U.
S.^NAVY;^ ACHIM
MENDE/^
ZEPPEL
IN^Hulking Airships Rise Again, Slowly
A WORLD IN A HURRY TURNS TO A LUMBERING EARLY 20TH-CENTURY TECHNOLOGY
FOR A LESSON IN EFFICIENCY
By April White22 SMITHSONIAN.COM | December 2019TECHNOLOGYprologue
wheels. By the 1890s, a women in bloomers on a bi-
cycle was an increasingly common sight.
“I’ll tell you what I think of bicycling,” the suff rag-
ist Susan B. Anthony said in 1896. “I think it has done
more to emancipate woman than any one thing in
the world.”ELECTRIC SCOOTERS ARE unlikely to pack such
a powerful social punch. But proponents argue that
they could lower emissions in cities—if they become
ubiquitous and residents use them both to supplant
trips in cars and to augment spotty public transit.
“People are looking for alternatives,” says Lime exec-
utive Adam Kovacevich.
City offi cials can be dubious, though, given the chaos
that has accompanied the arrival of scooters. For exam-
ple, Nashville allowed the fi rms to set up shop in 2018 ,
but a year later, after seeing scooters strewn about andaccidents, Mayor David Briley “believes that scooters
have been a failed experiment,” a City Hall spokesman
told me in an email. Briley proposed banning them; the
city council voted to halve the number instead—from
4,000 to 2,000—and asked the scooter fi rms to manage
their customers better. Atlanta banned them at night.
Public opinion seems bimodal: People either cherish or
despise them. A few riders told me they started as fans,
only to change their minds after experiencing terrible
accidents—including one woman I emailed who spent
months recovering from brain damage.
Are these just growing pains, like those that ac-
companied the rise of the bicycle? Possibly: It took
years for protocols and regulations on bike-riding to
emerge—though one diff erence today is the on-de-
mand scooters are deployed not by individual own-
ers, but by huge, high-tech fi rms seeking to blanket
the city and grow rapidly.IN THE 1930S, before commercial airplanes
began crossing the Atlantic, zeppelins promised
to change how we traveled. They could make
the voyage in just 43 hours, while the fastest
ocean liner took fi ve days. But when the
Hindenburg plummeted from the New Jersey
sky in 1937, killing 36 people, the disaster also
ended the dream that hydrogen-fi lled airships
would be the future of transportation.
Now scientists and others are starting to look
at zeppelins as something more than hovering
billboards like the Goodyear Blimp. The reason
is a benefi t that went unrecognized a century
ago: Airships can be more fuel effi cient than
cargo ships and airplanes.
Most modern airships use helium, a nonfl am-
mable but expensive and rare gas. But techno-
logical advances have lessened the explosive
danger associated with hydrogen, which is end-
lessly abundant. So the military, space agencies
and others are stepping up research on hydro-
gen-fi lled airships. And cargo transport could
be speedy as well as effi cient. A new study in
the journal Energy Conversion and Management
found that an airship fi ve times the length of
the Empire State Building riding the jet stream
could circle the globe in 14 days—faster
than any oceangoing ship.CONTINUED ON PAGE 86Top, the Navy’s short-lived USS Macon in 1933; above, a commercial passenger airship in 2014.