A rain of German bombs falling onto London may sound like a scene from the Blitz, but the city was also attacked by Germany during WWI, not by sleek metal-skinned aircraft, but by Zeppelins. Described by Winston Churchill as “enormous bladders of combustible gas,” these ominous lighter-than-air crafts caused 500 deaths in Britain. They also caused chaos on their own people, by denying them of their beloved sausages.
Although there was little evidence that airships were suited to military environments (they weren’t, by the way), there was a great demand for them among the German top brass. The ships could carry far more bombs over a further distance than aircraft, all while mounting defensive machine guns and they were actually quite hard to bring down.
However, unsurprisingly, the airships were still vulnerable to a prepared enemy and proved to be unwieldy, struggling to effectively navigate precisely over targets and lacking accurate bombing techniques.
Even when moored up the airships were thrown around by strong winds, and a few were lost because of poor weather conditions.
Beefy machines
These gigantic machines could measure up to 240 meters in length and required immense resources to construct. One of the most important was cow guts. The cow guts were used to make the bags that contained the airship’s gas. The gas is what makes the airships lighter than air.
Because the airships were huge, the number of resources they used was huge too, with each German Zeppelin using around 250,000 cows.
Goldbeater’s skin
The intestinal skin, also known as goldbeater’s skin, is incredibly resistant to tearing yet very thin and light. It has been used for many different things over the centuries but got its name from its use in the production of gold leaf. The skin is placed between layers of gold during gold beating, a process that can thin out many layers of gold separately.
A 1922 report on balloon fabrics for the US National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics highlights how valuable these guts were.