Oh the humanity! Today, Zeppelin disaster. This yardlong photo shows the aftermath of the great airship disaster that befell the USS Shenandoah on September 3, 1925, in what is surely the second most famous of all airship/zeppelin/dirigible disasters. The USS Shenandoah was the first rigid airship used by the US Navy. Based on the designs of German Zeppelins of World War I, she was constructed in New Jersey in 1922-23. She was enormous; 680 feet (more than two football fields), and it took 2.1 million square feet of helium to fill her (unlike their flammable German counterparts, American airships lifted with helium, not the more dangerous hydrogen). She had a crew of about 25 and travel at speeds up to about seventy miles per hour. She was conceived as a reconnaissance vessel, and an antisubmarine craft, but she really served during her short career as an experimental vehicle to test the possibilities of airships in Navy service, and to spread publicity for Navy. She made the first cross country flight by an airship in 1924; plans to fly her to the far north to explore the arctic had to be scrapped due to the ships ongoing maintenance issues. She crashed over Ohio on the early morning of September 3, 1925. She had embarked on a cross country publicity tour; as she flew over Nobel County, Ohio, she encountered a late summer thunderstorm. Though precisely what happened remains unclear, the ship broke up into several pieces in the turbulence of the violent storm. The pieces crashed to earth; fourteen men were killed. Most of these had been traveling in the steering gondola that hung from the bottom of the ship. When the Shenandoah began to break up, the gondola broke off entirely from the airship and fell: every man in it was killed save one who managed to escape. The rest of the crew survived by riding the wreckage down to the ground. For a time after the crash, the site where the sections of the huge airship came to the ground became a kind of strange tourist attraction. Clearly visible in this photograph, people came from far and wide in their Model Ts to gawk, to take souvenirs, to say theyd seen the great wreck. This photograph is by Rell Clements Jr., a navy photographer who had photographed the Shenandoah on numerous occasions during her career, and was presumably dispatched by the navy to capture images of her ignoble demise. He has taken an excellent panoramic image of the rear section of the wreckage. Even though it is only a part of the ship, it is mind-bogglingly large; it towers over gathered onlookers like a great leviathan. The word Shenandoah is clearly visible upon her broken skin, beside her crumpled fins. Marked in the photograph Copyright by Clements 1925. The image is very well taken. It is crisp and clear, with fine detail. Condition is excellent, except for a crease at upper right (pictured). These are outside the areas interest in the picture and do not detract much. No staining or water damage. In an old frame (probably not original). About 11 by 37 inches. A very rare, fascinating image.
Posted on: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 14:08:42 +0000
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