Based on the size of the human figures (assuming the people are 6 feet tall), and assuming the pool is 6 feet deep, a very rough estimate of the water in that pool would be 30,240 cubic feet, or 226,210 gallons, or 1,886,591 pounds.

Just to lift the water in the pool alone would require 31.4 million cubic feet of helium at 60 lb lift per 1000 cu. ft.

 That’s 4-1/2 Hindenburgs.

Of course, the airship would need to lift more than just the pool: Engines, anyone? Fuel? How about that hard carapace of a shell?

This “airship” has as much chance of floating in the air as Hugo Eckener after a meal of sauerbraten and kaiserschmarrn.

Which is good, because placing two million pounds of water above the lifting gas would cause this thing to capsize and dump all those people onto the pretty mountains.

And at that altitude, high above those mountains peaks, the helium would expand so much the airship would have to be vastly larger than in that illustration.

And the water in the pool would likely freeze into a block of ice without some rather effective — and heavy! — heating system.

But when some people think about airships, they forget about physics.

Bless their hearts. 🙂

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It didn’t.

Which is not to say Birmingham does not have a connection to the zeppelin craze of the 1920’s.

It certainly does.

The tower was built in 1929 as a publicity stunt to gain attention for the new hotel by capitalizing on the worldwide fascination with airships inspired by the success of Graf Zeppelin, which crossed the Atlantic in 1928 and made a round-the-world flight in 1929.

And if Birmingham wants to celebrate civic pride by promoting this connection to a fascinating time in aviation history, good for Birmingham!

Postcard of Hotel Thomas Jefferson. (Tichnor Brothers Collection Location, Boston Public Library)

Birmingham was not alone in trying to capture the public’s love of airships in the 1920s and 1930s. Several buildings around the United States installed “dirigible mooring masts” as publicity stunts during that era. The most famous, of course, is the one atop New York’s Empire State Building, but there is also one in Chicago (which I discussed in a piece for Chicago’s NPR affiliate WBEZ: “Zeppelin Poseurs: Why Chicago’s Airship Dreams Never Took Off“) and even in Buffalo, New York.

But while these were great marketing tools, they would have been disastrous mooring masts.

The spindly little structure on Birmingham’s building was never actually intended as a mooring mast for dirigibles, which place tremendous structural loads on their mooring masts; a 776-foot airship like Graf Zeppelin acts like a giant sail, and the slightest wind against such a tremendous surface puts a huge load on anything to which it is attached. The mooring mast used to secure Britain’s R.101, for example — which is shown in the Alabama video — could withstand a force of thirty tons and was secured to eight pieces of concrete that were each 12 feet square and embedded six feet deep in the ground, and the mast itself was a massive structure. It also had an elevator (lift) to carry passengers up and down the mast.

The airship mast at Cardington, England with R.101

Diagram of Cardington mast

The skinny tower in Birmingham could never have withstood the loads exerted by an airship.

I found the following photo of the structure posted by an urban explorer; it is easy to see that an airship would have ripped this “mast” off the building in the slightest wind, assuming the thin middle section of the tower didn’t fail first, which seems likely.

Nor does this “mooring mast” have any way for passengers to embark or disembark; there isn’t so much as a ladder connecting the top of the mast to the roof of the building.

But Birmingham, Buffalo, and other cities can take pride in their desire to be seen on the cutting edge of technology and to associate themselves with the future — even if only for the purpose of public relations.

Meanwhile, enjoy this great video from the folks at This is Alabama, and congratulations to Birmingham on the renovation of this beautiful old building.

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Before the 1940s, physicians would send their TB patients to a sanatorium in the mountains or desert in places like Switzerland, Scandinavia, the Rocky Mountains, or the southwestern United States.

The July 1930 issue of Popular Science Monthly proposed placing a sanatorium on an airship and imagined what such a flying clinic might look like.

According to the editors, the illustration was based on information provided by Karl Arnstein of Goodyear-Zeppelin. “The body of the airship would follow the design of the two 6,500,000-cubic-foot airships being built for the Navy. A hospital airship of this size would be able to stay aloft for weeks at a time. An airplane carried inside its hull could maintain communication with the ground and if necessary make trips for special medicines and supplies.”

The clinic itself was located at the top of the airship so patients “would receive the full benefits of sunlight. Its walls and roof would be studded with windows, the panes made of celluloid or some similar material which transmits the healthful rays of the sun.”

The effect of this arrangement on the ship’s center of gravity was not discussed.

This concept is an example of the airship as a symbol of futurism that was popular in the 1920s and 1930s. But while this proposal was never realistic, and the sanatorium movement itself ended with the development of modern tuberculosis drugs — the first was Streptomycin in the 1940s — scientists now recognize that tuberculosis is susceptible to UV light, which stimulates the production of  Vitamin D, and that the benefits of sunlight in the treatment of tuberculosis are real.

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Litchfield maintained his enthusiasm even after World War II and offered his vision of a lighter-than-air future in a 1945 book co-authored with Goodyear publicist Hugh Allen that asked the question, WHY? Why has America no Rigid Airships?

Goodyear began promoting luxury airship travel as early as 1931, when the construction of the Goodyear-Zeppelin airship Akron for the U.S. Navy suggested the possibility of a passenger version:

Possible passenger airship based on the design of U.S.S. Akron (Airships.net collection)

These drawings from Hugh Allen’s The Story of the Airship (1931) imagined an Art Deco dining salon, promenade, and even a lounge with a fireplace.

For more dirigibles that never came to be, visit Airships and Futurism.

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