rigid airship buoyed by flammable gas and the film reel that plays in our heads is of course, what did they think was gonna happen? The Hindenburg flew seventeen uneventful transatlantic flights in 1936. Any one of those could have been the last. And the May 1937 flight could very well have ended with delighted passengers disembarking in Lakehurst, New Jersey, and marveling to one another: what a thrilling time to be alive.

Katie Van Zanen

Katie is a doctoral student in English and education at the University of Michigan. She loves the New York Times crossword puzzle, advice columns, oceans, and dogs of all kinds.