Four years later, in , he proposed the use of steam engines to power navigable balloons. This was a year after John Stringfellow built a working model of Henson's proposed " aerial steam carriage ," creating the first successful powered prototype airplane in history. Three years on, Henri Giffard achieved Rufus Porter's proposal. Of course, Giffard's friends advised him against such folly. They knew the dangers hydrogen could present when combined with the sparks thrown up the smokestacks of steam engines devised by the likes of George Stephenson.
Undeterred, however, Giffard made a meritage of an elongated balloon, rudder and a propeller, driven by the steam engine that Meusnier longed for—achieving all of about three miles per hour, and barely managing to return from his launch point in a dead calm.
Fast forward to The Brazilian ex-pat Alberto Santos-Dumont , again in Paris, combined his love of motorcycle racing and ballooning to make a ballon dirigable of his own devising—the first successful aircraft to be propelled by an internal combustion engine.
A mere year and a bit later, he won the Deutsch Prize for flying from the Paris Aero Club around the Eiffel Tower and back in less than 30 minutes.
Parenthetically, because he was too busy with the controls of his machine to check his pocket watch, he did not know if he'd made it in time. And for a score more years, if you wanted to get to somewhere far away and come back, the airship was the way to go. But airships got left behind.
They have an Achilles' heel. No, it's not the weather, hydrogen, or the materials of the day—and it's not some conspiracy or a crewman with a bomb on the Hindenburg ruining it for everybody. Like a lot of things, the facts are simple and scientific, and thus boring—unless you're intrigued by simple scientific facts. Either way it's this: airships are inefficient. The purpose of transportation is to get a thing from one place to another.
The measure of any vehicle's efficiency—be it by land or by sea or even by air—is how much it carries vs. At the end of the day, we all want to get it there fast, and we all want to get it there cheap. Specific Power Required for Propulsion of Vehicles. In What Price Speed? Today, we can more easily take this a step further, dividing the vehicle's horsepower by the weight of the cargo it carries and its speed to gain even more insight.
The following graph does just that, and includes data from some key means of transportation. But let's keep things simple, and what engineers and scientists call a "first order of magnitude" analysis, which is a fancy way of saying let's check things out with some simple, rough, easy to calculate numbers.
Back before computers were everywhere—when you had to do things by hand with pencil and paper and a slide rule—this is what people did: Get some rough numbers to see if one thing is better or worse than something else, and toss out the bad ideas without wasting valuable time crunching useless numbers—let alone actually build the thing.
So, using information you can readily get today via the Internet, I've plotted a few examples: A container ship, a train, a truck, a couple of airplanes, a couple of old-school airships, and a couple of "modern" airships of the type that keep getting some press every few years, again and again, over the last 40 years or so.
These "new" airships are now called "hybrids" because they try to augment the lift of their gasbags with a bit of aerodynamic lift—in short, they try to be part balloon and part airplane at the same time. Never mind that Charles P. Burgess correctly argued from simple engineering principles in Chapter 10, "Common Airship Fallacies", of his book Airship Design , that this was, and remains, pure folly.
But never mind what he said; how about we judge for ourselves? If you look up how much power each vehicle has, and divide that by what it can carry and how fast it goes, and put those points on a graph, you can learn a lot. You can see, for instance, that a train is roughly as efficient as a container ship—but it goes much faster. A very short part of that canal, with a working lock and a canal boat has been reconstructed as a museum, next to the Ludwig Mill in Grand Rapids, Ohio.
The museum is very interesting. However, when there is land to lay tracks on, ditches full of water are dumb—especially when sides of the canal erode just from towing the canal boats through. This is why we don't use canals; we use roads and railroads. This is a point of personal interest because my aunt and uncle, Ila and Dale Dick, owned and operated a semi which was equipped with a heavy truck axle designed by my dad Wes and his team—Dana Corporation's first—in the s.
Their truck is plotted too. You can see it takes about four times as much power to haul cargo by road at roughly the same speed as a train. Therefore it takes that much more energy to get the cargo from here to there compared to trains and boats. But trucks are more flexible than trains, since you can send them everywhere that roads go; and that's why we use trucks to get it there: It may cost more per mile, but we can get it there by a more direct route.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin also started an airship company. LTA which stands for lighter than air! The aforementioned lack of need for runways makes airships a promising and practical option for delivering supplies to remote, hard-to-reach locations. To that end, Barry Prentice, who leads the Canadian company Buoyant Aircraft Systems International , hopes to use airships to transport pre-built structures for schools and housing to remote parts of Canada that lack good roads.
And earlier this year, French airship company Flying Whales I mean, how can you not adore that name?
As calls for climate action get louder and the costs associated with airships drop—as the cost of any new technology tends to do with time—we may find ourselves going retro and being ferried across the globe by giant helium-filled balloons. Learn more about republishing. By republishing this content you agree to comply with the Singularity Hub Republishing Guidelines. When republishing, please do not edit the contents of the article, ensure that you attribute the author and acknowledge that the article was originally published on Singularity Hub.
Please contact us with any questions. Please do not remove the pixel counter. The same principles apply to the airships. Zeppelins like the Hindenburg were the largest rigid airships ever built. Amazingly, they still are.
Size presents a challenge to the modern cargo rigid airship. This means that the cost of the envelope of the airship reduces tenfold. For the hypothetical rigid airship to be as effective as cargo boats are today, it would have to be over five times as long as the Empire State Building is tall. Beyond the logistics of building the thing, the docking of the airship would be a challenge due to limited control mechanisms, and strong winds could make it collapse.
But if these challenges could be overcome, the scientists say, a fleet of 1, rigid airship carriers "would be able to transport energy equivalent to 10 [percent] of current world electricity consumption.
Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. Archive Photos Getty Images. Rigid airships were largely abandoned after the Hindenburg's crash and an increased military preference for planes.
But they could make a comeback as cargo vessels.
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