Throw out Bain's theory and rule out the hydrogen driven explosion. If it was just a fire by the outer shell, it would have taken longer to burn. If it was just the hydrogen, it would happen much faster than 30 seconds! There would be an immediate combustion and decomposition between excited hydrogen and the immediate reaction to open air -- anotherwords an implosion would follow.
There was no implosion. There was the continued burn of the outershell and the obvious fire from the hydrogen. The hydrogen was obviously much more excited than expected.
Actually there was an implosion at the very outset of the fire. This can clearly be seen in the initial fire photo where the Hindenburg appears to be on an even keel. The framework and outer cover are collapsed very visibly inward from the stern to a point almost amidships.
Also, the burn rate of the entire ship (32-34 seconds) was entirely consistent with every description of a hydrogen airship fire I've ever read. When the British R-101 crashed and caught fire in France in 1930, the ship burned in roughly the same amount of time that the Hindenburg burned... the few survivors aboard had time to realize what was happening, but barely enough time to escape, as was the case with the Hindenburg. World War I zeppelins, when shot down, would hang there briefly as the fire took hold, and then they'd be fireballs in the sky within half a minute or so. And this was, of course, without being painted with the specific doping compound that covered the Hindenburg.
Also, you ask why the hydrogen didn't simply ignite all at once in the Hindenburg. "What slowed it down"? Simple... the hydrogen in the Hindenburg was contained in sixteen separate gas cells. The hydrogen didn't all roam free inside the outer cover as it would in a balloon or a blimp. It was essentially a duralumin cage with 16 balloons inside it, each in their own separate bay. While a rigid airship like the Hindenburg would burn very quickly (again, half a minute is pretty consistent) it was still a progressive burning. The Germans kept their hydrogen at the highest purity level possible (as close to 98% as they could manage) which further explains why the hydrogen in the Hindenburg didn't all immediately and violently ignite.
And that's another thing... the Hindenburg did not "explode". It burned. The purity level in the ship's gas cells was entirely too high for them to literally "explode".
Helmut Lau, in the few seconds he watched the early stages of the fire, saw exactly the progressive burning process that one would expect. He initially saw fire at a point above and forward of his position, partway up the front side of cell 4 and, of course, from his vantage point he was looking at the BOTTOM of cell 4 from below and aft, so he saw the glow of the fire through the gas cell material itself ("at first red and yellow and there was smoke in it" as Lau stated) Then cell 4 was quickly consumed by fire and as this occurred Lau saw cells 3 and 5 (those immediately aft and immediately forward of cell 4) ignite before he ducked for cover at the bottom of the lower fin.
No, the hydrogen didn't all ignite simultaneously because the way the ship was designed it simply wouldn't have.
You seem to be suggesting that the hydrogen inside the ship reacted with the paint outside the ship and this somehow excited the hydrogen so that it became flammable. Am I reading you correctly? Not that the contact between the paint and the hydrogen directly started the fire, but that the contact between them excited the hydrogen molecules? You're introducing an unnecessary step here... loose hydrogen that's leaked from the gas cells would immediately mix with oxygen from the air within the ship, and be highly flammable almost immediately. No catalyst effect was needed.
You then further state that "once the hydrogen is excited enough, a spark could happen anywhere inside." This is not entirely true. Static discharge from outside the
Just because you can disproove Incendiary Paint Theory still doesn't mean such disproof will proove the paint wasn't a catalyst that further ignited the hydrogen.
Ah, but the whole basis of Bain's theory (especially as it is used to counter the Hindenburg objection when discussing hydrogen's potential as a fuel) is that the hydrogen was incidental to the fire, and that it was the cover and not the hydrogen which was the fire's primary accelerant.
Bain tried to claim that the Hindenburg would have burnt just the same had it been filled with helium, and therefore hydrogen was not to blame for the Hindenburg disaster. Of course, Bain's claims seem to have changed as more and more of his theory was debunked (last I heard he was apparently claiming that it was engine exhaust which somehow wafted up to the top of the ship and caused the fire, so consider the source here) but when his theory was still new and unchallenged, he was trying to say that the outer cover was SO flammable that an airship filled with non-flammable helium would have burned exactly the way the Hindenburg burned. Hence, the inevitable conclusion would go, hydrogen is safe to use as a fuel.
Now, I believe hydrogen IS safe to use as a fuel, at least given the fact that we regularly use a combustible fuel like gasoline and consider it safe. Don't misunderstand me... I am a big proponent of the development of alternative fuel sources. I'm not arguing against Bain's theory for the sake of attacking alternative fuels.
However... Dessler, Overs, and Appleby have proven (by an easily replicated burn test) that the Hindenburg's outer cover, on its own, would have taken 40 hours to burn. A helium airship with this same covering under the same conditions would NOT have burned in 32-34 seconds as the Hindenburg did.
Could the outer cover have been the initial source of a small, slow-burning fire that ignited the ship's hydrogen and led to the disaster? Possibly. However, I have yet to see Bain actually replicate the ignition of the cover using the same static discharge that would have been present atop the Hindenburg. In various documentaries on the matter, I've seen him light fabric samples using an open flame, and using a high-voltage charge from a Jacob's Ladder, neither of which are remotely the same thing as the type of static discharge that would have ignited the Hindenburg.
A far more likely possibility as far as the fabric helping to generate a static discharge that would have ignited the hydrogen is this: The outer cover was isolated from the ship's framework by wooden shims up to a centimeter thick which had been glued along the longitudinal frames in a number of places (especially in the stern of the ship) to help tighten the outer cover (which was noted to be unusually loose during the ship's early flights.) Now you've got a gap between cover and framework across which static can arc, and in which loose hydrogen could easily be present if we're talking about the very top longitudinal girders atop the ship.
And this really comes back to the theory that Dr. Eckener had in 1937, and which he held for the rest of his life... free hydrogen was ignited by a spark between the outer cover and the ship's framework.
But again, either way, it was the hydrogen which was the real problem there. Had the Hindenburg been filled with helium, it simply would not have burned the way it did, even if the cover HAD somehow started on fire atop the ship. They'd have had plenty of time to get the ship landed and the passengers disembarked, and then you'd have probably seen riggers and mechanics climbing up inside the hull with fire extinguishers to douse the fire. The ship wouldn't have sailed back to Germany that night as intended, of course, but they'd have almost certainly saved it and repaired it.
And, of course, if the Hindenburg fire wasn't anything to do with any cover fire, if the whole thing was just as Eckener theorized, free hydrogen being ignited d
"Glow" compared to "reflection"... I see no facts but mere opinions that try to judge what one thinks even though there is no scientific proof that one can read minds especially long after death.
It's called reading for context, as opposed to simply taking one sentence or sentence fragment and interpreting it in whichever way you want to. Even reading Lau's unedited testimony by itself (though the same use of "reflection" in the context of "glow" occurs in other people's testimonies as well), the context quickly becomes clear, and he is absolutely NOT talking about a literal "reflection". He repeatedly, throughout the rest of his testimony, comes back to the fact that he saw actual fire, which spread out from the first point at which he'd seen it.
I will gladly cut and paste the entire transcript here if you like, though I don't think a lot of folks would appreciate my dumping 14 pages of text on them. Here is the section, however, where Lau describes the genesis of the fire. He's standing on a narrow catwalk along the port side of the lower fin about ten feet from the bottom edge, he's just helped a crewman in the hull above unhook a rope that had jammed between two wires, and he's looking up and to port to make sure that the rope is running clear...
I heard over me a muffled detonation and looked up and saw from the starboard side down inside the gas cell a bright reflection on the front bulkhead of cell No. 4. The gas cell was approximately at the line that I have indicated on Exhibit 10.
I therefore could see from there to the point that I am indicating. I could see from my position at this point to approximately the position indicated. Here and here I saw no fire at first. I saw it on the front side of cell 4. The bright reflection in the cell was inside. I saw it through the cell. It was at first red and yellow and there was smoke in it. The cell did not burst on the lower side. The cell suddenly disappeared by the heat.
The fire proceeded further down and then it got air. The flame became very bright and the fire rose up to the side, more to the starboard side, as I remember seeing it, and I saw that with the flame aluminum parts and fabric parts were thrown up.
In that same moment the forward cell and the back cell of cell 4 also caught fire, cell 3 and cell 5. At that time parts of girders, molten aluminum and fabric parts started to tumble down from the top. The whole thing only lasted a fraction of a second.
And then a little further on, as Lau is marking up a diagram of the ship to illustrate what he saw...
I could see the angle which I am marking on the plan. This was the angle of sight which I had at the time when the explosion occurred above my head. The first fire I saw in cell No. 4 towards the front bulkhead of the cell, inside the cell.
And still further along as he continues to mark up the diagram...
Q: Would you indicate the smallest part of a fire that you saw and its exact location, the very smallest part? Do that with a red pencil.
A: I did not see the absolute center of origin of the fire, because it must have been further up, since I saw the reflection of the fire through the cell wall.
Q: Show the point with a red pencil where you first saw the reflection.
A: Approximately where I have now indicated on this plan. It was further up at first, but then it came down.
And again...
Q: Will you take the red pencil and on the stern view of the ship place the location of the fire?
A: I first need a black pencil to show the location of the cell. The cell was approximately at the line that I have just indicated. The red reflection which I saw first must have come down approximately as I am indicating with the red pencil. The first moment I saw it, rushing out to the top, was here where I have ind
That's a very good summation of Addison Bain's Incendiary Paint Theory, but the fact of the matter is that theory has been thoroughly debunked.
The combined work of Professor Alexander Dessler, Donald Overs, and William Appleby (which can be viewed at http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/zf/LZ129fire.ht m ) has shone light into the many holes in the Bain theory, not the least of which is the fact that the cover of the Hindenburg burned far, far too slowly to have been the primary accelerant in the fire.
Having done many years of historical research into the Hindenburg disaster, I can say without reservation that Addison Bain was very selective in the evidence that he chose to use to support his theory. He used portions of eyewitness testimony, for example, from a Hindenburg crewman named Helmut Lau who was in the lower fin looking up when the fire broke out.
To read Bain's take on Lau's subsequent testimony to the Board of Inquiry, Lau saw above and in front of him the reflection of a fire that was burning aft of his position (since Bain's theory maintains that the fire originated aft of the fins on the starboard side of the tail cone where, conveniently, no cameras happened to be pointed.)
However, having read the full, unedited version of Lau's BOI testimony, I can tell you that Lau was very clear about the fact that the fire that he saw was forward and above his position, up between gas cells 4 and 5. He reiterated this point several times in his testimony.
What Bain did was to seize upon the word "reflection" in the transcript and use it as evidence that the fire was somewhere behind Lau. The problem with that, of course, is that the word "reflection" was used numerous times throughout the investigation by the German translators in a context which indicates that they meant "glow". Not just in Lau's testimony, but in the testimony of others too. Remember, few of the Hindenburg crew spoke enough English to testify in English. Virtually all of the English transcripts were of the words of the translators and not of the crew members themselves.
But since these testimony transcripts (Lau's included) have yet to ever be published in full, they have been read and examined in their unedited state by only a comparative handful of researchers. Those who initially flogged the sabotage theory several decades ago made their case by selectively quoting Lau's testimony, and unfortunately Addison Bain did the exact same thing in support of his own theory.
Another bit of "evidence" to which Bain pointed was the fact that the forward section of the Hindenburg "bounced" when it first leveled out on the ground. Bain's contention is that this proved that the hydrogen in the forward section had not yet burned, because why else would the ship rebound into the air?
The fact of the matter is, when you read the testimonies of the various members of the command crew, you see that many of them (including the senior officers aboard) waited at the windows of the control car until the ship had rebounded into the air before they jumped. In other words, it seems very clear that they EXPECTED the ship to bounce back some distance off of its landing wheel, or else they all would have leapt clear of the ship on its initial descent, because absent the expectation of the ship rebounding they would have assumed that the framework would collapse over the control car and trap them.
But again, that doesn't support the theory that Bain was trying to put forth, and so this fact is conveniently left out.
The fact is, the Hindenburg burned from the inside out, and not from the outside in. Two of the three surviving crewmen from the bow section subsequently stated that they felt the ship shake violently, and then looked above them and saw fire propagating forward along the axial girder that tunneled through the middle of the gas cells a split second BEFORE they felt the stern of the ship f
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Actually there was an implosion at the very outset of the fire. This can clearly be seen in the initial fire photo where the Hindenburg appears to be on an even keel. The framework and outer cover are collapsed very visibly inward from the stern to a point almost amidships.
Also, the burn rate of the entire ship (32-34 seconds) was entirely consistent with every description of a hydrogen airship fire I've ever read. When the British R-101 crashed and caught fire in France in 1930, the ship burned in roughly the same amount of time that the Hindenburg burned... the few survivors aboard had time to realize what was happening, but barely enough time to escape, as was the case with the Hindenburg. World War I zeppelins, when shot down, would hang there briefly as the fire took hold, and then they'd be fireballs in the sky within half a minute or so. And this was, of course, without being painted with the specific doping compound that covered the Hindenburg.
Also, you ask why the hydrogen didn't simply ignite all at once in the Hindenburg. "What slowed it down"? Simple... the hydrogen in the Hindenburg was contained in sixteen separate gas cells. The hydrogen didn't all roam free inside the outer cover as it would in a balloon or a blimp. It was essentially a duralumin cage with 16 balloons inside it, each in their own separate bay. While a rigid airship like the Hindenburg would burn very quickly (again, half a minute is pretty consistent) it was still a progressive burning. The Germans kept their hydrogen at the highest purity level possible (as close to 98% as they could manage) which further explains why the hydrogen in the Hindenburg didn't all immediately and violently ignite.
And that's another thing... the Hindenburg did not "explode". It burned. The purity level in the ship's gas cells was entirely too high for them to literally "explode".
Helmut Lau, in the few seconds he watched the early stages of the fire, saw exactly the progressive burning process that one would expect. He initially saw fire at a point above and forward of his position, partway up the front side of cell 4 and, of course, from his vantage point he was looking at the BOTTOM of cell 4 from below and aft, so he saw the glow of the fire through the gas cell material itself ("at first red and yellow and there was smoke in it" as Lau stated) Then cell 4 was quickly consumed by fire and as this occurred Lau saw cells 3 and 5 (those immediately aft and immediately forward of cell 4) ignite before he ducked for cover at the bottom of the lower fin.
No, the hydrogen didn't all ignite simultaneously because the way the ship was designed it simply wouldn't have.
You seem to be suggesting that the hydrogen inside the ship reacted with the paint outside the ship and this somehow excited the hydrogen so that it became flammable. Am I reading you correctly? Not that the contact between the paint and the hydrogen directly started the fire, but that the contact between them excited the hydrogen molecules? You're introducing an unnecessary step here... loose hydrogen that's leaked from the gas cells would immediately mix with oxygen from the air within the ship, and be highly flammable almost immediately. No catalyst effect was needed.
You then further state that "once the hydrogen is excited enough, a spark could happen anywhere inside." This is not entirely true. Static discharge from outside the
Ah, but the whole basis of Bain's theory (especially as it is used to counter the Hindenburg objection when discussing hydrogen's potential as a fuel) is that the hydrogen was incidental to the fire, and that it was the cover and not the hydrogen which was the fire's primary accelerant.
Bain tried to claim that the Hindenburg would have burnt just the same had it been filled with helium, and therefore hydrogen was not to blame for the Hindenburg disaster. Of course, Bain's claims seem to have changed as more and more of his theory was debunked (last I heard he was apparently claiming that it was engine exhaust which somehow wafted up to the top of the ship and caused the fire, so consider the source here) but when his theory was still new and unchallenged, he was trying to say that the outer cover was SO flammable that an airship filled with non-flammable helium would have burned exactly the way the Hindenburg burned. Hence, the inevitable conclusion would go, hydrogen is safe to use as a fuel.
Now, I believe hydrogen IS safe to use as a fuel, at least given the fact that we regularly use a combustible fuel like gasoline and consider it safe. Don't misunderstand me... I am a big proponent of the development of alternative fuel sources. I'm not arguing against Bain's theory for the sake of attacking alternative fuels.
However... Dessler, Overs, and Appleby have proven (by an easily replicated burn test) that the Hindenburg's outer cover, on its own, would have taken 40 hours to burn. A helium airship with this same covering under the same conditions would NOT have burned in 32-34 seconds as the Hindenburg did.
Could the outer cover have been the initial source of a small, slow-burning fire that ignited the ship's hydrogen and led to the disaster? Possibly. However, I have yet to see Bain actually replicate the ignition of the cover using the same static discharge that would have been present atop the Hindenburg. In various documentaries on the matter, I've seen him light fabric samples using an open flame, and using a high-voltage charge from a Jacob's Ladder, neither of which are remotely the same thing as the type of static discharge that would have ignited the Hindenburg.
A far more likely possibility as far as the fabric helping to generate a static discharge that would have ignited the hydrogen is this: The outer cover was isolated from the ship's framework by wooden shims up to a centimeter thick which had been glued along the longitudinal frames in a number of places (especially in the stern of the ship) to help tighten the outer cover (which was noted to be unusually loose during the ship's early flights.) Now you've got a gap between cover and framework across which static can arc, and in which loose hydrogen could easily be present if we're talking about the very top longitudinal girders atop the ship.
And this really comes back to the theory that Dr. Eckener had in 1937, and which he held for the rest of his life... free hydrogen was ignited by a spark between the outer cover and the ship's framework.
But again, either way, it was the hydrogen which was the real problem there. Had the Hindenburg been filled with helium, it simply would not have burned the way it did, even if the cover HAD somehow started on fire atop the ship. They'd have had plenty of time to get the ship landed and the passengers disembarked, and then you'd have probably seen riggers and mechanics climbing up inside the hull with fire extinguishers to douse the fire. The ship wouldn't have sailed back to Germany that night as intended, of course, but they'd have almost certainly saved it and repaired it.
And, of course, if the Hindenburg fire wasn't anything to do with any cover fire, if the whole thing was just as Eckener theorized, free hydrogen being ignited d
It's called reading for context, as opposed to simply taking one sentence or sentence fragment and interpreting it in whichever way you want to. Even reading Lau's unedited testimony by itself (though the same use of "reflection" in the context of "glow" occurs in other people's testimonies as well), the context quickly becomes clear, and he is absolutely NOT talking about a literal "reflection". He repeatedly, throughout the rest of his testimony, comes back to the fact that he saw actual fire, which spread out from the first point at which he'd seen it.
I will gladly cut and paste the entire transcript here if you like, though I don't think a lot of folks would appreciate my dumping 14 pages of text on them. Here is the section, however, where Lau describes the genesis of the fire. He's standing on a narrow catwalk along the port side of the lower fin about ten feet from the bottom edge, he's just helped a crewman in the hull above unhook a rope that had jammed between two wires, and he's looking up and to port to make sure that the rope is running clear...
And then a little further on, as Lau is marking up a diagram of the ship to illustrate what he saw...
And still further along as he continues to mark up the diagram...
And again...
The combined work of Professor Alexander Dessler, Donald Overs, and William Appleby (which can be viewed at http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/zf/LZ129fire.ht m ) has shone light into the many holes in the Bain theory, not the least of which is the fact that the cover of the Hindenburg burned far, far too slowly to have been the primary accelerant in the fire.
Having done many years of historical research into the Hindenburg disaster, I can say without reservation that Addison Bain was very selective in the evidence that he chose to use to support his theory. He used portions of eyewitness testimony, for example, from a Hindenburg crewman named Helmut Lau who was in the lower fin looking up when the fire broke out.
To read Bain's take on Lau's subsequent testimony to the Board of Inquiry, Lau saw above and in front of him the reflection of a fire that was burning aft of his position (since Bain's theory maintains that the fire originated aft of the fins on the starboard side of the tail cone where, conveniently, no cameras happened to be pointed.)
However, having read the full, unedited version of Lau's BOI testimony, I can tell you that Lau was very clear about the fact that the fire that he saw was forward and above his position, up between gas cells 4 and 5. He reiterated this point several times in his testimony.
What Bain did was to seize upon the word "reflection" in the transcript and use it as evidence that the fire was somewhere behind Lau. The problem with that, of course, is that the word "reflection" was used numerous times throughout the investigation by the German translators in a context which indicates that they meant "glow". Not just in Lau's testimony, but in the testimony of others too. Remember, few of the Hindenburg crew spoke enough English to testify in English. Virtually all of the English transcripts were of the words of the translators and not of the crew members themselves.
But since these testimony transcripts (Lau's included) have yet to ever be published in full, they have been read and examined in their unedited state by only a comparative handful of researchers. Those who initially flogged the sabotage theory several decades ago made their case by selectively quoting Lau's testimony, and unfortunately Addison Bain did the exact same thing in support of his own theory.
Another bit of "evidence" to which Bain pointed was the fact that the forward section of the Hindenburg "bounced" when it first leveled out on the ground. Bain's contention is that this proved that the hydrogen in the forward section had not yet burned, because why else would the ship rebound into the air?
The fact of the matter is, when you read the testimonies of the various members of the command crew, you see that many of them (including the senior officers aboard) waited at the windows of the control car until the ship had rebounded into the air before they jumped. In other words, it seems very clear that they EXPECTED the ship to bounce back some distance off of its landing wheel, or else they all would have leapt clear of the ship on its initial descent, because absent the expectation of the ship rebounding they would have assumed that the framework would collapse over the control car and trap them.
But again, that doesn't support the theory that Bain was trying to put forth, and so this fact is conveniently left out.
The fact is, the Hindenburg burned from the inside out, and not from the outside in. Two of the three surviving crewmen from the bow section subsequently stated that they felt the ship shake violently, and then looked above them and saw fire propagating forward along the axial girder that tunneled through the middle of the gas cells a split second BEFORE they felt the stern of the ship f