Failed technologies don't fail

If lifting technology of airships outstrips that of airplanes, (say the airfoil design of the wing was flawed and the Wright brothers abandoned or let lay fallow their airplane design)...

Lots of people were competing to design flying machines. Some of them even had the backing of national governments. France was spending good money on their project. If the Wrights didn't do it someone else would. Most promising alternate would be Alberto Santos-Dumont of Brazil. In fact some say he did invent the first proper manned flying machine (his didn't need a catapult to take-off), but the Wrights simply had better publicity sense.

I'm not saying airships couldn't be more popular. But they were doomed to be a short lived dead end. At best they could make a bigger niche for themselves. Airplanes are just fundamentally a simpler and better solution.

The only way for airships to be have a real chance is for some critical technologies to mature earlier.


http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/12/10/brazil.santosdumont.reut/index.html
 
Was MiniDisc a failure? I'd thought it was really popular in Asia before mp3-players became widespread.

I said it was an also-ran. I supose it would have been popular in Asia- they either have the guts or the money to embrace all these new technologies. It never quite took off in the UK, but it enjoyed modest success (my Dad has a machine somewhere...)
 
Check out the Museum of Retro Technology

Combat Cutlery is particularly intriguing.

I quite like the pneumatic networking idea myself. I remember reading several future-prediction things from the fifties or whenever which were predicting we'd have vast networks of pneumatic tubes delivering our shopping. Imagine ordering something online and it being piped to your home!
 
I think airships could remain useful much longer than until the late '40s - given sufficient financial and technological backing (which they would've had without Lakehurst and WW2 getting in the way). They could fill a niche between cargo ships and planes:

-Planes: fast, but expensive due to massive fuel consumption, haven't got the 100+t lifting capacity of '30s airships

-Ships: cheaper, but a lot slower

Airships could do the time-critical heavy lifting, e.g. if a British-made turbine in a power station in India fails, an airship could bring in a replacement in a matter of days, rather than weeks for a cargo ship ... there was a German concept for such an airship a few years ago, but the company ran in to financial difficulties.
 
To get optimum lift you need hydrogen balloons which are dangerous. Helium is safer but has reduced cargo. No airship was as safe as mainstream transportation. They had to compete with trains, ships, and airplanes and that didn't leave much of an economic sweet spot left.

Perhaps if the Great Depression didn't happen and the 1930s were an age of peace, international airships would have developed in a more cooperative environment (US making helium widely available). But even so it's days were numbered.
 
The bugle call would never be the same.

rifle_bugle.jpg
 
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