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Hindenburg’s Smoking Room
- quijoteuniv 5mo agoI will use this as a metaphor of humanity!
- lanstin 5mo agoThat sweet sweet nicotine.
- mschuster91 5mo ago> The real danger of allowing smoking on a hydrogen airship — and the reason it was strictly confined to the closely monitored smoking room — was the risk of a fire; I'd say... contrary, allowing smoking in a dedicated controlled place was the safer option. The real danger was not allowing smoking because if you ban smoking, people will smoke no matter if it's banned - and back then, there were a looooot more smokers, so a loooooot more opportunities for someone to behave utterly braindead. That's also why every modern airplane to this day has ashtrays in the lavatory. There WILL be someone smoking at some point, and better provide them with a safe option to discard the butt than risk having the person throw the butt in the trash bin where it can set the waste ablaze.
- bloomingeek 5mo agoYour reply is reasonable. I've always thought the biggest problem to almost anything is human. We sometimes make the most thoughtless decisions and justify them with the flimsiest of excuses. We marvel at the stubbornness of two year-olds, then ignore ourselves.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago> I've always thought the biggest problem to almost anything is human. Makes sense, "problem" is a human invention and without humans on the planet, there wouldn't really be any problems anymore.
- 47282847 5mo agoAh. I always thought it was because of flexibility and timespan of airplane use, but it sounds like you are right! Thanks. TIL. https://simpleflying.com/why-airplnes-ashtrays-lavatories https://simpleflying.com/why-airplnes-ashtrays-lavatories https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2026/04/28/airplane-ashtray-smoke/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2026/04/28/airplane-as...
- buildbot 5mo agoThere’s a video on the first link of a landing in Belgrade that’s deeply funny. “We departed late and arrived early, A Boeing 737 would never be able to do that” “Why are you reading out numbers to me like I am an old man”
- SoftTalker 5mo agoThe real danger was using hydrogen to float the airship.
- jodrellblank 5mo agoNo, the passengers were in a gondola off the bottom of the airship, the lift gas was concentrated at the top of the airship, some 100 feet above, above an asbestos ceiling. The real dangers were: - being early in the days of flying. One airship disaster (the British R101) was the airship being extended, not tested carefully, and rushed into service for a political deadline. Another had the vents sealed shut so it hit its altitude ceiling. The Graf Zeppelin was one of the safest aircraft ever flown - a million miles without accident in the 1930s when aeroplanes were crashing a lot. Even the Hindenburg disaster killed 35 people, most of its passengers and crew survived. - Using cow intestines stitched together by hand to make the Hydrogen lift cells. The stitching leaves holes which could let air mix with the lift gas. - Many airship accidents were related to mooring, and having humans grab onto mooring lines and having humans try to pull a 7 million cubic foot balloon against the wind and that going wrong. If we can now do high pressure Hydrogen powered cars, tanks of it in gas stations in urban areas and Hydrogen powered aircraft, and people think that can be safe, we ought to be able to achieve room temperature and pressure airship lift gas with it more safely than they could in the 1920s.
- hnbear 5mo agoFrom another page on the site: "The passenger accommodation aboard Hindenburg was contained within the hull of the airship (unlike Graf Zeppelin, whose passenger space was located in the ship’s gondola)." https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/interiors/ https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/interiors/
- willio58 5mo ago> The real danger was not allowing smoking because if you ban smoking, people will smoke no matter if it's banned. This same concept is why full prohibition never works. People who want to do something will find a way and it often comes at the cost of being more harmful to society than if they were allowed to do it in a controlled environment.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoThat's always what I've said too, so I'm now proposing to put all the "want to be murderers" together with folks who want suicide assistance. Make one move, get two results or whatever they say.
- paulpauper 5mo agoif cigarettes can destroy the airship you got bigger problems.
- Ekaros 5mo agoI believe real problem was the lighters. Not the cigarettes. And hydrogen was not that risky. Problem was more so that the envelop was too burnable.
- jodrellblank 5mo ago> "The real danger of allowing smoking on a hydrogen airship - was the risk of a fire" Maybe. They had diesel engines, 240 Volt and 24 Volt electric generators, 200 Watt battery powered radio transmitter, backup radio transmitter, a 5.7 million candle power searchlight, an electric oven and hob galley. It's not like there were no risk of heat or combustion anywhere else on the airship.
- charcircuit 5mo agoMake it illegal. No rational person would through their life away just to smoke.
- rrvsh 5mo agoFeels like this may run into a no true scotsman but this is demonstrably false if you look at the number of marijuana smokers in countries where they impose severe penalties (up to life) on them
- charcircuit 5mo agoI suspect that may be caused by poor enforcement allowing people to gamble with their life.
- protocolture 5mo agoWhat if an irrational person was aboard.
- Waterluvian 5mo agoIt’s really amazing just what extent people went to in order to smoke. Apparently people smoked on submarines for a while. And planes. And everywhere else. Smoking is just such a disease and it feels like only now are we kind of getting a handle on it.
- graceful6800 5mo agoSeveral years ago I had a brief stop at some airport-- maybe Atlanta? But they had an indoor smoking area. I smoked at the time so I followed the map, and you could see the smoking area from the balcony on the floor above. It was a glass cube maybe 10 feet across, and it was crammed full of people. Completely full, like those Japanese trains. And there was a crowd of people outside waiting to get in. I went outside. It was pretty nice, there was no one around.
- allenrb 5mo agoI’ve been told by someone who was in the service that when smoking was no longer allowed on submarines, it made a huge difference in the cleanliness of machinery and thus how much work was required to maintain it. Yeah, I’d love some of that goodness in my lungs, please.
- Stratoscope 5mo agoOf course there were smoking and non-smoking sections on airplanes. The same air recirculated through the entire airplane, and the non-smoking section began the very next row after the smoking section.
- kortilla 5mo agoAir isn’t recirculated on an airplane. It’s continually brought in from outside the aircraft
- helloplanets 5mo ago50% is recirculated, 50% is from the outside. Before the 80's it was 100% from the outside, though.
- CapitalistCartr 5mo agoWhen I was a kid, back eons ago, smoking was everywhere. People who didn't smoke had ashtrays for guests. Telling people to not smoke was simply not a thing. When I was about 16, some family friends put a small sign on their front door requesting people not smoke inside their house. I was shocked. I liked the idea, but I'd never seen that before, never even considered it. I recall wondering how many people would be offended enough to stop visiting.
- hliyan 5mo agoI remember this. Ashtrays were practically part of the furniture (especially coffee tables), even if you didn't have a smoker at home.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoAs was passing out cigarettes and cigars to all the guests, didn't see this so much in the USA but very common in Europe even into the late 1990s.
- pavlov 5mo agoElementary school children would make ashtrays as gifts for Father's Day. If dad didn't smoke, surely he had guests who did.
- hnlmorg 5mo agoYeah. I remember that too. It was such an odd thing to make at schools and kids clubs. But that’s through the lens of modern life.
- redwall_hp 5mo agoI vaguely remember living room chairs with built in ash trays (like how some have cup holders now). And in the late 90s, being on a plane and the chairs had a metal folding door on the armrest that exposed an ash tray. Smoking on planes was already gone or going away, but the hardware lingered for quite some time.
- paulorlando 5mo agoI remember years ago movie theaters in Hong Kong allowed smoking. If I remember right, it wasn't in the back, like on planes, but the seats to the one side of the center aisle.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- stmw 5mo agoTruly a better time - today we worry about using Rust 'unsafe' too often. They had a smoking room on a hydrogen airship! /j
- Hamuko 5mo agoI imagine the smoking room was partly a safety feature. It was pressurised and located somewhere where hydrogen wouldn't leak. So you now have all of the smokers do it somewhere safe instead of trying to light up in secret somewhere unsafe.
- noosphr 5mo agoOur brains are becoming more plastic by volume than neurons. I'm not sure we have a leg to stand on when lecturing the past.
- IAmBroom 5mo agoYou get bad side effects from smoking the next day (stale taste, off breath, tingling gums or coughing). And frankly, immediately: bad smell. We're still not even sure what nanoplastics do to human biochemistry. Hardly the same.
- keiferski 5mo agoI don’t know if it would help anyone else, but personally, watching the movie The Insider kind of permanently put me off from smoking. Jeffrey Wigand is/was an incredibly inspiring figure and I think of him every time I see cigarettes. https://youtu.be/MGOb29aePyc?is=CKyo1UM-dkiRHdWa https://youtu.be/MGOb29aePyc?is=CKyo1UM-dkiRHdWa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Wigand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Wigand
- gwbas1c 5mo agoEven though may parents didn't smoke, and there was a lot of anti-smoking education around me, I grew up around a lot of smokers. What did it for me was watching my uncle have a rather painful death in his 50s because he couldn't stop drinking and smoking. (He went into alcohol withdrawal in the hospital after lung surgery.) That being said, I did smoke a few when I was in my early 30s. Something about nicotine just put weird thoughts in my head a few days after smoking a cigarette: One day I was biking home and the thought "it would be a good idea to have a cigarette before making dinner" popped into my head. I never touched cigarettes after that. Cigarettes are more addictive than people who've never tried them realize. It's not just a matter of will power, something about nicotine manipulates your motivations in a very subconscious way.
- WalterBright 5mo agoI never smoked because I knew I'd like it. But there are a couple photos of me "smoking" as I was trying to look cool.
- iamalizard 5mo ago[dead]
- brcmthrowaway 5mo agoIs there any truth of Nicotine being a nootropic?
- Lockedin1 5mo ago[flagged]
- jibbers 5mo agoMaybe https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11350241/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11350241/
- mordae 5mo agoIt's a vasoconstrictor. Gets more blood up to the brain.
- heliosinc 5mo agoI'm all about non-nicotine focus pouches these days. Came acrosss a new one recently that has extended caffeine and 4-6 hrs of lock in
- brcmthrowaway 5mo agoLink?
- heliosinc 5mo agoyeah it's https://www.takeroon.com/ https://www.takeroon.com/
- gwbas1c 5mo agoOne interesting lesson from airships is about disruption and how people take old assumptions into new paradigms. Today we're used to being on plans for short periods of time. We get on, sit down, wait, and then arrive at our destination. Airships came about when long distance travel meant you were spending multiple days in a vehicle, either a train or boat. An airship was a place that was set up for you to spend a few days on it, so it was set up more like a boat, with a place to stay, lounge, and eat; than a plane where you don't stay on it for an extended time. We sometimes see this in new technologies where someone holds onto assumptions of the past.
- u1hcw9nx 5mo agoThe eastward trips took 53 to 78 hours, it resembled more boat or train trip than flight.
- aaron695 5mo ago[dead]
- c7b 5mo agoI felt a bit similar about electric cars with a trunk in the front where the engine would sit in an ICE car. But that's more about esthetic expectations, like the first cars looked similar to horse carriages.
- cf100clunk 5mo agoVW Beetle?
- elzbardico 5mo agoBut here the space also have the role of serving as a crumple zone in case of frontal collisions
- CarVac 5mo agoIf you can put something in it it doesn't count as crumple zone and the car has to be engineered with a separate crumple zone anyway.
- BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 5mo agoBack in the 50's tonsillectomies were a regular rite of passage for kids, especially in colder places where kids spent more time indoors exposed to smoke. A couple years after moving from Maiibu to Toronto, I had the surgery.
- Broken_Hippo 5mo agoThat wasn't because of smoke, though. It was common, in part, because antibiotics weren't nearly as good and in part because medicine wasn't so advanced. Turns out, it's good to keep tonsils in even if they get infected from time to time. https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/tonsillectomies-still-performed-more-selectively https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/tonsillectomies-stil...
- Barbing 5mo agoLast paragraph: >The smoking room was perhaps the most popular room on the ship, which is not surprising at a time when so many people smoked, but its popularity was no doubt enhanced because it was also the location of the [Hindenburg’s bar](link). That’s how you keep a reader on the site!
- doginasuit 5mo agoThis story reminds me of the game Oxygen Not Included. > The smoking room was kept at a higher pressure than the rest of the ship so that no leaking hydrogen could enter the room I haven't yet played any other game where air pressure in a room relative to the rooms surrounding it could mean the difference between life and death. Without really meaning to I gained an intuitive understanding of physics by just trying not to asphyxiate my dupes. Gold standard for edutainment.
- CaptainBanger 5mo agoYou might enjoy Hardspace: Shipbreaker. I assure you pressure differentials will be life or death!
- u1hcw9nx 5mo agoHindenburg was originally designed to use helium, but The US banned the export of helium. Helium was rare and expensive to manufacture and only the US made it in sufficient quantities.
- ziofill 5mo agoFor those who are interested: a very recent Stuff You Should Know podcast episode was about the Hindenburg disaster: https://stuffyoushouldknow.com/episode/the-hindenburg-disaster/ https://stuffyoushouldknow.com/episode/the-hindenburg-disast...
- lynguist 5mo agohttps://www.icao.int/sites/default/files/postalhistory/aviation_history_the_catapult_mail.htm https://www.icao.int/sites/default/files/postalhistory/aviat... Catapult mail service In the years immediately preceding Hindenburg (1928-1935), state of the art mail delivery service catapulted airplanes with mail while the ocean liner was still on sea. Hindenburg made that unnecessary.
- qzgrid37 5mo ago[dead]
- pseingatl 5mo agoIf you wait until age 60 before you start smoking, you'll get all the benefits of nicotine--weight loss, more energy, appetite suppression--and you won't live long enough to develop tobacco-related disease.
- IAmBroom 5mo agoCarcinogens hate this one weird trick!
- pbronez 5mo agoThis is a really lovely website. I had no idea that stamp collectors were a critical market for airships! > The polar journey, like other zeppelin flights, was largely financed by stamp collectors; Graf Zeppelin carried approximately 50,000 letters sent by philatelists, and made a water-landing to exchange mail with the Soviet icebreaker Malygin, which itself carried a large quantity of mail sent by stamp collectors.