Around the World by Zeppelin, in 1929

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In August 1929, the airship Graf Zeppelin set off for a round-the-world tour.  Among the 20 passengers on board was Lady Grace Drummond-Hay, whose trip was paid for by the Hearst newspapers and whose assignment was to write about the venture from a woman’s perspective.  Lady Hay was somewhat disconcerted to find out that among the other passengers on the trip would be a journalist named Karl Henry von Wiegand, with whom she was deeply in love–Karl having broken off their relationship six months earlier.

Here’s a wonderful pseudo-documentary about the flight, with the story told from Lady Hay’s perspective.  I call it a pseudo-documentary because while the film is genuine, the narration is only partly taken from Hay’s articles and letters–part of it was created by the screenwriters—and there is at least one event that was fictionalized. Includes great film footage of New York, Friederichshafen, and Toyko.  Very much worth watching.

7 thoughts on “Around the World by Zeppelin, in 1929”

  2. At 1.5 hours I’ll have to watch that tomorrow.

    YouTube comments seem as a rule to brinkg out the most vulgar of people.

    I passege I always remember what from the wonderful book Unbroken, about the life (and survival) of Louis Zamperini.

    She describes the visit of the Graf Zepelin over Los Angeles (probably that same trip) and something like a solar eclipse as it passes over the city.

  3. i watched that and a pile of others. Youtube U has a lot of airship vids, fascinating. The flying boats are another interesting trip into the past.

    You can train the youtube beast by careful selection and it will feed you what you want till you get tired of it. ;)

  4. YouTube appears to have some kind of curse on it, making all commenters stupid and belligerent. It almost never fails.

  5. Let me help, UtubeU is universal so we get a bit of everything, and as humans are dumb, we get lots of that.

    But humans are also smart:

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYeF244yNGuFefuFKqxIAXw
    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvBqzzvUBLCs8Y7Axb-jZew
    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoxcjq-8xIDTYp3uz647V5A
    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo-3ThNQmPmQSQL_L6Lx1_w
    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtESv1e7ntJaLJYKIO1FoYw
    https://www.youtube.com/user/fermilab

    But wait there’s more, lots more. ;)

  6. Pen, I think your argument is that the dumbness (actually, I think it’s something worse than dumbness) has been there all along and media like YouTube are just making it more visible. I suspect this isn’t the case…I think there is considerably more free-floating anger than there was, say, a couple of decades ago.

  7. No David, I did not mean that dumbness is anything other than the normal babbling of humanity. Most of it is not worth listening to, just like most of TV is crap.

    What you can find on a universal platform, is all manner of expression, and some of it, is very much worth paying attentions to.

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