- Regis, Ed.
Monsters.
New York: Basic Books, 2015.
ISBN 978-0-465-06594-3.
-
In 1863, as the American Civil War raged, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin,
an ambitious young cavalry officer from the German kingdom of
Württemberg arrived in America to observe the conflict and
learn its lessons for modern warfare. He arranged an audience
with President Lincoln, who authorised him to travel among
the Union armies. Zeppelin spent a month with General Joseph
Hooker's Army of the Potomac. Accustomed to German military
organisation, he was unimpressed with what he saw and left to see
the sights of the new continent. While visiting Minnesota, he
ascended in a tethered balloon and saw the landscape laid out
below him like a military topographical map. He immediately
grasped the advantage of such an eye in the sky for military
purposes. He was impressed.
Upon his return to Germany, Zeppelin pursued a military career,
distinguishing himself in the 1870 war with France, although
being considered “a hothead”. It was this
characteristic which brought his military career to an abrupt
end in 1890. Chafing under what he perceived as stifling
leadership by the Prussian officer corps, he wrote
directly to the Kaiser to complain. This was a bad career move;
the Kaiser “promoted” him into retirement. Adrift,
looking for a new career, Zeppelin seized upon controlled aerial
flight, particularly for its military applications. And he
thought big.
By 1890, France was at the forefront of aviation. By 1885 the
first dirigible,
La France,
had demonstrated aerial navigation over complex closed courses
and carried passengers. Built for the French army, it was just a
technology demonstrator, but to Zeppelin it demonstrated a capability
with such potential that Germany must not be left behind.
He threw his energy into the effort, formed a company, raised the
money, and embarked upon the construction of
Luftschiff Zeppelin 1
(LZ 1).
Count Zeppelin was not a man to make small plans. Eschewing
sub-scale demonstrators or technology-proving prototypes, he
went directly to a full scale airship intended to be militarily
useful. It was fully 128 metres long, almost two and a half
times the size of La France,
longer than a football field. Its rigid aluminium frame
contained 17 gas bags filled with hydrogen, and it was powered
by two gasoline engines. LZ 1 flew just three times. An
observer from the German War Ministry reported it to be
“suitable for neither military nor for non-military purposes.”
Zeppelin's company closed its doors and the airship was sold for
scrap.
By 1905, Zeppelin was ready to try again. On its first flight, the LZ 2
lost power and control and had to make a forced landing. Tethered
to the ground at the landing site, it was caught by the wind and
destroyed. It was sold for scrap. Later the LZ 3 flew
successfully, and Zeppelin embarked upon construction of the LZ 4,
which would be larger still. While attempting a twenty-four hour
endurance flight, it suffered motor failure, landed, and while tied
down was caught by wind. Its gas bags rubbed against one another and
static electricity ignited the hydrogen, which reduced the airship
to smoking wreckage.
Many people would have given up at this point, but not the redoubtable
Count. The LZ 5, delivered to the military, was lost when carried away
by the wind after an emergency landing and dashed against a hill. LZ 6
burned in its hangar after an engine caught fire. LZ 7, the first
civilian passenger airship, crashed into a forest on its first flight
and was damaged beyond repair. LZ 8, its replacement, was destroyed
by a gust of wind while being walked out of its hangar.
With the outbreak of war in 1914, the airship went to war. Germany
operated 117 airships, using them for reconnaissance and even
bombing targets in England. Of the 117, fully 81 were destroyed,
about half due to enemy action and half by the woes which had wrecked
so many airships prior to the conflict.
Based upon this stunning record of success, after the end of the
Great War, Britain decided to embark in earnest on its own
airship program, building even larger airships than Germany.
Results were no better, culminating in the
R100 and
R101,
built to provide air and cargo service on routes throughout
the Empire. On its maiden flight to India in 1930, R101 crashed and
burned in a storm while crossing France, killing 48 of the
54 on board. After the catastrophe, the R100 was retired and
sold for scrap.
This did not deter the Americans, who, in addition to their
technical prowess and “can do” spirit, had
access to helium, produced as a by-product of their
natural gas fields. Unlike hydrogen, helium is nonflammable,
so the risk of fire, which had destroyed so many airships
using hydrogen, was entirely eliminated. Helium does not
provide as much lift as hydrogen, but this can be compensated
for by increasing the size of the ship.
Helium is also around fifty times more expensive than hydrogen, which
makes managing an airship in flight more difficult. While the
commander of a hydrogen airship can freely “valve”
gas to reduce lift when required, doing this in a helium
ship is forbiddingly expensive and restricted only to the
most dire of emergencies.
The U.S. Navy believed the airship to be an ideal platform for
long-range reconnaissance, anti-submarine patrols, and other
missions where its endurance, speed, and the ability to
operate far offshore provided advantages over ships and
heavier than air craft. Between 1921 and 1935 the Navy
operated
five rigid airships,
three built domestically and two abroad. Four of the five crashed in
storms or due to structural failure, killing dozens of crew.
This sorry chronicle leads up to a detailed recounting of
the history of the
Hindenburg.
Originally designed to use helium, it was redesigned for hydrogen
after it became clear the U.S., which had forbidden export of helium
in 1927, would not grant a waiver, especially to a Germany by
then under Nazi rule. The Hindenburg was enormous:
at 245 metres in length, it was longer than the U.S. Capitol building and
more than three times the length of a Boeing 747. It carried
between 50 and 72 passengers who were served by a crew of 40 to
61, with accommodations (apart from the spartan sleeping quarters)
comparable to first class on ocean liners. In 1936, the great ship
made 17 transatlantic crossings without incident. On its first
flight to the U.S. in 1937, it was
destroyed by
fire while approaching the mooring mast at Lakehurst, New Jersey.
The disaster and its aftermath are described in detail. Remarkably,
given the iconic images of the flaming airship falling to the ground
and the structure glowing from the intense heat of combustion, of
the 97 passengers and crew on board, 62 survived the disaster. (One
of the members of the ground crew also died.)
Prior to the destruction of the Hindenburg, a total
of twenty-six hydrogen filled airships had been destroyed by
fire, excluding those shot down in wartime, with a total of 250
people killed. The vast majority of all rigid airships built
ended in disaster—if not due to fire then structural failure,
weather, or pilot error. Why did people continue to pursue this
technology in the face of abundant evidence that it was fundamentally
flawed?
The author argues that rigid airships are an example of a
“pathological technology”, which he characterises
as:
- Embracing something huge, either in size or effects.
- Inducing a state bordering on enthralment among its
proponents…
- …who underplay its downsides, risks, unintended consequences,
and obvious dangers.
- Having costs out of proportion to the benefits
it is alleged to provide.
Few people would argue that the pursuit of large airships for more
than three decades in the face of repeated disasters was a pathological
technology under these criteria. Even setting aside the risks from using
hydrogen as a lifting gas (which I believe the author over-emphasises:
prior to the Hindenburg accident nobody had ever been
injured on a commercial passenger flight of a hydrogen airship, and
nobody gives a second thought today about boarding an airplane with
140 tonnes of flammable jet fuel in the tanks and flying across the
Pacific with only two engines). Seemingly hazardous technologies can
be rendered safe with sufficient experience and precautions. Large lighter
than air ships were, however, inherently unsafe because they were
large and lighter than air: nothing could be done about that. They
were are the mercy of the weather, and if they were designed to be
strong enough to withstand whatever weather conditions they might
encounter, they would have been too heavy to fly. As the experience
of the U.S. Navy with helium airships demonstrated, it didn't matter
if you were immune to the risks of hydrogen; the ship would eventually
be destroyed in a storm.
The author then moves on from airships to discuss other technologies
he deems pathological, and here, in my opinion, goes off the rails.
The first of these technologies is
Project Plowshare,
a U.S. program to explore the use of nuclear explosions for civil
engineering projects such as excavation, digging of canals, creating
harbours, and fracturing rock to stimulate oil and gas production.
With his characteristic snark, Regis mocks the very idea of Plowshare,
and yet examination of the history of the program belies this
ridicule. For the suggested applications, nuclear explosions were
far more economical than chemical detonations and conventional
earthmoving equipment. One principal goal of Plowshare was to
determine the efficacy of such explosions and whether they would
pose risks (for example, release of radiation) which were
unacceptable. Over 11 years 26 nuclear tests were conducted under
the program, most at the Nevada Test Site, and after a review of
the results it was concluded the radiation risk was unacceptable
and the results unpromising. Project Plowshare was shut down in 1977.
I don't see what's remotely pathological about this. You have an idea
for a new technology; you explore it in theory; conduct experiments;
then decide it's not worth pursuing. Now maybe if you're Ed Regis,
you may have been able to determine at the outset, without any of
the experimental results, that the whole thing was absurd, but a great
many people with in-depth knowledge of the issues involved preferred
to run the experiments, take the data, and decide based upon the results.
That, to me, seems the antithesis of pathological.
The next example of a pathological technology is the
Superconducting
Super Collider, a planned particle accelerator to be built in Texas
which would have an accelerator ring 87.1 km in circumference and
collide protons at a centre of mass energy of 40 TeV. The project was
approved and construction begun in the 1980s. In 1993, Congress voted to
cancel the project and work underway was abandoned. Here, the fit with
“pathological technology” is even worse. Sure, the project
was large, but it was mostly underground: hardly something to
“enthral” anybody except physics nerds. There were no risks
at all, apart from those in any civil engineering project of comparable
scale. The project was cancelled because it overran its budget
estimates but, even if completed, would probably have cost less than
a tenth the expenditures to date on the International Space Station, which
has produced little or nothing of scientific value. How is it
pathological when a project, undertaken for well-defined goals, is
cancelled when those funding it, seeing its schedule slip and budget
balloon beyond that projected, pull the plug on it? Isn't that how things
are supposed to work? Who were the seers who forecast all of this at the
project's inception?
The final example of so-called pathological technology is pure
spite. Ed Regis has a fine time ridiculing participants in the first
100 Year Starship
symposium, a gathering to explore how and why humans might be able, within
a century, to launch missions (robotic or crewed) to other star systems.
This is not a technology at all, but rather an exploration of what
future technologies might be able to do, and the limits imposed by
the known laws of physics upon potential technologies. This is
precisely the kind of “exploratory engineering” that
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
engaged in when he worked out the fundamentals of space flight in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. He didn't know the details of
how it would be done, but he was able to calculate, from first
principles, the limits of what could be done, and to demonstrate that
the laws of physics and properties of materials permitted the
missions he envisioned. His work was largely ignored, which I suppose
may be better than being mocked, as here.
You want a pathological technology? How about replacing reliable base load
energy sources with inefficient sources at the whim of clouds and wind?
Banning washing machines and dishwashers that work in favour of ones
that don't? Replacing toilets with ones that take two flushes in order
to “save water”? And all of this in order to “save
the planet” from the consequences predicted by a theoretical model
which has failed to predict measured results since its inception, through
policies which impoverish developing countries and, even if you accept
the discredited models, will have negligible results on the global
climate. On this scandal of our age, the author is silent. He
concludes:
Still, for all of their considerable faults and stupidities—their
huge costs, terrible risks, unintended negative consequences, and in
some cases injuries and deaths—pathological technologies possess
one crucial saving grace: they can be stopped.
Or better yet, never begun.
Except, it seems, you can only recognise them in retrospect.
January 2016 