3/4: His Majesty's Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine by S. C. Gwynne (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2024
⏱️ 13 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/His-Majestys-Airship-Largest-Machine/dp/1982168277
From historian and bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Empire of the Summer Moon comes a “captivating, thoroughly researched” (The New York Times Book Review) tale of the rise and fall of the world’s largest airship—and the doomed love story between an ambitious British officer and a married Romanian princess at its heart.
1914
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Bachelor with the author Sam Gwyn, S. Gwyn. His book is His Majesty's Airship, |
| 0:09.4 | Life and Tragic Death of the World's largest flying machine. |
| 0:12.8 | We've shown you the disaster of R-38. |
| 0:14.8 | There are many other disasters all around the world |
| 0:17.8 | with these rigid airships flying with hydrogen, |
| 0:21.9 | highly flammable hydrogen, more than 1,300 degrees when it |
| 0:25.4 | burns suddenly and brings these ships down and destroys the crew. But our |
| 0:30.6 | Minister of Air, Kit Thompson, has a vision. |
| 0:34.4 | He's also Lord Cardington. |
| 0:36.7 | He's going to build two ships. |
| 0:39.2 | One is going to be R100, and R100 is going to represent socialism built by the state. |
| 0:46.0 | R101 is going to be built by capitalism or at least they regarded as capitalism |
| 0:51.0 | and they're going to be built in different places. |
| 0:53.4 | R100 is standard issue material from the German success of rigid airships. |
| 1:00.0 | R101, however, the Imperial Majesty's ship is going to have lots of experiments on it. |
| 1:07.0 | Sam, why did they choose to put all these new features on R101. |
| 1:14.0 | Should we regard this as a beta? |
| 1:16.0 | That's our language today. |
| 1:18.0 | Is that how to view R101? |
| 1:20.0 | R101 was going to be an entirely new thing. As we said before, you know, |
| 1:26.6 | zepilans were invented, the rigid airships rather were invented by Ferdinand on |
| 1:30.8 | Zeppelin in 1900, used extensively in World War I, |
... |
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