[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 138 (Tuesday, October 6, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11631-S11633]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE TRUE STORY OF HYDROGEN AND THE ``HINDENBURG'' DISASTER
Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, for many years I have spoken of the
promise of hydrogen energy as our best hope for an environmentally safe
sustainable energy future. My vision, and the vision of many of our top
scientists is simple. Hydrogen, which is produced by renewable energy
with absolutely no pollution and no resource depletion of any kind,
will prove a truly sustainable energy option.
I recognize that hydrogen is not yet a form of energy widely known to
the American public. In fact, hydrogen has an unfortunate association.
I would like to spend a few minutes dispelling one unfortunate myth of
hydrogen energy.
Mr. President, mention the word ``hydrogen'' and many people remember
the Hindenburg--the dirigible that caught fire back in May of 1937,
killing 36 of the 97 people on board. Now, thanks to the scientific
sleuthing of Addison Bain, a retired NASA scientist with 30 years
experience with hydrogen, we can state with a fair degree of certainty
that the Hindenburg would have caught fire even without any hydrogen on
board.
This detective story was reported in a recent issue of Popular
Science. I ask that the Popular Science article be printed in the
Congressional Record at the conclusion of my remarks.
Addison Bain collected actual samples from the Hindenburg--the cloth
bags that contained the hydrogen--which were saved as souvenirs by the
crowd awaiting the Hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937.
When these samples were analyzed by modern techniques, Bain discovered
[[Page S11632]]
that the bags had been coated with cellulose nitrate or cellulose
acetate--both flammable materials. Furthermore, the cellulose material
was impregnated with aluminum flakes to reflect sunlight, and aluminum
powder is used in rocket fuel. Essentially the outside of the
Hindenburg was coated with rocket fuel!
Addison now believes that the Hindenburg probably caught fire from an
electrical discharge igniting the cellulose-coated gas bags. Remember,
the ship docked at Lakehurst with electrical storms in the area, which
was against regulations.
I would like to personally thank Addison Bain for his valuable
contribution to the history of the Hindenburg, and to lessening the
public's concerns over the safety of hydrogen. Hydrogen, in my
judgment, will become a premier fuel in the 21st century, since burning
hydrogen produces no pollution of any kind, just pure, clean water. And
hydrogen can be produced by using sunlight or wind electricity to split
water.
Hydrogen energy has been used safely in the Nation's space program
for many decades, and I believe it can be used safely for many other
applications here on Earth. For example, hydrogen could be a safe
alternative fuel for cars. It would be much less dangerous than
gasoline in an accident. Hydrogen gas disperses rapidly, while gasoline
lingers in the vicinity of the accident, increasing the risks to
survivors of the crash. I believe there are also countless other uses
for hydrogen. We can pursue those options without fear because of
Addison Bain's efforts. Thanks to Addison Bain, we can continue down
the path toward a renewable hydrogen future without the undue fear of a
singular event from 60 years ago.
The article follows:
What Really Downed the Hindenburg
(By Mariette DiChristina)
May 6, 1937. The sky still appears moody after a stormy
day. A stately, silvery marvel, the 240-ton Hindenburg
airship glides 200 feet above Lakehurst, New Jersey, at
around 7:21 p.m. In a 6-knot wind, the Zeppelin is attempting
its first ``high landing'': The crew throws the spider lines
out, preparing for mooring. The gigantic ship, nearly three
football fields in length, would be slowly winched down.
If you think you know exactly what happened next, Adison
Bain has a surprise for you. Six decades after the infamous
Hindenburg disaster, when 36 of 97 aboard died during the
horrific blaze that halted rigid-airship travel, Bain has
revealed a stunning new explanation for what started the
fire. Bain, a recently retired engineer and manager of
hydrogen programs who spent more than 30 years at NASA, has
recently concluded several years of scientific sleuthing work
in search of the culprit behind the conflagration. He combed
through thousands of pages of original testimony and
materials at four archives in the United States and one in
Germany, interviewed survivors and airship experts, and
ultimately tested original materials from the model LZ-129
Hindenburg and its contemporaries. Contrary to what the
investigators ruled at the time, asserts Bain, the fire did
not start with free hydrogen lit by natural electrical
discharge or sabotage.
The hunt for the truth about the Hindenburg began in the
late 1960s for Bain, a genial man with slicked-backed dark
hair and a face lined by many smiles. He was working on a
hydrogen safety manual for NASA. Sitting in a ``Florida
room'' of mint and mauve tiled floors and furniture in a
Cocoa Beach apartment, Bain recalls how he paged through the
literature on hydrogen. ``Invariably,'' he says, ``the topic
of the Hindenburg would come up. At the time, I didn't think
a lot about it.''
Over the years, however, as he continued his NASA work in
hydrogen systems, the reference began to accumulate in his
mind. ``What I was starting to notice is that the authors
were inconsistent,'' he says. Hydrogen detractors said the
gas was so flammable it killed everyone on the Hindenburg,
which wasn't true--about one-third of those aboard had died.
On the other hand, hydrogen promoters pooh-poohed safety
concerns and claimed that those who perished did so only
because they jumped from the burning airship, which also
wasn't true. Says Bain: ``I thought, wait a minute! Where are
they getting their information?'' He has also seen the famous
photos of the Hindenburg's bright, blistering hot fire and
knew that hydrogen doesn't burn in that way. A hydrogen fire
radiates little heat and is barely visible to the unaided
eye.
By 1990, Bain pulled a one-year assignment in Washington,
D.C., at NASA headquarters, then across the street from the
National Air & Space Museum. ``I like airplanes, so I went
over there. Lo and behold, there's this 25-foot-long model of
the Hindenburg used in the 1975 movie with George C. Scott,''
he recalls. ``I'm looking at that model and a plaque on the
wall. The plaque says something about how the hydrogen
exploded,'' As a hydrogen expert, he knew that the pure gas
doesn't just explode. That was enough: He made an appointment
with the archivists upstairs, dooned a pair of protective
gloves, and lost himself in decades-old original documents in
the museum's Hindenburg files for the rest of the day.
His research soon became something of a part-time
obsession. Over the next few years. Bain would steal away to
the archive and travel to others in College Park and
Suitland, Maryland, poring through thousands of pages and
copying documents in search of answers. He even traveled to
the Fires Sciences Lab in Missoula, Montana. He speculated
that, perhaps, some of the airship's materials had played a
role in the ignition. Maddeningly, however, he couldn't find
the exact formulations used. ``I had the idea of the problem,
but needed enough evidence to back my story up,'' he says.
That was as far as he got until 1994, when he ran into
Richard van Treuren, a space shuttle technician, at a
conference on hydrogen. Van Treuren, a self-avowed ``helium
head'' and member of the airship aficionados called the
Lighter-Than-Air Society in Akron, Ohio, was seeking Bain to
talk about hydrogen. Van Treuren had a book about airships.
Bain spotted the book in the crook of van Treuren's arm and
bought it from him on the spot.
``The rain still spatters the wet ground in starts and
stops. The air is highly charged from the thunderstorms,
investigators would rule later. Six and three-quarter acres
of Hindenburg fabrics is kiting in the breeze. A witness
later would recall a bluish electrical phenomenon that dances
over the aft starboard side of the Hindenburg for more than a
minute.''
Through van Treuren, Bain learned that pieces of the
Hindenburg's skin still existed. Bain traveled around the
country to procure them, spending hundreds of dollars buying
original materials, books, and papers from collectors. ``What
I was trying to find out is, what did they use specifically
in the coating?'' he says.
Hepburn Walker, who had been stationed in Lakehurst in the
early `40s, was among those in possession of pieces of the
Hindenburg, Walker had found them in the soil. Another
sample, a part of the swastika painted on the Hindenburg's
side, was kept in a safe by Cheryl Gantz, head of the
Zeppelin Collectors Club in Chicago.
Bain remembers meeting Gantz. ``May I have a little
clipping, just anything to take to the lab?'' he begged.
Gantz was willing, but wanted to impress upon Bain the
fabric's value to her: ``How much do you value your
firstborn?'' she asked. Bain laughs: ``I got the message!''
Bain also located fabric samples in Germany that were
representative of the top of the Hindenburg, where the fire
started.
Materials in hand, Bain headed to NASA's Materials Science
Laboratory at the nearby Kennedy Space Center. Over the next
14 months, he carefully laid out a systematic testing
protocol involving some 14 researchers who would volunteer
their spare time to assist in what became known as Project H.
``A jagged fire licks along the aft starboard side of the
Hindenburg, another witness later recalls. Crewman Helmut
Lau, on the lower left of the craft, looks up through the
translucent gas cells and sees a red glow. In moments, cells
begin to melt before his eyes. The fire crests the top of the
Hindenburg and spreads outward and downward, toward lau and
the others. Girders start cracking and wires snap. With
hydrogen still in the cells, the giant airship maintains
level trim.''
What was in that fabric? Work to create a chemical and
physical analysis included using an infrared stectrograph and
a scanning electron microscope, which provided, respectively,
the chemical signatures of the organic compounds and elements
present.
A startling variety of highly flammable compounds proved to
have been added to the cotton fabric base. ``They used a
cellulose acetate or nitrate as a typical doping compound,
which is flammable to begin with--a forest fire is cellulose
fire,'' says Bain. ``OK, you coat that with cellulose
nitrate--nitrate is used to make gunpowder. And then you put
[on] aluminum powder. Now, aluminum powder is a fuel used on
the solid rocket boosters on the space shuttle.'' The wood
spacers and ramie cord used to bind the structure together,
along with the silk and other fabrics in the ship, would also
have added to the fuel-rich inferno. Even the duralumin
support framework of the Hindenburg's, rigid skeleton was
coated with lacquer, ostensibly to protect it from moisture.
In a flame test, a fabric section ignited and burned
readily. The arc test, in which 30,000 volts were zapped
across a piece of fabric several inches long, was even more
revealing: ``Poof, it disappeared. The whole thing happened
faster than I can explain it,'' Bain says. ``I guess the
moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket
fuel.''
Bain is quick to point out, however, that it's not that the
Germans and other airship and aircraft makers of the era were
simply foolish in doping the fabric the way they did. They
had a number of technical problems to solve using the
materials of the time. Today's synthetic fabrics, with their
range of properties, did not yet exist. The cotton or linen
fabric skin was swabbed with the chemicals to make it taut
and reduce flutter for aerodynamics, and then painted with
the reflective red iron oxide and aluminum so the sun's heat
wouldn't expand the gas in the cells, to help prevent gas
from escaping. The skin had to be protected from
deterioration from sunlight and rot from moisture. When
engineers changed one part of the formulation to address
flammability concerns, the
[[Page S11633]]
mixture might not have adhered well or other problems would
crop up.
``And I'm not saying hydrogen didn't contribute to the
fire,'' adds Bain. It is after all a fuel, he notes--and one
he is hoping will develop into a replacement or supplement to
natural gas. ``But it was a fuel-rich fire already; the
hydrogen just added to it.'' Bain figures that maybe half of
the 5 million cubic feet of hydrogen remaining aboard the
Hindenburg after the Atlantic crossing burned in the fire.
``But so what? It's academic.''
Also made academic, perhaps, are decades of speculation
over the causes behind the start of the Zeppelin fire. All
have blamed hydrogen, with various ideas about how the gas
became free and ignited. One popular theory has it that a
wire punctured a gas cell. Bain, obviously, finds this
doubtful. ``If that happened, it should have occurred
during one of the final maneuvers.'' But, ``The ship was
stationary for 4 minutes before the first fire was
indicated.'' If cells were leaking gas that long, ``The
ship should really start going like this,'' Bain says as
he tilts a handheld Hindenburg model nose upward. ``And
it's not. [At the start of the fire,] it's still in
trim.''
What about the possibility of loose hydrogen from the
vents? Hydrogen was released to help maintain level flight,
and others have theorized that a valve may have stuck open.
``The Hindenberg had an excellent venting system'' says Bain,
with vents between cells that measured some 2 feet high and 7
feet across. If hydrogen accumulated--difficult to imagine
for the lightest element, which has the greatest dispersal
rate in the universe--how come, he asks, none of the fires
were observed at the vent sites atop the ship?
``In seconds, the rear half of the Hindenburg is engulfed
in bright, writhing flames. Gas cells one and two expand and
burst with explosive force; the released hydrogen adds fuel
to the conflagration. The ship lurches forward, breaking off
water tanks attached by light-release connectors near the bow
of the craft. Having lost ballast, the airship's nose heads
upward and people start jumping to escape the flames, some
too far from the ground to survive the fall.''
What is perhaps most stunning about Bain's research is that
what he has discovered comes 60 years after some German
airship experts already knew it. While visiting an archive in
Germany, he copied two 1937 letters handwritten in German
that had not been seen by earlier investigators. Their
shocking contents were revealed to Bain only after he
returned to Florida and had them translated. They were
written by an electrical engineer named Otto Beyerstock, who
had incinerated pieces of Hindenburg fabric during electrical
tests conducted at the behest of the Zeppelin Co. In the
notes, Beyerstock testily dismissed the idea that hydrogen
could have started the fire, stating with certitude that it
could only have been caused by the fabric's flammability in a
charged atmosphere. In a similar craft flying under the same
atmospheric conditions that the Hindenburg faced in
Lakehurst, the same sort of conflagration would occur, even
if noncombustible helium were used as the lifting gas. (In
fact, notes Bain, such a fire did take place in 1935, when a
helium-filled airship with an acetate-aluminum skin burned
near Point Sur, California.)
``I beg you to kindly inform me about the corrective
measures to be taken or that have already been taken,''
Beyerstock wrote to Zeppelin. Some modifications were made in
a subsequent airship plan, such as the addition of a fire
retardant. ``They knew,'' Bain says simply. But shortly after
the Hindenburg disaster, and probably because of it, the
great Zeppelins were removed from service.
Some detractors are still not ready to put aside the idea
of hydrogen as fire-starter. ``Addison Bain's hydrogen
background carries some weight,'' says Eric Brothers, the
editor of Buoyant Flight, the Lighter-Than-Air Society's
bulletin, but not everyone at the society is convinced. The
bulletin this year ran three articles detailing the skin-
ignition research, coauthored by van Treuren and Bain. As for
Brothers: ``I would like to see more independent verification
of the tests, though I recognize that that's difficult to
do,'' he says. Still, ``I'm 90 percent convinced that the
fabric had some role.''
One of the Buoyant Flight articles' most stringent critics
is Donald E. Overs, a retired engineer and pilot who worked
on Goodyear blimp construction and engineering for more than
20 years. ``Based on the authors' cover burn rate tests, it
would have taken anywhere from 15 minutes to probably an hour
or more for the cover alone to burn off. The entire ship, on
the other hand, was consumed in less than 60 seconds,'' he
says. Overs' detailed e-mail challenges to Bain's theory--and
the various defenses supporters--would occupy some 50 printed
pages. ``Bain can at most demonstrate or argue that the cover
was a brief link in the early ignition of the hydrogen, but
he cannot prove even that,'' concludes Overs.
``Like the mythical Icarus who ventured too close to the
sun, the Hindenburg goes down in flames. As it touches the
ground, the ship bounces lightly, perhaps still buoyant with
remaining hydrogen.''
None of what Bain has learned has diminished his admiration
for the engineering achievement in creating the great
airships. ``With all due respect,'' he says, ``the Germans
did a fantastic job. I admire their technology.
``It was just an unfortunate little flaw, just like the
flaw on the Titanic and the flaw in the Challenger,'' he
says, referring to the ``unsinkable'' ship's sulfurous,
brittle steel and the space shuttle's O-ring--both of which
failed under the prevailing weather conditions. ``You never
know what Mother Nature is going to do to you.''
____________________