Hindenburg disaster and wingsuits

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 6 January 2024

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week's Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Barbara Waibel, author of a book on the Hindenburg and Director of Archives at the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen, Germany. She tells us about the history of airships.

We begin with some remarkable archive of the Hindenburg airship disaster in 1937. Then British scientist Jonathan Shanklin describes how he discovered the hole in the ozone layer in 1985.

In the second half of the programme we hear from a NASA scientist who worked on the Voyager space probe which took the famous 'Pale Blue Dot' photo of Earth. A physicist from Quebec remembers when a solar flare plunged the Canadian province into darkness. And we hear the exciting and dangerous story of the invention of the wingsuit.

Contributors: Barbara Waibel - Author and Director of Archives at the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen, Germany. Jonathan Shanklin - Scientist who discovered the hole in the ozone layer. Candice Hansen - NASA scientist. Aja Hruska - Physicist from Quebec. Jari Kuosma - Inventor of the commercial wingsuit.

(Photo: Hindenburg airship. Credit: Corbis via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Take a walk in somebody else's shoes with podcasts from the BBC World Service
0:05.1	Unmissible stories from around the globe. Search for the documentary, lives less
0:10.9	ordinary, and amazing sports stories wherever you get your BBC
0:15.2	podcasts. Are you ready for some magic?
0:20.3	Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast with me Max Pearson, a collection of
0:27.7	this week's witness history episodes on the BBC World Service. This week we're
0:32.0	looking up to the skies and beyond, for example, the discovery
0:36.0	of the hole in the ozone layer and its harmful effects.
0:39.0	Us three are the only people that have ever subjected are any flesh to see what happens and our
0:45.0	flesh burned. It took months for the skin to stop peeling off our faces after returning
0:50.4	back to civilization.
0:52.6	But the troubles of planet Earth seem very small when viewed from the Voyager space
0:56.8	probe 6 billion kilometers away.
0:59.2	I had chills running up and down my back.
1:02.1	It looked so tiny and so fragile and yet so
1:05.2	special in that ray of scattered light. And we'll hear from the inventor of the first
1:10.5	commercial wing suit.
1:12.8	That's all coming later in the podcast, but first, an event which demonstrated the dangers
1:17.6	inherent in humankind's desire to fly.
1:21.0	In the 1930s, the pride of Nazi Germany, when it came to literally flying the flag around the world, was the Hindenburg airship.
1:29.5	At last it was thought luxury travel in the air over long distances was possible.
1:34.7	Vicky Farncombe tells the story of the Hindenburg disaster with the help of some remarkable
	...

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