The Goodyear Blimp Disaster of 1919 | Episode 36

If you think going to the bank can be a hassle and you've always wondered what's the difference between flammable and inflammable, Well, have we got a story for you. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we're going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and awe inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you'll hear about the worst bank deposit in aviation history. You'll learn why you should never parachute without practice, and you'll learn the medical effects of reverse telescoping your legs into your abdomen. This is not the show that you play around kids, or while eating or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shrew the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. You know, it's been a minute since we found ourselves in Chicago. It's a city unlike any other. It's the fifth biggest in North America, and Conde Nast repeatedly calls it the best big city in America. It's caught culture coming out of its butt, and it's known for its different neighborhoods. It's architectural Londons and live events and things to see and do, and there's culinary and art scenes. They say that the Art Institute of Chicago is the highest rated in the world. It's also the birthplace of modern architecture and brownies. And honestly, it's not a bad thing that we haven't been here in a while. I mean, disasters don't happen here every day. I mean, yes, it did go into the ground in eighteen seventy one, but the world's first skyscraper rose from the act. Is if we haven't popped eye since our very first episode. Remember we visited a squash court at the University of Chicago stag Field just before Mankind split the very first act. Well, we're back, but not for any kind of radiation induced trauma. Not today. We are visiting on July the twenty first, nineteen nineteen. So what capone is a thing, but underground bathtop jin wasn't yet. Plot dogs are things, but deep dish pizza also not yet. We're here and World War One just ended, and all the boys were coming back from overseas, and the overall crime rates were down, and industries were bursting, some more than others. We're gonna head over to the South side and grab some seats at Kimiski Park to watch the White Sox game. And you might be asking, don't you mean guaranteed raite field, And I absolutely do not. The Miski Park. It was named after the White Sox founder and their owner, Charles Kamiski, and today the things named after a snippet, a legal copy. It's probably the most heartless abomination of a name for a sports field I can think of. And I'll try my best not to throw up all over my roasted peanuts and cracker jacks. We're getting here in the late innings of a doubleheader against the New York Yankees. The park was built over a former city dump, and it became the baseball palace of the world. It was only the third steel and concrete stadium in the major leagues. Anyway, Buck Weaver threw a walk off single on the ninth and rounded out the first game, and now we're into the second. Like all ballparks of the day Kamiski Park was open to the elements, and today it was glorious and sunny. But we're not just here to see a ballgame. From the right parts of the stands, you could get a pretty good look at a bonafide marvel of the modern age. See in the early nineteen hundreds, lighter than air vehicles were all the rage ever. Hear of the Goodyear blimp while we're here in time for its maiden voyage. And yeah, obviously dus is just a big old bag again with some fins and a propeller. But to the people of the age, I'm trying to think of things that we could see that would create that same kind of slack jaw. What'll they think the next fainting spell that people had when they saw this thing in action. In seventeen eighty three, Jacques Etienne and Joseph Muncolfi invented the first hot air balloon. It looked like an ornate easter egg, but without any the kind of rudder or engine, basically a plaything for the wind, and it didn't come with a giant return if found tagged either. About seventy years later, Henry Giffard built more of a cigar shaped balloon with a propeller, which made it behave like less of a one way moving service than Jack and Joe's were wounded. Fast forward to nineteen hundred and Count Ferdinand von Zepplin of Germany maybe heard the name before, and you can guess what I'm gonna say, but he really started to pimp the blimp. No one really remembers where the name blimp came from, but the most common story is that it's short for British class B air ship. You just shortened all that to and add limp to the end. Of course, by that logic, they could have been easily called burks or boobs or Beethovens. We sometimes called blimps zeppelins, kind of the same way that we call all face tissues kleenex. Fernie zepp invented the first ever rigid bodied airship with more of the shape and abilities of modern airships. It had a metal framework. It was four hundred and twenty feet in length and about thirty feet in diameter. It was filled with hydrogen gas filled ropper bags and used a culmination of tail fins and rudders and engines to move around more predictably, And yeah, at first people viewed the whole thing the way you thought of the house and the movie up. But on board m passengers sat comfortably and they reported feeling safer than on a train. What the people of Chicago were watching that day was Goodyear's blimp, the Wing Foot Express. What well, back in the day the Goodyear Company. Their logo was kind of a line drawing of a foot with a wing attached to it. Was supposed to represent Mercury, the god of speed, and the Greek pantheon. Basically more of like a hand drawn version of the much more streamlined Nike swosh that we all look at now. So they took the name wing Foot from the logo, and yes, we're talking about that Goodyear, the Tire and Rubber Company. During the summer of nineteen nineteen, their blimp was the talk of the town. Hell is that for most of the day it had been cruising around the downtown area as its crews put it through its paces on training rooms. If you can't picture it, imagine a massive balloon, but with more of a cylindrical football shape to it. Like we said, it was huge and a cast quite a shadow. Passengers sat below the balloon in an open air wicker gondola suspended beneath the bag. It by itself was thirty four feet long and it could squeeze in about six people. Behind that were two giant Gnome laurone one hundred and ten horsepower rotary air cooled engines. And like we said, the balloon wasn't really a balloon, magica housing for smaller balloons, carrying ninety five thousand cubic feet of hydrogen. As the ground crews loosened the ropes tethering it to the earth, the pilot throttled the mighty engines, The propeller caught the air, and the vehicle lifted from the ground with the softest touch and soared into the sky. It floated around twelve hundred feet above the city. The only way you'd really know it was there was from the hum of the engines and the pristine shadow that raced along the streets beneath. This thing drew all kinds of attention and everyone gazed upwards. People were literally hanging out of office windows for a better look. And you got to remember, back in nineteen nineteen, very very few people had ever flown Wilburn Orville only set that vibe about sixteen years earlier, and also, like we said today, was the Maid in flight. The Goodyear airship arrived from Akron, Ohio, at an unused airplane hangar on the grounds of the White City Amusement Park. The Akron hanger had been taken over by the arm The airship arrived in pieces and was assembled through early July. It could cruise at about forty miles or sixty kilometers an hour, and we said it floated about twelve hundred feet up. That's how high you might see a traffic helicopter. Since nineteen seventeen, Goodyear had been using the hangar to assemble blimps for the Navy and other commercial purposes, and thousands would mass around the place to stare. Planes had always been said to be best suited for short flights, you know, five hundred seven hundred miles just hops. Airships, on the other hand, promised to travel long distances without stopping or refueling, which made them perfect for non stop continental or transoceanic flights. A mixed crowd of aerial enthusiasts, gawkers, businessmen, and military officials all had visions of a future where the skies were filled with blimps. The Daily News predicted that Chicago would soon become the blimpopolis of the Western world. That's their awesome word, not mine. Goodyear's blimp was finishing up at second loop around down Town, floating past Kamiski Park about middle of the third inning. Piloting today was Captain Jack Botner floating to and from Grant Park at the edge of Lake Michigan, and he was joined by small handfuls of mechanics or local officials or reporters on exhibition flights between Grant Park and White City. Flying over downtown Chicago made him a very early rock star before that was even a thing. Before departures, mechanics would get to work double checking and tuning everything in the engines, just making sure that nothing would go wrong. And check this. A blimp uses less gas in two weeks than it takes a seven forty seven airplane just to taxi to the runway. Glimps use high pressure gas to make them lighter than air. An empty blimp might weigh ten pounds, but with a knife high pressure gas it drops to only a few hundred. But yep, this was pretty new technology still and so much was riding on this that they just couldn't afford any surprises, like the time mere minutes ago when thick streams of oil started spraying from one of the engines. The head of Goodyear's Aeronautic division saw this and threw a flag on the planet. But the pressure to fix this thing and get it back into the sky was itself sky high. See what I did. Four people had been allowed to board. Earl Davenport was a public relations agent for White City, Carl Weaver and Harry Whacker were flight mechanics, and Milton Norton was a photographer. The Chicago skyline had never risen above six hundred feet before, but zoning laws and height restrictions were changing, so the Goodyear company invited him for the flight, hoping his photographs would create some real jelly about the experience. Back at Kimiski Park, fans of baseball became fans of future tech as Goodyear's blimp made its way from the Downtown Loop back towards White City, right over their heads. Most of the reason the massive dirigible was crisscrossing the skies above was kind of like a marketing stunt. They needed to create public intro in what Goodyear saw as the future of passenger air travel. People across Europe and America were already all shut up and take my money to get onto one of these things, and now they were seeing it flying over the loop for free. The loop is the core the heart of downtown Chicago. The name comes from different cable cars and railway systems that have always looped around the areas ever since the late eighteen hundreds. Each of the men that I mentioned had been instructed on what to do in the event of an accident, which was actually called an event of the impossible, which is a little too unsinkable ship for my taste, but has just pulled that thought. The ballast was carefully adjusted, the rigging was inspected, the engines were turned on, and up they went. The blimp left the ground as soon as it was released and sailed away without even a quiver, and from that height, the crowd on the field sank farther and farther away. The blimp left White City for Grant Park, were thousands more gathered round to watch the ground grew grab a ropes and gently bring her down. Captain Botner steered over the downtown loop around three, and after four she was up again. Norton had been set to take photo after photo of the city skyscrapers from above when he felt a trimmer. The steel cables that secured the gondola beneath the blimp shuddered. Buttner looked around, scanning the mallon when he saw the flicker of a flame. Before they left, he had casually remarked that this whole thing was safer than walking, and now his face went ashen, and he told everyone they were going to burn to death, and then jumped from the gondola. Before they boarded, each man had been strapped around the waist with an old timey parachute folded into a bag inside the fuselage, and the captain apparently he just went to go test his There were so many witnesses and they all had different versions of the story. No one could agree where the flame was first seen, but wherever it came from, it spread incredibly fast. They gasped as the blimp burst into f enveloping the gas bag, which began to contort and close in on itself, all the while losing lyft and quickly falling. Mechanic Carl Weaver understood the assignment and over the side he went, but a spray of flame licked his parachute, which caught fire, which ruined the effect, and he fell twelve hundred feet. Carl Weaver and Harry Whacker jumped out too, but as Earl Davenport left, his lines became ensnared in all the rigging. He was trapped and forced along for the ride. He found himself hanging fifty feet below the gondolas, the blimp, fully engulfed in flames. I might add buckled in the middle, jackknifed and dropped. The game at Kimiski was stopped as fans and players watched the disaster unfold in horror. There was plenty of screaming as it dropped. Meanwhile, at street level, twelve hundred feet below, the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank had already closed to the public for the day. It was about five to five and about one hundred and fifty book keepers, clerks, nearly all girls, were finishing up the day's transaction records and whatnot. Monday was always their busiest day of the week, and there was so much to do, but they'd be able to go home soon, and there's certainly worse places to work. The bank itself was one of the most beautiful buildings in the city. It was a two and a half story architectural gem designed by Daniel Burnham. It sat in the heart of Chicago's financial district, directly across from the Border Trade Building, and the inside it was lavish like concert hall, lavish an ornate central rotunda laid with marble and ringed by pillars. The most visually striking thing about the design was the enormous stained glass skylight high above the rotunda. And again, it was about five to five, and because they were so engrossed in finishing up, no one really noticed as a vaguely human shadow appeared. The shadow grew in size and volume, until a human shape exploded through the skylight above, fell straight and splacked to a stop in the middle of the marble rotunda flaming parachute and all now everybody inhale a little extra deep to screen, because seconds after a much larger and oddly bright and shimmery shadow appeared from above. There was an almighty crash, and the blimp's flaming bulk crashed through the skylight, past the balcony and immediately. It was as if the whole roof was collapsing and came to rest on the unexpected employees seated below. Harriet Messinger was a switchboard operator seated on the balcony above. She said after the initial splat, the girls hesitated. Many of them were stunned by glass or too frightened to run. Then the huge machine came through. It seemed to fill the bank with flame that searched out every corner. The heavy part, with its engines and tanks fell to the floor and exploded. Yep, the blimp made a deposit two heavy rotary engines and gasoline tanks that detonated on contact. Flaming gas sprayed over everyone within fifty feet. One bank employee ran out of his office and was immediately knocked off his feet by the explosion. He got up and someone plowed into him, screaming, oh my god, it's raining hell. He described the screams as indescribable. The area directly beneath the skylight was caged, you know, for security reasons, which also meant it only had two exits. People fought their way through the exits to escape the building while actively engulfed in flames. Many witnesses outside caught souvenirs from the shower of class created when the bank windows blew out from the explosion. Girls working on the balcony floor were forced to leap, screaming to the street below. Gradually, signs of life were reduced to barely recognizable forms, feebly crawling away while their clothes burned off all around them. Bodies eyeing under the wreckage had been reduced to char by the fire, which had grown white hot, and this made rescue work pretty much impossible. The marble pillars supporting the roof and lining the rotunda were cracked and broken by the heat. The marble floors had carved in where the engines fell. The entire telegraph and stenography areas were reduced to ashes. But wait, what about those other guys from the blimp? Well, Harry Whacker landed, but he got pretty knocked up doing it. Remember, the only thing more underdeveloped than his actual parachute was his ability to use it properly. And the photographer Milton Norton, well, he landed feet first with his legs dead straight. You know what happened, Well, both of his legs shattered, and all of that got fired up into his torso and caused massive internal injuries. If you had been forced to leap from a height like you know, forced forced, would you know what to do? Most people will fall at some point in their lives. Eight million Americans suffer serious fall injuries every year. That is a full third of all emergency room visits. Right there. Whether you fall two feet or twenty thousand feet, it's not so much the fall as the landing that's going to get you, but it's the fall that sets up the landing. The secret to improving your chances of staying at ground level rather than six feet beneath is understanding how to fall as safely as you can. I am going to tell you a lot of things here, and some might seem a little contradictory, but it all depends on the unique circumstances of your fall. If you are falling head first, I'm certainly not going to be able to train you to do with some kind of mid air sumrsault in the little time that we have in this segment. I do apologize for that, and you will be missed. But for the rest of us, if you find yourself falling, the first thing you're going to want to do is grab something. And I know that sounds obvious and you're probably going to do it automatically, but grab anything you can on the way down. The longer your landing takes, the less force it takes for you to stop. People have survived by falling into snow, trees, even mud and wet grass when they live to tell all about it, because it absorbed their impact way better than say a parking lot or a rock quarry. People have been able to slow their descent by fractions of a second by grabbing debris or tree branches or window ledges on their way down. Even how much clothing is fluttering behind you can affect your surface profile. Parachutes have so much surface area because more energy is required to push air out of the way and it slows you down. Don't got one, well, don't panic right away. If you can try the splay out flying squirrel position, that should be able to help increase air drag. It doesn't sound like much, but it can make all the difference between a cracked skull and a crushed skull. Julian Koki survived a fall over the Amazon back in the seventies, and it is believed she lived because she had been knocked around by all the foliage before impact. Anything you can impact with will shave speed on the way down. In World War II, a pilot named Alan McGee found himself falling without a shoot, and he survived a fall of ti twenty thousand feet, And they say that he survived because he smashed through a glass roof right before impact, which slowed him just enough to make his injuries non fatal. I know, I'm always telling you to relax and try not to panic in these safety segments, and it's obviously easier said than done. But in this case, a relaxed body is better at absorbing and distributing impact forces then say a pin wheeling octopus. Try to relax your muscles and your joints, like your elbows in your knees. Ivan Chizov was a Soviet pilot kind of had to leave his plane behind at twenty two thousand feet, and he survived because he was unconscious, not loosen flailey, but not crouched either. You collapse with all your joints all tightened up, and you could reasonably kick out all of your own teeth. But if you can't nap on the way down, you might as well actually try to land on your feet. No, this isn't a trick. Landing on your feet does a better job of protecting your skull and your organs than falling flat or onto your sides. It'll still mess you up extremely bad, but it does improve your chances. I know, ideally you're supposed to spread out the force when landing, but you don't always get to choose, and you might as well know all your options. You want both feet to hit the ground at the same time to help distribute the shock, to cross both legs evenly. You then want to fall to the side and roll. There's a reason paratroopers are trained this way. In fact, this is going to sound awful, but if you were falling to your side, you could sacrifice your arm. Put your arm out towards the ground like a kickstand, and everything from your palm to your shoulder will shatter but partially break the fall ahead of the rest of your body. So that's pretty good. I mean, it would be exquisitely painful, but it could reduce your velocity, and even the smallest difference in speed can make a difference in your chance as a survival. If you can try to land on the medist parts of your body too, you know, maybe your buttocks or your thighs. I've read that any muscular or fatty parts in your back would do pretty well too. But I've also read that falling on your back is the absolute worst option and should be avoided at all costs and regardless. No matter how you find yourself falling, use your arms and protect your head. Nothing else matters. If you can't protect your head. If you survive a major fall without brain damage, then get ready for the shackles of fame, because you are incredibly lucky. Captain Botner landed as safe as can be, like Mary Poppins, y'all, and was immediately whisked away to tell his story to the police. He said, as we neared State Street, I felt the machine buckle and there was a tremor throughout the fuselage. I knew something it had happened, and I saw the flames licking the bag. I'll watched the flames for a couple of seconds before I said anything to the other fellows. Knowing the ship was finished, I yelled over the top, everybody jump or you'll burn alive. He was acknowledged for his role in the disaster, but kind of like the way passengers were acknowledged after the Titanic. And what became of poor Earl Davenport. Well, he'd still been attached and dangling beneath the gondola of the flaming blimp as it dropped, and as it forced its way into the bank, Davenport was scraped off against the roof and found later by firefighters. Enthusiasm for the White Sox game deflated as quickly as the blimp, and people started leaving after the third inning, with fourteen thousand people at the game, adding to the thousands already descending on the area. Nearly twenty thousand people witnessed the aftermath of the disaster. Many offered help to the victims, and as ambulances ferried survivors to local hospitals, hundreds of family and friends swarmed Iroquois Memorial and Saint Luke's to learn if their relatives were still with us. So what happened, Well, no one could agree. Two out of the five survivors, Oh I forgot to say, Norton died. Yeah, he is the one who shattered both his legs on impact. Turns out you cannot reverse telescope your legs without skipping out on your hospital bill. So to speak. Only Harry Whacker and the captain could put a finger down for having fallen out of a flaming blimp and survived, and neither of them could really say what even happened. No one could agree on where the fire started. Forensic investigation wasn't a thing yet, so that was a non starter. But a lot of theories were offered at the time. One was that a static electric spark set off the blimp's highly flammable hydrogen. Another was that some kind of engine malfunction created an unlucky spark that ignited the gas. Another was that Milton Norton had been using one of those old tiny slow exposure box gammeras that needed flashpowder or camera bulbs and that did it. Another was that the bag absorbed too much sunlight, expanded and burst. Yet another was that a mechanic could used a blow torch on one of the propellers before takeoff, and somehow a little tiny fire had hit away and smoldered in the fuselage. And after all investigations they resulted in no determination of the cause of the fire. And although seventeen good year. Employees, including Botner, had been arrested. No charges were ever filed. The bank was pretty jacked up, and surprise, surprise, all that fire hose water did not mix well with the paper bank records. But it was all cleaned up and employees were expected back the next day. Bandages and all people questioned how this quote enormous floating fire bomb had been allowed to fly over one of the most densely populated square miles on Earth in the first place. And if this had happened in any other city or at any other time, much would have been made about it. But Chicago was a busy city, like we said, and as incredible as the story was, it quickly faded and was replaced by other news. The day after the disaster, a child was murdered coming home after playing in a nearby schoolyard. It was a completely senseless crime, and five days later the murderer confessed. Except on that same day, a young African American teenager named Eugene Williams had been floating on a raft in Lake Michigan mine in his own business when a group of white people saw accused him of floating over some invisible whites only imaginary line that they just made up, and when he asked them for clarification, they beat him to death with rocks. After that, a week of race riots ripped across the majority black neighborhoods along the city's south side. And you might think that the black neighborhoods would revolt with rage, and they did, but not before roving gangs of young white men egged them on by attacking them in the streets. By the end of the week, the blimp story had completely disappeared from newspapers as Chicago's red Summer erupted in destruction and violence all across the city. By mid August, many parts of the city were in ruins, thirty eight people were killed and more than five hundred had been injured. The Grand Park airstrip had been closed, Chicago began building a municipal airport known today as Midway International. Well, how did the White Sox finish their year? Well, they powered their way to the American League pennant, which would be its own headline. But turns out they cheated at the World Series, and that is a whole, entire other story. So did blimps immediately fall out a favor and disappear from the skies. Not yet, not exactly. That took twelve more years when the largest darrigible ever built, all the better for making out all the swastikas from a distance, flew to Lakehurst, New Jersey, and burned before the news cameras and the eyes of the world. Yep, I'm talking about the Hindenburg, and all those people who were busy throwing their wallets at ticket agents were now doing the thing with the finger and the collar. As for the Goodyear Blimp, you probably didn't know that America's very first civil aviation disaster was well, frankly this unusual. Thirteen people had been killed and twenty seven were seriously injured. The Goodyear disaster revolutionized air safety, as over city flights became heavily regulated in a way never before even considered. Non radiation induced trauma was not the only thing it left behind. It was a horror show that traumatized thousands, but because it belonged to a busy newsweek, it was largely forgotten. Some people say that the Goodyear Blimp crash of nineteen nineteen was an unusual footnote in the history of aviation, and I one hundred percent agree, but the true legacy of the Goodyear Blimp crash of nineteen nineteen was the immediate desire for safety in the short term that became the beginnings of an air traffic safety system that has continued to evolve for more than one hundred years. Keeping you and I and millions of others safe both in the sky and on foot around the world never really disappeared. In spite of Hindenburg's best efforts. Radio announcer Herb Morrison's cry of Oh the Humanity became part of America's first coast to coast radio news broadcast. They were refined and made safer with increased availability of non flammable lighter than air gases like helium, but the idea of blimp based passenger traffic went down like a lead balloon. They've remained a popular site at athletic events like the World Series or the Super Bowl or the Olympics. But even with that said, today there are more astronauts in the world than blimp pilots, and there is no mention of the airship or the disaster on Goodyear's website. It's as if Goodyear's blimp, the Wingfoot Air Express never existed, a race from public memory in a Ball of Flame. You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, a Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or you can fire us an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one and all you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. If you want to support the ongoing production of the show, you can buy me a coffee at buy Me a Coffee dot com slash Doomsday. But if you can spare the money and had to choose, we ask you to consider making your donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They are often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to eight they have helped over three point six million people across seventy five different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic dot CAA. On the next episode, I'm doing a special minisode and which doesn't mean anything because they never really turn out to be that MANI we are going to be revisiting a chapter in the history of my hometown that threatens to lead you both confused and toothless. It's the Toronto Circus Riot of eighteen fifty five. We'll talk to un safety goggles off and thanks for listening.