Early Balloons and Airships
The History and Legacy of Dirigibles Before the Invention of Airplanes
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Narrated by:
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David Bernard
About this listen
The Wright Brothers initially underestimated the difficulties involved in flying, and they were apparently surprised by the fact that so many others were working on solving the "problem of human flight" already. Decades before their own historic plane would end up in the National Air & Space Museum, Wilbur and Orville asked the Smithsonian for reading materials and brushed up on everything from the works of their contemporaries to Leonardo Da Vinci. Undeterred by the work, and the fact that several would-be pioneers died in crashes trying to control gliders, the Wright Brothers tested out gliding at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina for several years, working to perfect pilot control before trying powered flight.
In December 1903, the brothers had done enough scientific work with concepts like lift to help their aeronautical designs, and they had the technical know-how to work with engines. On December 17, the brothers took turns making history’s first successful powered flights. The fourth and final flight lasted nearly a minute and covered nearly 900 feet. The Wright Flyer I had just made history, and minutes later it would be permanently damaged after wind gusts tipped it over; it would never fly again.
A decade later, aircraft appeared in the skies over the battlefields of World War I, but they did not represent a complete novelty in warfare either, at least not during the early months of World War I. While airplanes had never before appeared above the field of war, other aerial vehicles had already been in use for decades, and balloons had carried soldiers above the landscape for centuries to provide a high observation point superior to most geological features. The French used a balloon for this purpose at the Battle of Fleurus in 1794, and by the American Civil War, military hydrogen balloons saw frequent use, filled from wagons generating hydrogen from iron filings and sulfuric acid. The balloonist Thaddeus Lowe persuaded President Abraham Lincoln to use the airships for observation, communicating troop movements to the ground with a telegraph wire. Lowe himself reported, "A hawk hovering above a chicken yard could not have caused more commotion than did my balloons when they appeared before Yorktown." (Holmes, 2013, 251). The Confederates agreed with this assessment: "At Yorktown, when almost daily ascensions were made, our camp, batteries, field works and all defenses were plain to the vision of the occupants of the balloons. [...] The balloon ascensions excited us more than all the outpost attacks."
Indeed, with advances in dirigible technology, many military thinkers and even aeronautical enthusiasts believed that blimps would remain the chief military aerial asset more or less forever. These men thought airplanes would play a secondary role at best, and that they might even prove a uselessly expensive gimmick soon to fade back into obscurity, leaving the majestic bulk of the dirigible as sole master of the skies.
Early Balloons and Airships: The History of the City’s Underground Ossuaries and Burial Network looks at the development of the first balloons and airships, and how they were primarily used. You will learn about the first airships like never before.
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By: Dan Hampton
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Marked for Death
- The First War in the Air
- By: James Hamilton-Paterson
- Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Little more than 10 years after the first powered flight, aircraft were pressed into service in World War I. Nearly forgotten in the war's massive overall death toll, some 50,000 aircrew would die in the combatant nations' fledgling air forces. The romance of aviation had a remarkable grip on the public imagination, propaganda focusing on gallant air "aces" who become national heroes. The reality was horribly different. Marked for Death debunks popular myth to explore the brutal truths of wartime aviation.
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Excellent
- By Amazon Customer on 08-20-16
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The Perfectionists
- How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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The New York Times best-selling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement - precision - in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future.
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Somewhat less than perfect
- By enya keshet on 06-19-18
By: Simon Winchester
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Pacific
- Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 14 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling author Simon Winchester offers an enthralling biography of the Pacific Ocean and its role in the modern world, exploring our relationship with this imposing force of nature. Winchester's personal experience is vast and his storytelling second to none. And his historical understanding of the region is formidable, making Pacific a paean to this magnificent sea of beauty, myth, and imagination that is transforming our lives.
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Political Asides Have Become Bombastic Didactic
- By Mark Patterson on 12-25-15
By: Simon Winchester
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The Great Air Race
- Death, Glory, and the Dawn of American Aviation
- By: John Lancaster
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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The incredible, untold story of the men who risked their lives in the first transcontinental air contest—and put American aviation on the map.
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Very entertaining/informative book
- By D. Littman on 12-09-22
By: John Lancaster
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China Clipper: The Age of the Great Flying Boats
- By: Robert Gandt
- Narrated by: Thomas Block
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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When the China Clipper shattered aviation records on its maiden six-day flight from California to the Orient in 1935, the flying boat became an instant celebrity. This lively history by Robert Gandt traces the development of the great flying boats as both a triumph of technology and a stirring human drama. He examines the political, military, and economic forces that drove its development and explains the aeronautical advances that made the aircraft possible.
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Never been this disappointed
- By doug reiter on 08-09-21
By: Robert Gandt
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Tiny Blunders/Big Disasters
- Thirty-Nine Tiny Mistakes That Changed the World Forever
- By: Jared Knott
- Narrated by: Stephen Bowlby
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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How often does a single tiny mistake cause an entire civilization to collapse? More often than you think! Listeners of Jared Knott’s book Tiny Blunders/Big Disasters will be amazed at the little things that changed history in a big way.
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Very, very interesting facts
- By dexter on 11-02-21
By: Jared Knott
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The Dawn of Innovation
- The First American Industrial Revolution
- By: Charles R. Morris
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 30 years after the Civil War, the United States blew by Great Britain to become the greatest economic power in world history. That is a well-known period in history, when titans like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan walked the earth. But as Charles R. Morris shows us, the platform for that spectacular growth spurt was built in the first half of the century. By the 1820s, America was already the world's most productive manufacturer and the most intensely commercialized society in history.
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How our industries started
- By Jean on 02-22-13
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Firestorm
- Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden
- By: Marshall De Bruhl
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 13 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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On February 13 and 14, 1945, three successive waves of British and U.S. aircraft rained down thousands of tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on the largely undefended German city of Dresden. Night and day, Dresden was engulfed in a vast sea of flame, a firestorm that generated 1,500-degree temperatures and hurricane-force winds. Thousands suffocated in underground shelters where they had fled to escape the inferno above.
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slanted view of air attacks during war
- By Ed Yusis on 03-31-14
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N-4 Down
- The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia
- By: Mark Piesing
- Narrated by: Matt Jamie
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Triumphantly returning from the North Pole on May 24, 1928, the world-famous exploring airship Italia — code-named N-4 — was struck by a terrible storm and crashed somewhere over the Arctic ice, triggering the largest polar rescue mission in history. Helping lead the search was Roald Amundsen, the poles’ greatest explorer, who himself soon went missing in the frozen wastes. Amundsen’s body has never been found, the last victim of one of the Arctic’s most enduring mysteries....
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Interesting and entertaining
- By 2451 on 09-01-21
By: Mark Piesing
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Blackett's War
- The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare
- By: Stephen Budiansky
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In March 1941, after a year of unbroken and devastating U-boat onslaughts, the British War Cabinet decided to try a new strategy in the foundering naval campaign. To do so, they hired an intensely private, bohemian physicist who was also an ardent socialist. Patrick Blackett was a former navy officer and future winner of the Nobel Prize; he is little remembered today, but he and his fellow scientists did as much to win the war against Nazi Germany as almost anyone else.
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First time science used to fight a war
- By Jean on 08-20-14
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The Bomber Mafia
- A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
- By: Malcolm Gladwell
- Narrated by: Malcolm Gladwell
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Malcolm Gladwell, author of New York Times best sellers including Talking to Strangers and host of the podcast Revisionist History, uses original interviews, archival footage, and his trademark insight to weave together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in Central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard. As listeners hear these stories unfurl, Gladwell examines one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.
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Listen to the same story on his podcast for free
- By Dustin on 04-28-21
By: Malcolm Gladwell
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Operation Chastise
- The RAF's Most Brilliant Attack of World War II
- By: Max Hastings
- Narrated by: Max Hastings, Peter Noble
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The attack on Nazi Germany’s dams on May 17, 1943, was one of the most remarkable feats in military history. The absurdly young men of the Royal Air Force’s 617 Squadron set forth in cold blood and darkness, without benefit of electronic aids, to fly lumbering heavy bombers straight and level towards a target at a height above the water less than the length of a bowling alley. Yet this story has never been told in full. Max Hastings takes us back to the May 1943 raid to reveal how the truth of that night is considerably different from the popularized account most people know.
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Wish He Had Stuck to the Core Story
- By John on 06-22-20
By: Max Hastings
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A Higher Form of Killing
- Six Weeks in World War I That Forever Changed the Nature of Warfare
- By: Diana Preston
- Narrated by: Christine Williams
- Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In six weeks during April and May 1915, as World War I escalated, Germany forever altered the way war would be fought. On April 22, at Ypres, German canisters spewed poison gas at French and Canadian soldiers in their trenches; on May 7, the German submarine U-20, without warning, torpedoed the passenger liner Lusitania, killing 1,198 civilians; and on May 31, a German Zeppelin began the first aerial bombardment of London and its inhabitants.
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Very Informative
- By Anonymous User on 05-24-23
By: Diana Preston