The Hindenburg

The smoking salons of the Hindenburg and other hydrogen-filled dirigibles of Ihe 1930s were insulated with urea-formaldehyde polymer foams. The structure of this polymer is highly cross-linked, like that of Bakelite (Section 31.5). Propose a structure. 

Prior to the fire, the Hindenburg had completed 10 round trips between the U.S. and Europe. A sister ship, the Graf Zeppelin, made regular scheduled transatlantic crossings from 1928 to 1939 with no incidents. There were 161 rigid airships that flew between 1897 and 1940, almost all of these used hydrogen and 20 were destroyed by fires. Of these 20, seventeen were lost in military action where in many cases the fires resulted from enemy fire during World War I. 

The Hindenburg was the largest flying machine ever built — 804 feet long. It would have dwarfed a Jumbo 747 and was roughly the size of the Titanic. The crash Morrison described killed thirty-five of the ninety-seven people onboard, along with one crew member on the ground. Morrison s description. 

On May 6,1937, the German passenger airship the Hindenburg suddenly burst into flames while approaching its landing site in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Thirty-five people out of the 97 on board the airship died in the blaze. 

The product of this reaction is harmless, but the combustion of hydrogen is quite explosive. Airships during the 1930s, like the Hindenburg, were filled with hydrogen because the gas is lighter than air. Unfortunately, it is also highly flammable. 

The Hindenburg Disaster Titanic of the Sky. Vidicom Media Productions. Available online. URL http //www.vidicom-tv. com/tohiburg.htm. Accessed Dec. 17, 2006. 

A well-known case is the detrimental influence on the development and use of hydrogen in the transportation industry caused by the Hindenburg accident in 1936. The Zeppelin company chose to blame hydrogen for the accident, although they seemed to have known that the cause was the use of a... 

Bain, A., Vorst, W. van (1999). The Hindenburg tragedy revisited the fatal flaw found. Int. J. Hydrogen Energy 24,399-403. 

Hydrogen mixed with oxygen triggers another notoriously explosive gas-phase reaction that most probably contributed to the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia as well as the Hindenburg disaster. Gas-phase explosions usually react via chain reactions the electron in a radical finds a mate, but in the process steals an electron from another pair, which creates at least one other radical and possibly more, if a bond is disrupted. 

The Hindenburg was Germany s largest passenger airship. It was built in 1936 as a luxury liner, and it made the trip to the United States faster than an ocean liner. 

The Hindenburg was designed to be filled with helium, a safer gas than the highly flammable hydrogen. But in those pre-World War II days, the United States suspected that Germany s new leader, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), had military plans for helium-filled ships. So the United States refused to sell helium to the Zeppelin airship company. Seven million cubic feet of hydrogen were used instead. This made the crew very nervous about the potentiai for fire. Passengers were even checked for matches as they boarded ... 

On May 3, 1937, the Hindenburg left Frankfurt, Germany, for Lakehurst, New Jersey. It traveled over the Netherlands, down the English Channel, through Canada, and into the United States. 

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