Thanks, Jim!

Z is for Zeppelins
All Change Points (q.v.), from Xerxes (q.v.) to the last presidential election, create worlds with clean, efficient Zeppelin traffic. Changing history may produce Zeppelins as an inevitable by-product, much as bombarding uranium produces gamma rays. Often, the quickest way to tell if you are in an Alternate History is to look up, rather than at a newspaper or encyclopedia. From this premise, it is not outside the realm of Plausibility (q.v.) that our history between 1900 and 1936 was, in fact, an Alternate History. It would, at least, explain a lot.

This appears in his Suppressed Transmission 2 collection -- which, appropriately, features an introductory poem by John M. Ford ("In the Neomythic Age").

And zeppelins are cool. Coolness always trumps logic. Alas, it's not the only thing that trumps logic--here's hoping for the best on Tuesday.

I know the feeling. Does anyone know of a Brief History of Heresy? was a question from me, and it's now my brush with immortality.

Just the other day in my office, somebody added a portrait of Noah Webster to our Copyediting Shrine.

And when I saw it, I had three thoughts in succession
1) (The Devil and Noah Webster!)
2) (I wonder what John M. Ford would do with that?)
3) (And now we'll never know.)

I miss the man.

Peter Erwin @ 8 quotes Kenneth Hite:

Changing history may produce Zeppelins as an inevitable by-product, much as bombarding uranium produces gamma rays.

Someone at Jo Walton's Farthing Party mentioned this phenomenon, and Emmet O'Brien named it the Hindenburg Uncertainty Principle.

I feel like a bit of a spoilsport in pointing out that the Hindenburg was merely the last in a series of zeppelin disasters, following the British R101 (carrying the Air Minister who had overseen the project) and the US Navy's Shenandoah and Macon.

Of course, this has two implications:

1. The Zeppelin meme is very hard to kill; it took four rather spectacular disasters for Them to convince our timeline to give up the idea.
2. Now we have cool underwater zeppelin wreckage to explore.

But I have to say that part of what's "spectacular" about those incidents is how little loss of life there was. The Macon's especially striking: two dead. What're the odds of surviving a sea crash in a jet?

> I feel like a bit of a spoilsport in pointing out that the Hindenburg was merely the last in a series of zeppelin disasters, following the British R101 (carrying the Air Minister who had overseen the project) and the US Navy's Shenandoah and Macon.

I've got a lovely little book at home called "Airshipwreck" which consists of almost nothing but pictures of... wrecked airships.

Many of them seem to have been done in by extraordinary weather conditions - i.e. 2 mile an hour breeze on the ground pushes them slowly into a solid object and they gently fold in half.

You're right. And the Hindenburg was also less catastrophic than we tend to think: almost two-thirds of the passengers and crew survived. (On the other hand, when the Akron went down, only 3 of the 76 crew survived.)

Freeman Dyson had an interesting essay a number of years ago where he compared post-WW1 zeppelin programs (few in number, giant, prestigious, government-funded) with airplane research (lots of small, private projects, often involving just a handful of people). His argument was that the zeppelin programs were very vulnerable to failures, since the failures were very public and embarassing, and tended to lead to the entire program being shut down; on the other hand, failures of airplane prototypes only affected the company or inventor involved, and other programs charged on ahead in a kind of Darwinian technological process. The result was, by the late 1930s, lots of progress with airplanes and the end of all zeppelin research.

Then he suggested that the more recent equivalents of zeppelin programs were a) 1950s nuclear reactor research[*]; and b) national space programs.

[*] I'll admit I'm not convinced that having hundreds of people tinkering with nuclear reactors in their garages would necessarily have been a Good Thing....

If I'm recalling the essay, I think he also concluded that there had been a rush to commercialization of nuclear power, and that the water-cooled reactors that were built, were based on the designs used by the Navy. And where a water-cooled reactor for a submarine was perfectly reasonable, it might not have been the best solution for civilian nuclear power.

Shute says much the same thing as Dyson, from the inside; also that the zeppelin programs, being big government funded programs, were under constant pressure to add this or that feature to prove how wonderful they were, and to add personnel who came with glowing recommendations from some politician. R101 took the brunt of these intrusions. Following radical design changes, R101 was sent on its flight to India ahead of the standard test flights the staff had agreed on, because Baron Thompson had announced that he would fly to India and back in R101 and considered his schedule inflexible. The result was disaster.