You have definitely seen photos or newsreel footage of the final fate of the airship Hindenburg.
What you have not seen is the footage of the many, many other airship crashes that littered the 1920s and 1930s, largely because they took place far from any cameras.
Airships evolved from the simple hot-air balloons of the 18th century. Engineers filled them with better lift gases than simple hot air (usually flammable hydrogen), changed their shape to make them more aerodynamic, and added engines, crew compartments, and room for passengers, cargo, bombs, etc.
They crashed constantly.
They were torn from their moorings and blown out to sea, they separated from their gondolas, they were shot down while trying (and often failing) to bomb London, they were smashed into trees or hillsides by storms, and they exploded suddenly in mid-air.
Yet people kept building them, for about 40 years, from the late 19th century up until the dawn of the Second World War.
They were unwieldy, expensive, and dangerous. So what gave them such longevity?
I think it’s partly explicable by basic human optimism.
Many useful technologies have taken a great deal of time and development and refinement to unlock their potential.
But there are lots and lots of technologies that are fatally flawed, or that can be better replaced by something else.
Back in 1910 or 1920, both airships and airplanes were equally rickety, dangerous contraptions. But airplanes did get bigger, safer, and more useful. But even by the 1930s, airship advocates were loathe to abandon their lovely, lethal creations.
Part of the reason is glamour.
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Airships promised something early airplanes couldn’t deliver – the experience of being on a luxury train car, or an ocean liner, but in the air. The dream was to combine the speed of air travel with the comfort of a journey on the Orient Express. It never worked out that way, and eventually there were luxury first-class areas on airplanes.
This is what I think about when I see yet another attempt to revive various modern technologies that have been tried over and over again, only to fail.
Flying cars, virtual and augmented reality, atomic-powered cargo ships, personal jetpacks – people have been dreaming these dreams over and over again, because they’re cool and exciting, and we really wish they would work.
My current theory is that, at any given point, a certain amount of the stuff that’s being hyped as “right around the corner!” is going to turn out to be garbage.
There’s a difference between something that works in theory, something that works in practice, and something that works safely, reliably, and cost-effectively in practice.
Only the last of the three is going to actually make it. But if you make it as far as “works in practice, but also catches fire/crashes/suddenly breaks down,” you can keep the hype train going for years.
We would all be better off if we could sort out more quickly which is which.