After Dark podcast on the R101 airship disaster

The latest edition of the BBC's After Dark podcast deals with the R101 airship disaster of 1930:

"It's like the Titanic, except you've never heard of it. And in a way, it's even weirder."

So says today's guest, Cautionary Tales' host, Tim Harford, about the disastrous story he's taking Anthony and Maddy through.

Airships were the ocean liners of the skies, and in the 1920s, Britain had ambitions to connect the Empire in this way. Until it all went tragically wrong.

I blogged about this myself back in 2022. There I suggested that the way the victims of the disaster lay in state in Westminster Hall might be a measure of the hopes the government had invested in this means of transport as a way of keeping up the Empire. From what Tim Harford says, I was right.

And he was as amazed as I was by this – the quotation comes from the Great Disasters site:

The most important part of the airship – the bit that provides that lift – is, obviously, the gas itself, and the giant gasbags holding it. They were painstakingly made from "gold-beater skin" – a particular membrane taken from an ox’s intestine. 

It had taken something like a million oxen to make the R101's gasbags, which were prepared on-site by a team of women who scraped, washed, stretched and glued them into their final form. 

The R101 design team had tested various other materials, but came to the conclusion that gold-beater skin, the tried and tested option, was the best then available.

As I wrote in my blog post:

A million oxen to make one airship? This conjures up a Dieselpunk world where the skies are filled with airships and whole continents are given over to raising the billions of oxen that demands.