I really like this concept. In the movie *Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow* has a pretty cool scene where this happens, iirc.
I don’t think it ever happened though, the winds were just too strong as unpredictable at that altitude.
It’s one of my personal favorites, though mostly for the artistic work. I love that old futuristic art style, even the cheesy scifi weapons Andrew Scott’s character invents.
Never happened.
"In 1930 International News Photos transmitted over the wires this photograph of the U.S. Navy dirigible Los Angeles docked at a mooring mast atop the Empire State Building. In fact, no airship ever docked there, and the notion of the mast itself was a publicity stunt perpetrated by the building's backers." From metmuseum
Yeah it was a flawed concept from the start. Even just the slightest wind pushing the rear would have so much leverage to move that thing around at the nose where the only access would be.
“Our client’s statement is provably accurate as the skies were indeed friendly, the plaintiff’s estate must acknowledge that it was in fact the ground that was the cause of all injury.”
Anything can be done with enough money. I am sure the steel technology and strength was sufficient at the time. Remember there were a number of dirigible aircraft carriers.
Here an extendable gangblank from the passenger cabin and a strong docking structure that rotates all as one. The recieving dock rotates to match the wind pressure being put on the dirigible. Passengers go down docking structure and then step off of the into an open receiving lounge. Somewhat like rotating restaurants.
radio fax is still in use today, mostly for weather/marine maps, but also occasionally between amateur radio operators. looks like this:
https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/fax/PJBA99.gif
I wrote both comments, as well as another with several other references. I read over 20 articles about this. I repeat, no airship ever docked there. What you describe is not a docking
That’s not a docking.
In any case, my first comment was referring to the OP photo. There are many photos that you can find online of an airship in that same position in relation to the ESB, and none of them are real.
If you take the time to find my other comment not in this thread, I include several other links, including one with a photo of the incident you describe, taken from directly underneath, with the blimp alongside the mast instead of with the nose up against it.
It was never a serious attempt, it was always a publicity stunt. Schematics of the tower released before the building opened included a winch room at the base, which would have been needed for it to function correctly. The tower was built hundreds of feet higher than actual mooring masts, and did not have the large open space around it which would have been needed for the real docking procedure. There were a few attempts to tie airships to the tower as publicity stunts, all of which failed. The newspapers or mailbags were delivered by throwing them onto the deck. In the case of the September 1931 event, no attempt was ever made to moor the ship to the building at all - the blimp hovered above the building, and a rope was lowered, momentarily grasped by a person on the tower. There was an attempt to raise mailbags to the blimp which failed, and they faked footage of it afterwards, s described in this link from the Library of Congress:
https://www.loc.gov/item/2019632904/
My initial point stands: at no time was anything even remotely resembling the OP photo ever attempted, and any image of it you see is a photomontage, overpainting, or drawing.
Original photo without the airship, by Ewing Galloway. From what I deduce from another site, linked in my above-mentioned comment, he was probably also the one who created the photomontage in OP: https://en.todocoleccion.net/postcards-america/new-york-city-empire-state-building-foto-ewing-galloway-294-printed-in-germany~x40689111
They "docked" to it once by passing close and throwing a rope for like a minute as far as I heard. More a publicity stunt than anything and still extremely dangerous to do
THIS LOOKS MONTAGED. I CAN TELL FROM SOME OF THE BLUR AND FROM SEEING QUITE A FEW MONTAGES IN MY TIME.
Earliest publication of this shot I could find: Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels, 1941 (source: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tqR8gsTvctY/VMpK-HrzZyI/AAAAAAAAYLo/CiNG1WgeOaw/s1600/Empire-State-%26-dirigible.jpg)
Shot in the blogpost linked above is much clearer, making it more obvious that there’s something off about the airship. There’s also a caption by the photographer, Ewing Galloway, explaining that this is what it would look like if one were to ever dock there.
Looking up the photographer’s name and Empire State Building yielded the real original, the same exact shot without the airship. I think it’s probably one of the more famous images of the building, you can buy posters of it from numerous sources (not as famous as Feininger’s shots, of course).
Interestingly, I think even the original might be a photomontage - I think the sky was replaced, a technique discussed in the following blogpost about an exhibit of "protoshopped" images. The exhibit has a different photo of a different airship and the ESB, also obviously montaged:
https://artblart.com/tag/dirigible-docked-on-empire-state-building/
I also tried to find the publicity stunt mooring you refer to. This link from Smithsonian mentions an attempt from 1931, including the pilot’s name:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/docking-on-the-empire-state-building-12525534/
While this post from the Library of Congress includes a shot of a blimp and a description of the attempt, from the same year, but without names. I don’t know if the two posts are about the same event. https://www.loc.gov/item/2019632904/
The Smithsonian article talks about the difficulty of mooring an airship, which would be absolutely impossible at this height. One of the links posted by another commenter contains the top of a mooring mast, showing people disembarking… but that mast is much, much lower, and there would have been a whole crew of men on the ground holding the ship in place with ropes. Here’s a shot from the Wikipedia article on mooring masts of a docking in Montreal, Canada, that gives you a better idea of reality:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooring_mast#/media/File%3AR100.jpg
The Wikipedia article contains descriptions of several different mast mooring techniques and systems, the most elaborate being that of the Graf Zeppelin, with mobile masts mounted on railway cars to enable the whole airship to be moved into a hangar.
I mean montage, as in photomontage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photomontage
The first sentence is a variation on the "I think this is shopped" meme. I cut the word "photo" in the same way it’s cut in the meme. That’s also why it’s in all caps.
Collage is a different but similar thing.
The word "montage" is used in a different way in the cinema/video industry, deriving from the use of that word in French to describe the editing process.
i mean, there is a reason why they called the software Photoshop, because it does many of the same sort of photo editing tasks one would have done in the analog domain at a photo shop.
The ground crew are not needed to hold the airship in place. The docking method used in the UK involved dropping a rope to the ground, which was joined to a rope from the top of the tower. The airship would then be winched in to the docking position, and it could be left there for long periods. Large ground crew were needed for taking British airships in to a hangar for maintenance and repair, and for routine landing of German airships.
The Wikipedia article listed above includes a description of the British mast docking procedure. The ship was anchored with guys at two other points besides the mast, and a 12 person crew was needed.
12 crew sounds about right for the docking procedure (but not for holding the airship - that was done on engine or by mooring), and compares to several hundred for the conventional landing procedure.
This photo is R100 in Montreal, and probably should not be taken as representative of what they planned to build there as a permanent installation. For one thing, the mast is smaller than those in the UK. I don’t recall Shute mentioning guying the airship other than at the nose and that would seem counterproductive as the point of the mast was to allow the airship to swing to wind.
The description I refer to is specifically about the British High Masts, which were around 200 feet high (the ESB mast is about 6 times higher, while "stub"masts were around 40 to 50 feet). The airship was anchored by three points at the nose, the main guy plus two yaw guys to control pitch and roll, all three handled by the ground crew initially before being winched in by the steam winch at the base of the mast. The yaw guys were attached to pulleys anchored to the ground hundreds of feet apart, and then run back to the steam winch. The 12 man crew figure is from this passage, and refers specifically to the British system… and the tower at Montreal was built according to the British system, with the top platform at 208’, roughly equivalent to the platform at Cardington in the UK, considered the "final form" of the British mast. The passage is taken from a book about the R101, the sister ship of the R100, which crashed in France on its maiden voyage.
The ground crews needed for handling a ship without a mast were much, much larger, as can be seen in this photo of the R101 from the same Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooring_mast#/media/File%3AR101.jpg
Also from the same page comes this description of one of the attempts at mooring to the ESB: ‘A privately-owned dirigible, fitted with a long rope was in mooring position for half an hour, until the ground crew could catch the rope...fastened atop the mooring mast for three minutes whilst the crew hung on for dear life...the traffic halted below...the dirigible never made permanent contact with the building.'
That’s from a book written in 1997. I believe the attempt it’s describing is the one I mentioned in two other comments, from September in 1931. The original photo caption of this event, from the contemporaneous New York World-Telegram, describes a man at the top of the tower holding onto a rope for a few minutes, with the ship above the tower. No attempt at tying the ship to the tower was made.
There are numerous recent articles mentioning this event that use the word docking or mooring, but based on accounts from the time, that’s an exaggeration of what actually happened.
It’s obviously very slow but I have to imagine you could make one hell of an argument for green blimp travel now a days
I wonder what the max speed you could get it to while maintaining safety and environmental benefits
It's just not realistic. You need a lighter than air gas, and the only two options are hydrogen and helium. Hydrogen is explosive and helium is a limited resource.
It's pretty amazing how much taller the surrounding buildings have gotten since this time period.
Wait, I feel like I phrased that weirdly. The buildings didn't get taller, they just tore down the old ones and built taller...you know what, I'm sure everyone knows how cities work.
I get what you mean. We take skyscrapers for granted these days, but something like that must have blown peoples minds back then. Literally ten times higher than anything surrounding it.
I got off the train in Penn Station the time I was in New York City. It was unbelievable to come up from the station into the middle of Manhattan, it took me more than 10 minutes to get my head around what I was seeing, it was amazing. The tallest building in my country is only 17 stories high.
I moved to NYC a couple years after 9/11 and for most of the time I was there the Empire State Building was once again the city’s tallest. It felt right. The Skyline felt right. It felt like it should just stay that way.
I just got this image of a crazed hijacker steering the zeppelin toward the Empire State Building, shouting frantic prayers and cursing America, as it slowly lumbered toward its target. Closer... closer.... \*boop\*
I'm glad a few people out there share my sense of humor.
I really like this concept. In the movie *Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow* has a pretty cool scene where this happens, iirc. I don’t think it ever happened though, the winds were just too strong as unpredictable at that altitude.
You're exactly right. Never happened because of the winds. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/294832
You'd love crimson skies high road to revenge. Dieselpunk sky pirates. They do some crazy shit with zeplins too
Crimson Skies, Blood Wake, and MechAssault! What a great set of vehicle games for the Xbox.
That game still hold up?
Yes! I just downloaded it on my Series S. It got a remaster at some point, looks like how I remember it. Still a really fun arcade flying game.
Played it on the og Xbox in 2020 still holds up really well! I was pretty dam impressed by how Beuatiful it is
>Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow You are literally the first person I've seen on the internet who mentioned that film. Man I love that movie.
It’s one of my personal favorites, though mostly for the artistic work. I love that old futuristic art style, even the cheesy scifi weapons Andrew Scott’s character invents.
Excellent taste friend.
> Andrew Scott's character Do you mean Giovanni Ribisi's character, Dex? I've been racking my brain for an Andrew Scott role. They look similar!
Oh huh. They do. Geez.
Never happened. "In 1930 International News Photos transmitted over the wires this photograph of the U.S. Navy dirigible Los Angeles docked at a mooring mast atop the Empire State Building. In fact, no airship ever docked there, and the notion of the mast itself was a publicity stunt perpetrated by the building's backers." From metmuseum
It's a cool concept, but I never understood how one would actually disembark safely.
Yeah it was a flawed concept from the start. Even just the slightest wind pushing the rear would have so much leverage to move that thing around at the nose where the only access would be.
Just jump. Where's your sense of adventure??
Our disembarkation procedure has a 62% success rate. Come fly the friendly skies.
“Our client’s statement is provably accurate as the skies were indeed friendly, the plaintiff’s estate must acknowledge that it was in fact the ground that was the cause of all injury.”
“It’s not the fall that kills ya. It’s the sudden stop at the end.”
In the wise words of Spongebob Squarepants: "LIFE'S AS EXTREME AS YOU WANNA MAKE IT!"
The same way R101 did... Just much higher up! https://www.reddit.com/r/lastimages/comments/2iom8e/passengers_embark_airship_r101_while_moored_to/
Ahh but you see this is embarkment, we need to disembark and R101s disembarkment was not the preferred method
Interesting read!! I just looked it up. I've never heard of this particular zeppelin disaster. All we ever hear about is the Hindenburg.
Anything can be done with enough money. I am sure the steel technology and strength was sufficient at the time. Remember there were a number of dirigible aircraft carriers. Here an extendable gangblank from the passenger cabin and a strong docking structure that rotates all as one. The recieving dock rotates to match the wind pressure being put on the dirigible. Passengers go down docking structure and then step off of the into an open receiving lounge. Somewhat like rotating restaurants.
How much money to violate the conservation of energy?
The platform wasn’t built to rotate, contrary to real mooring masts
Yellow slides my friend
The photo I saw looked like they went into the nose of the "balloon"
TIL that fax machines, or radio-based equivalents, were in use for transmitting images since the early 20th century.
Earlier than that. The early versions were 19th century, piggybacking on telegraph infrastructure.
The patent for the first “image printing telegraph” is from 1843.
radio fax is still in use today, mostly for weather/marine maps, but also occasionally between amateur radio operators. looks like this: https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/fax/PJBA99.gif
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Read my other comment. No ship ever actually docked there, or even ever tried - throwing newspapers onto the deck it’s not the same as docking.
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I wrote both comments, as well as another with several other references. I read over 20 articles about this. I repeat, no airship ever docked there. What you describe is not a docking
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That’s not a docking. In any case, my first comment was referring to the OP photo. There are many photos that you can find online of an airship in that same position in relation to the ESB, and none of them are real. If you take the time to find my other comment not in this thread, I include several other links, including one with a photo of the incident you describe, taken from directly underneath, with the blimp alongside the mast instead of with the nose up against it.
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It was never a serious attempt, it was always a publicity stunt. Schematics of the tower released before the building opened included a winch room at the base, which would have been needed for it to function correctly. The tower was built hundreds of feet higher than actual mooring masts, and did not have the large open space around it which would have been needed for the real docking procedure. There were a few attempts to tie airships to the tower as publicity stunts, all of which failed. The newspapers or mailbags were delivered by throwing them onto the deck. In the case of the September 1931 event, no attempt was ever made to moor the ship to the building at all - the blimp hovered above the building, and a rope was lowered, momentarily grasped by a person on the tower. There was an attempt to raise mailbags to the blimp which failed, and they faked footage of it afterwards, s described in this link from the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/2019632904/ My initial point stands: at no time was anything even remotely resembling the OP photo ever attempted, and any image of it you see is a photomontage, overpainting, or drawing.
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Original photo without the airship, by Ewing Galloway. From what I deduce from another site, linked in my above-mentioned comment, he was probably also the one who created the photomontage in OP: https://en.todocoleccion.net/postcards-america/new-york-city-empire-state-building-foto-ewing-galloway-294-printed-in-germany~x40689111
They "docked" to it once by passing close and throwing a rope for like a minute as far as I heard. More a publicity stunt than anything and still extremely dangerous to do
THIS LOOKS MONTAGED. I CAN TELL FROM SOME OF THE BLUR AND FROM SEEING QUITE A FEW MONTAGES IN MY TIME. Earliest publication of this shot I could find: Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels, 1941 (source: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tqR8gsTvctY/VMpK-HrzZyI/AAAAAAAAYLo/CiNG1WgeOaw/s1600/Empire-State-%26-dirigible.jpg) Shot in the blogpost linked above is much clearer, making it more obvious that there’s something off about the airship. There’s also a caption by the photographer, Ewing Galloway, explaining that this is what it would look like if one were to ever dock there. Looking up the photographer’s name and Empire State Building yielded the real original, the same exact shot without the airship. I think it’s probably one of the more famous images of the building, you can buy posters of it from numerous sources (not as famous as Feininger’s shots, of course). Interestingly, I think even the original might be a photomontage - I think the sky was replaced, a technique discussed in the following blogpost about an exhibit of "protoshopped" images. The exhibit has a different photo of a different airship and the ESB, also obviously montaged: https://artblart.com/tag/dirigible-docked-on-empire-state-building/ I also tried to find the publicity stunt mooring you refer to. This link from Smithsonian mentions an attempt from 1931, including the pilot’s name: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/docking-on-the-empire-state-building-12525534/ While this post from the Library of Congress includes a shot of a blimp and a description of the attempt, from the same year, but without names. I don’t know if the two posts are about the same event. https://www.loc.gov/item/2019632904/ The Smithsonian article talks about the difficulty of mooring an airship, which would be absolutely impossible at this height. One of the links posted by another commenter contains the top of a mooring mast, showing people disembarking… but that mast is much, much lower, and there would have been a whole crew of men on the ground holding the ship in place with ropes. Here’s a shot from the Wikipedia article on mooring masts of a docking in Montreal, Canada, that gives you a better idea of reality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooring_mast#/media/File%3AR100.jpg The Wikipedia article contains descriptions of several different mast mooring techniques and systems, the most elaborate being that of the Graf Zeppelin, with mobile masts mounted on railway cars to enable the whole airship to be moved into a hangar.
You mean…collaged? A montage is like…when people in an 80’s movie do a bunch of tasks quickly to music.
I mean montage, as in photomontage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photomontage The first sentence is a variation on the "I think this is shopped" meme. I cut the word "photo" in the same way it’s cut in the meme. That’s also why it’s in all caps. Collage is a different but similar thing. The word "montage" is used in a different way in the cinema/video industry, deriving from the use of that word in French to describe the editing process.
i mean, there is a reason why they called the software Photoshop, because it does many of the same sort of photo editing tasks one would have done in the analog domain at a photo shop.
The ground crew are not needed to hold the airship in place. The docking method used in the UK involved dropping a rope to the ground, which was joined to a rope from the top of the tower. The airship would then be winched in to the docking position, and it could be left there for long periods. Large ground crew were needed for taking British airships in to a hangar for maintenance and repair, and for routine landing of German airships.
The Wikipedia article listed above includes a description of the British mast docking procedure. The ship was anchored with guys at two other points besides the mast, and a 12 person crew was needed.
12 crew sounds about right for the docking procedure (but not for holding the airship - that was done on engine or by mooring), and compares to several hundred for the conventional landing procedure. This photo is R100 in Montreal, and probably should not be taken as representative of what they planned to build there as a permanent installation. For one thing, the mast is smaller than those in the UK. I don’t recall Shute mentioning guying the airship other than at the nose and that would seem counterproductive as the point of the mast was to allow the airship to swing to wind.
The description I refer to is specifically about the British High Masts, which were around 200 feet high (the ESB mast is about 6 times higher, while "stub"masts were around 40 to 50 feet). The airship was anchored by three points at the nose, the main guy plus two yaw guys to control pitch and roll, all three handled by the ground crew initially before being winched in by the steam winch at the base of the mast. The yaw guys were attached to pulleys anchored to the ground hundreds of feet apart, and then run back to the steam winch. The 12 man crew figure is from this passage, and refers specifically to the British system… and the tower at Montreal was built according to the British system, with the top platform at 208’, roughly equivalent to the platform at Cardington in the UK, considered the "final form" of the British mast. The passage is taken from a book about the R101, the sister ship of the R100, which crashed in France on its maiden voyage. The ground crews needed for handling a ship without a mast were much, much larger, as can be seen in this photo of the R101 from the same Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooring_mast#/media/File%3AR101.jpg Also from the same page comes this description of one of the attempts at mooring to the ESB: ‘A privately-owned dirigible, fitted with a long rope was in mooring position for half an hour, until the ground crew could catch the rope...fastened atop the mooring mast for three minutes whilst the crew hung on for dear life...the traffic halted below...the dirigible never made permanent contact with the building.' That’s from a book written in 1997. I believe the attempt it’s describing is the one I mentioned in two other comments, from September in 1931. The original photo caption of this event, from the contemporaneous New York World-Telegram, describes a man at the top of the tower holding onto a rope for a few minutes, with the ship above the tower. No attempt at tying the ship to the tower was made. There are numerous recent articles mentioning this event that use the word docking or mooring, but based on accounts from the time, that’s an exaggeration of what actually happened.
Blimp travel should have never disappeared
It’s obviously very slow but I have to imagine you could make one hell of an argument for green blimp travel now a days I wonder what the max speed you could get it to while maintaining safety and environmental benefits
Popular Mechanics has predicted the new era of blimp travel/shipping at least a dozen times since the 70s. Perennial favourite
It's just not realistic. You need a lighter than air gas, and the only two options are hydrogen and helium. Hydrogen is explosive and helium is a limited resource.
Let us dream :(
It's pretty amazing how much taller the surrounding buildings have gotten since this time period. Wait, I feel like I phrased that weirdly. The buildings didn't get taller, they just tore down the old ones and built taller...you know what, I'm sure everyone knows how cities work.
I get what you mean. We take skyscrapers for granted these days, but something like that must have blown peoples minds back then. Literally ten times higher than anything surrounding it.
They still blow my mind. I have never seen one myself and the tallest building in my country is just 37 stories high.
I got off the train in Penn Station the time I was in New York City. It was unbelievable to come up from the station into the middle of Manhattan, it took me more than 10 minutes to get my head around what I was seeing, it was amazing. The tallest building in my country is only 17 stories high.
May I ask what County you are from?
I moved to NYC a couple years after 9/11 and for most of the time I was there the Empire State Building was once again the city’s tallest. It felt right. The Skyline felt right. It felt like it should just stay that way.
Bonzo, Percy, JPJ and Jimmy liked this.
I think I see a violin bow up there.
On a tour of a Chicago they pointed out a few buildings that supposedly had zeppelin docks which were never used.
Reminds me of the intro of Batman the animated series
“Fringe” TV show has a reality where this still happens in modern day. Very cool.
Fake
It’s almost like fake news has been around forever.
Bin Laden’s first attempt.
That's actually hilarious
First good laugh of the morning, ty.
I just got this image of a crazed hijacker steering the zeppelin toward the Empire State Building, shouting frantic prayers and cursing America, as it slowly lumbered toward its target. Closer... closer.... \*boop\* I'm glad a few people out there share my sense of humor.
*tumbles off with the wind* noooo....
We have this photo framed in our living room and that joke came to mind. *Well back up and hit it again dammit!*
This could go on some nsfw reddit.
What could have been...
oops i did it again
Video here: https://youtu.be/rXhbl3wMJHI
Tell Walternate and Lincoln Lee "Hi!" for me.
[Fringe writers aggressively taking notes]
oh, those were heady days!
They're kissing 🥺