Passenger Airship

For the first decades of the twentieth century, the rigid airship promised a future of luxurious long-distance flight. These were vast lighter-than-air craft built around a structural framework of girders, filled with cells of lifting gas, and capable of carrying passengers in comfort over distances that early airplanes could not yet manage. The most successful were the German Zeppelins, pioneered by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, whose first airship, LZ 1, flew in 1900.

The concept moved quickly from spectacle to scheduled service. The German company DELAG, founded in 1909, ran the world’s first airline to carry fare-paying passengers by air, using Zeppelins for sightseeing and transport before the First World War. After the war, the Graf Zeppelin (LZ 127) of 1928 became the format’s great proof of concept, flying more than a million miles, circling the globe in 1929, and establishing the first regular intercontinental passenger service across the South Atlantic to Brazil.

The Hindenburg (LZ 129) of 1936 represented the apex of the idea: a flying ocean liner with a dining room, lounge, and promenade decks, crossing the North Atlantic in roughly two and a half days. But the era was shadowed by catastrophe. Britain’s R101 crashed in 1930, and the American naval airships USS Akron and USS Macon were lost in 1933 and 1935. These disasters had already shaken confidence in the rigid airship before its most famous tragedy.

On May 6, 1937, the Hindenburg caught fire while landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey, and was destroyed in well under a minute, killing 35 of the 97 people aboard along with one member of the ground crew, 36 dead in all. The disaster was captured on film and in Herbert Morrison’s anguished radio commentary. Public confidence in passenger airships collapsed, and the format, already strained by accidents and rising airplane performance, came to an effective end.

The Edsel

The Edsel is the rare product whose name became a common noun for failure, a fate few flops ever achieve. Launched by Ford in 1957 as an entirely new mid-price marque, it arrived wrapped in more secrecy, market research, and advertising bravado than perhaps any car before it. Ford promised the public something revolutionary, then delivered a competent but unremarkable automobile with an unusual grille, and the gap between promise and product became the whole story.

Named for Edsel Ford, the late son of Henry Ford and a respected company president in his own right, the Edsel was conceived to fill a perceived hole in Ford’s lineup between the cheap Ford and the upscale Lincoln, the territory General Motors dominated with Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick. On paper, the logic was sound. In execution, almost everything that could go wrong did, and most of it had less to do with the car than with timing, expectations, and corporate self-sabotage.

The Edsel debuted into the teeth of the 1957-58 recession, which hit the mid-price segment hardest of all, just as buyers were starting to shift toward smaller, cheaper cars. Its build quality suffered because Edsels were assembled on existing Ford and Mercury lines by workers unfamiliar with the new model. Its lineup overlapped confusingly with the very Fords and Mercurys it was meant to complement. And its styling, particularly the vertical horse-collar grille, divided opinion sharply.

Ford had projected sales around 200,000 cars a year. It sold roughly 63,000 in the first model year and far fewer after that. The company killed the Edsel on November 19, 1959, after barely three model years, absorbing a reported loss in the range of $250 to $350 million. The car itself was not a disaster; the launch was, and the launch is what everyone remembered.