title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: On 6 September 2017, Lucy Boynton was cast to play Mercury's long-term girlfriend, Mary Austin. Lindsey Stirling, Bryce Dallas Howard, Maria Bello and Ashley Johnson were also considered. On 11 September 2017, Mike Myers joined the cast to play EMI executive Ray Foster, and on 22 September 2017, Aaron McCusker was added to play Mercury's long-term boyfriend Jim Hutton. On 26 September 2017, it was announced that Aidan Gillen had been cast as John Reid, Queen's second manager, from 1975 to 1978, who took over from Norman Sheffield of Trident Studios; while Tom Hollander was set to play Jim Beach, Queen's third manager, who took over from John Reid in 1978. The film includes cameos by current Queen vocalist Adam Lambert as a truck driver and the film's editor John Ottman as a live TV director. Luke Deacon, son of John Deacon, also makes a cameo appearance as a college student, attending the pub where Smile plays.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: Pre-production began in July 2017 in the United Kingdom, with principal photography commencing in London in September 2017. Queen archivist Greg Brooks was instrumental in helping recreate each scene to make it as true to life as possible. He worked daily with Fox for months from the beginning, providing answers to questions. There were about a hundred extras, who were all individually scanned 360° and digitally replicated to imitate a larger crowd. The entire Live Aid performance was filmed on a giant set at the former airfield RAF Bovingdon, but in the final cut "We Will Rock You" and "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" were cut out.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: When Malek was contacted about playing Mercury, he had only a casual knowledge of Queen. To embody Mercury, Malek had to work many intense sessions with a movement coach (as well as learn to talk with prosthetic teeth). Malek's protruding teeth were crafted by artist Chris Lyons. Besides examining Mercury's movements, they also watched footage of Liza Minnelli, who was an inspiration to Mercury's stage moves. Malek took singing and piano lessons and had an accent coach. He said, "I had to re-create things he did on the fly, onstage. There were many days I said to myself, 'This is a lost cause.'" After finishing the film, Malek said that he became a "Queen super-fan", specifying, "I see Freddie as the best performer of all time... I never ceased to be astonished by this man." While Malek sang some parts in the film, producers inserted vocal stems from Queen songs as well as filling in parts with Canadian vocalist Marc Martel, a winner of the Queen Extravaganza Live Tour auditions.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: On 1 December 2017, "The Hollywood Reporter" reported that 20th Century Fox had temporarily halted production due to the "unexpected unavailability" of director Bryan Singer. Sources said that Singer had not returned to the set after the Thanksgiving week (20–26 November). Discussions began about replacing him. Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel stepped in to direct during Singer's non-showings. Singer's absence was reportedly due to "a personal health matter concerning Bryan and his family". With under three weeks left on the shoot, Singer requested a filming hiatus as his mother was extremely ill. Other sources claimed that Malek and the crew had grown tired of Singer's behaviour, who was reportedly arriving late to set and clashing with Malek. Tom Hollander briefly quit the film over issues with Singer but was convinced to return. On 4 December 2017, Singer was fired as director, with about two weeks of scheduled principal photography remaining.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: On 6 December 2017, Dexter Fletcher was announced as Singer's replacement and on 15 December, filming resumed with Fletcher directing. Fletcher later estimated that two-thirds of the principal photography had been completed when he joined the production, saying, "I came into the last few weeks of principal photography and editing and the bits and pieces like that... I was looking at two complete [acts] in a good film, and [I had to] not let it down."


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: On 30 January 2018, Gwilym Lee posted to social media that filming had finished. Visual effects were provided by DNEG and supervised by Paul Norris.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: According to the Directors Guild of America, only one director can be named for a film, and the DGA has sole control over who that will be. Although Fletcher replaced Singer on the set before filming was completed, with two weeks left (Singer hired the cast, crew and filmed most of the film), producer Graham King announced in June 2018 that Singer would receive the directing credit on the finished film. Fletcher received an executive producer credit.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: John Ottman, a frequent collaborator of Singer, edited the film's soundtrack. The film lacks an original underscore, deviating from previous Singer-Ottman collaborations on which the latter has also served as composer. An official soundtrack album was released by Hollywood Records and Virgin EMI Records on CD, cassette and digital formats on 19 October 2018. The album contains several Queen hits and 11 previously unreleased recordings, including five tracks from their 21-minute Live Aid performance in July 1985, which have never before been released in audio form. Vinyl releases (including a picture disc bundle) followed in February and April 2019. The soundtrack became the sixth-best-selling album of 2019.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: The film has attracted notable criticism for its historicity, as many major historical events surrounding the band are portrayed either out of order or inaccurately in the film; McCarten explained this was for dramatic effect, saying: "We're making a movie here, not a documentary." The visual blog "Information Is Beautiful" deduced that, while taking creative licence into account, the film was 79.9% accurate when compared to real-life events, calling it "a fairly truthful account represented in a massively compressed [and] edited timeline".


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: The world premiere of "Bohemian Rhapsody" took place in London at Wembley Arena, on 23 October 2018. It was released in the United Kingdom on 24 October 2018 in IMAX, and in the United States on 2 November 2018, by 20th Century Fox. The film had previously been scheduled for release on 25 December 2018.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: In November 2018, John Ottman announced in an interview that an extended version of the film with cut-out scenes may be released, in a yet unknown format.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: On 1 January 2019, it was announced that there would be special sing-along screenings simultaneously in cinemas across the United Kingdom with the first screening at Leicester Square's Prince Charles Cinema with others on 11 January 2019. There were also many sing-along screenings in South Korea and Japan.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: In China, the film had a limited release on 22 March 2019. Three minutes of the film was censored, including scenes depicting drugs and homosexuality. Part of Rami Malek's Oscar speech, where he referred to Freddie Mercury as "a gay man, an immigrant," was also censored in China.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: In Egypt, the film was subjected to several cuts before it was permitted to be screened. As Rami Malek is of Egyptian descent, his Oscar win for his portrayal of Freddie Mercury drew congratulations from Egyptian media and government figures. However, Neela Ghoshal of Human Rights Watch stated that the country deserved "an Oscar for hypocrisy" given its prohibition on homosexuals appearing in the media. Member of Parliament Mohamed Ismail criticised Malek's win, stating: "He is trying to [spread] homosexuality among the youth... The award has a specific goal, which is to corrupt morality in the Arab world. Rami Malek is a bad example. If he was in Egypt, he would have been hanged."


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released the film in the United States on DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray on 19 February 2019; with a digital version released 22 January. The UK digital release was scheduled for 23 February 2019, with DVD and Blu-ray/4K Ultra HD on 18 March 2019. The home release includes an extended version of the Live Aid sequence, a 16-minute featurette, a 22-minute documentary, and trailers.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: In the United Kingdom, it surpassed "" to become the fastest-selling digital download film of all time, selling 265,000 downloads in eight days. It also set the record for the biggest debut on physical disc formats, selling 465,000 discs in its first week. It went on to sell 853,000 units in four weeks, including 388,600 digital sales.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: In the United States, 73% of unit sales in the first week were on Blu-ray Disc, with 13% from the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray version. Home video sales in the United States and Canada are estimated to have generated over , including $19,333,115 in DVD sales and $41,562,971 in Blu-ray sales.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: The first trailer for the film was released on 15 May 2018 and with more than 5 million views in the first 24 hours, it was the top trending video on YouTube. Television writer and producer Bryan Fuller argued that the trailer favours Mercury's relationship with women as opposed to men, and also highlighted the absence of the singer's AIDS diagnosis from the synopsis. Instead, it's simply referred to as "a life-threatening illness". Executives stated that the film would acknowledge Mercury's gay relationships. With the release of the trailer, Queen reached three of the top 20 positions on the "Billboard" Hot Rock Songs chart: "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Another One Bites the Dust" and "We Are the Champions". All-in-all the studio spent $121 million promoting the film.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: On 11 June 2018, at CineEurope in Barcelona, an early showing of the film closed the show, with appearances by Rami Malek and producer Graham King and special appearances by Brian May and Roger Taylor, who were playing a concert of Queen + Adam Lambert in Barcelona.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: "Bohemian Rhapsody" grossed $216.7 million in the United States and Canada, and $694.1 million in other territories, for a total worldwide gross of $910.8 million, against a production budget of about $52 million.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: On 11 November, it surpassed "Straight Outta Compton" ($201.6 million) to become the highest-grossing musical biopic of all-time worldwide. "Bohemian Rhapsody" went on to set box office records for the highest-grossing biographical film of all time, and the highest-grossing LGBT film. It also set the record for the highest-grossing conventional drama film (it was surpassed by "Joker" one year later). It is Fox's fourth highest-grossing film, and their fifth highest outside of North America.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: "Deadline Hollywood" calculated the net profit of the film to be $350.8 million, when factoring together all expenses and revenue, making it the fourth most profitable release of 2018. However, in November 2021, after McCarten sued producer Graham King over lack of payments, it was revealed 20th Century Fox wrote down the film as a $51 million loss, an act attributed to Hollywood accounting.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: In the United Kingdom, the film had preview screenings on its opening night of 24 October 2018, grossing £1.62million () from 575 venues, with a per-screen average of £2,817 (). It went on to gross from 1,250 screens in its opening weekend, finishing first at the box office. It grossed another in its second weekend, remaining at number-one and grossing £20.4 million () through 12 days.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: In the United States and Canada, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was released alongside "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms" and "Nobody's Fool", and was originally projected to gross $26–30 million in its opening weekend. By the week of its release, weekend estimates had reached $35–40 million. It made $18.4 million on its first day, including $3.9 million from Thursday night previews. It went on to debut to $51.1 million, topping the box office and marking the second-best opening for a musical biographical picture, behind "Straight Outta Compton" ($60.2 million in August 2015). The film made $31.2 million in its second weekend, finishing second, behind newcomer "The Grinch", and $15.7 million in its third, finishing behind "" and "The Grinch".


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: In its fourth weekend the film made $13.8 million, and $19.3 million over the five-day Thanksgiving frame, finishing fifth. On 1 December, it passed $162 million at the domestic box office, surpassing "Straight Outta Compton" as the highest grossing musical biopic in the United States. In its 10th weekend of release the film was added to 199 theatres over the previous week for a total of 1,080, and made $2.4 million. In its 12th weekend of release the film made $2.3 million from 1,117 theatres, crossing the $200 million mark. In the film's 13th week of release, following the announcement of its five Oscar nominations, it was added back to an additional 246 theatres (for a total of 1,423) and made $2.6 million.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: In its second weekend of international release, the film topped the worldwide box office, grossing $72.5 million in international markets. New markets included France ($7.7 million), Mexico ($5.8 million), Germany ($5.7 million) and Australia ($5.7 million). By its fourth weekend the film was still holding strong, adding an additional $45.5 million from 78 markets, for a running total of $256.4 million. Through four weekends of international release, the film's largest markets were the UK ($45.3 million, passing "La La Land"), followed by South Korea ($24.5 million), France ($18.38 million), Australia ($16.8 million) and Mexico ($15.5 million). On 12 December, the film surpassed $433 million at the international box office, becoming the highest-grossing musical biopic ever overseas.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: The film became the biggest 2018 release in 13 international markets, including Japan ($88.6 million), Italy ($30.5 million) and the Netherlands ($19.3 million), . The film's largest overseas markets were in East Asia, with the largest-grossing market being Japan, where it became the highest-grossing film of 2018. The film crossed 7million tickets sold and grossed at the Japanese box office, with the IMAX version crossing , becoming the highest-grossing IMAX release ever in Japan. It also crossed there, and is the highest-grossing live-action musical film in Japan, passing "Beauty and the Beast" (2017). As of 31 March 2019, "Bohemian Rhapsody" has sold 9,220,250 tickets and grossed in Japan.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: In South Korea, the film debuted at number two at the box office and by the fourth week took over the number one spot. After a short drop for two weeks, the film reclaimed the number one spot in its seventh week, which is a first for a Hollywood film. As the second-largest grossing market outside of North America, the film has amassed $77 million, as of 1 February 2019, and has become the sixth highest-grossing foreign film ever in South Korea, with nearly 10 million tickets sold. It is the most successful musical film ever released in South Korea.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: The film grossed $29.4 million in Spain, $16.4 million in Russia and $14.4 million in Brazil, . In China, where the film received an art house release after having its content edited, it debuted to $11.6 million, setting the all-time record for a National Alliance of Arthouse Cinemas release.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of based on 419 reviews, and an average rating of . The website's critical consensus reads: ""Bohemian Rhapsody" hits a handful of high notes, but as an in-depth look at a beloved band, it offers more of a medley than a true greatest hits collection." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 49 out of 100, based on 50 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale, while PostTrak reported filmgoers gave it an 88% positive score and a 75% "definite recommend". The critical response to "Bohemian Rhapsody" made it one of the worst-reviewed films to win a Best Picture award at the Golden Globe Awards (lowest Rotten Tomatoes score since "Out of Africa" in 1986—60% compared to "Bohemian Rhapsody" 62% at the time of the awards), or to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards (lowest Rotten Tomatoes score since "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" in 2012—46% at the time of the awards).


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: Owen Gleiberman of "Variety" wrote: "Rami Malek does a commanding job of channeling Freddie Mercury's flamboyant rock-god bravura, but Bryan Singer's middle-of-the-road Queen biopic rarely lives up to the authenticity of its lead performance." Paul Whitington, writing for the "Irish Independent", gave the film 3/5 stars, saying: ""Bohemian Rhapsody" is not big on subtlety: it tells Freddie's story loudly, taking dramatic shortcuts, over-neatly conflating events and reducing most of the surrounding characters to single dimensions. Some of the dialogue's a bit heavy-handed too, but I must say I was thoroughly entertained."


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: For the "Evening Standard", Craig McLean wrote: ""Bohemian Rhapsody" is triumphant entertainment. The post-production special effects have done their job: the Live Aid scenes are convincingly epic. The actors have done their job, too, notably Malek, who oozes pure Mercury." For "Time", Stephanie Zacharek wrote: "In strict filmmaking terms, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is a bit of a mess. Some of its scenes connect awkwardly, and it hits every beat of disaster and triumphs squarely, like a gong. Yet if it has many of the problems we associate with 'bad' movies, it has more ragged energy than so many good ones, largely because of Rami Malek's performance as Mercury, all glitter and muscle and nerve endings." She described it as "a movie for sensualists, not quality-control experts".


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: Chief "Guardian" pop critic Alexis Petridis described the portrayal of Mercury as "sanitized", writing: ""Bohemian Rhapsody" is a film that plays so fast and loose with the truth, it ends up seeming faintly ridiculous: you start out nitpicking about minor chronological errors... and end up with your jaw on the floor." "Guardian" film critic Steve Rose described it as a "rock slog with a troubling moralistic subtext". Although he praised Malek's performance, David Ehrlich of IndieWire gave the film a grade of "D+", criticising Singer's direction and calling the film "royally embarrassing". He wrote: "Queen's music may have been unclassifiable, but their movie is as trite and textbook as it gets." He described the film as a "terrible and self-indulgent piece of revisionist history, where the legend is always prioritized over the truth, even when the truth was surely far more interesting."


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: For "The Spectator", Jasper Rees described "Bohemian Rhapsody" as "a succession of predigested clichés", writing "you are overcome by the sapping impression that almost nothing happened the way it's being presented." He concluded: "The costumes and wigs are splendid, and the songs are still up to snuff. But this homage to a showman is more famine than feast." Olly Richards wrote for "Empire" that the film was "a safe, competent, decidedly non-scandalous biopic. It treats the life of Freddie Mercury with cautious affection, happy to play within the rules when depicting a man who did anything but." However, he described Malek as "spectacular", concluding: "If the script hits a lot of bum notes, Malek is always perfectly in key." Peter Travers of "Rolling Stone" wrote: "In struggling to make a salable PG-13 movie out of an R-rated rock life, "Bohemian Rhapsody" leaves you feeling that something essential and elemental is missing", but said to put Malek "high on the list for best film performances of 2018," as the actor "digs so deep into the role that we can't believe we're not watching the real thing."


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: Dave Calhoun wrote for "Time Out": "It boasts a film-stealing, possessed performance by Rami Malek, who pouts, struts and quips as Mercury, turning the rest of the cast into bit-part players... The movie, though catchy and often seductive, is an act of brazen myth-making. Facts and chronology are tossed aside in favor of a messianic storyline... Much is left out, or fiddled with." He added, "don't expect anything more than a safe gloss over the Queen tale... its attitude toward sex and drugs is coy and uncomfortably close to the small-world thinking it claims to dismiss." Despite calling the film "uneven," "Chicago Tribune" film critic Katie Walsh stated: "Malek keeps it going with his sheer will and talent." In a negative review, Soumya Srivastava of the "Hindustan Times" still asserted that the character was "played to a toothy perfection by Rami Malek." Johnny Oleksinski of the "New York Post" was less impressed with Malek's performance, writing: "It's a surface-level performance — physically galvanizing, but with no substance."


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: The film received criticism for its portrayal of Mercury's gay relationships. Aja Romano wrote for "Vox": ""Bohemian Rhapsody" is a movie that consciously tries to position a gay man at its center while strategically disengaging with the 'gay' part as much as it can, flitting briefly over his emotional and sexual experiences and fixating on his platonic relationship with an ex-girlfriend instead." Likewise, Olly Richards wrote: "There are some poor, strange choices when deciding where to focus, not least committing so much time to his relationship with Mary Austin and virtually none to any happy gay relationship, romantic or otherwise." Owen Gleiberman wrote that the film "treats Freddie's life – his sexual-romantic identity, his loneliness, his reckless adventures in gay leather clubs – with kid-gloves reticence, so that even if the film isn't telling major lies, you don't feel you're fully touching the real story either."


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: Brian May responded to the critical reviews by stating that the "mistake that critics made was reviewing the trailer instead of reviewing the film. They jumped to conclusions. Once people stake their claim, it's hard for them to withdraw." Fraser Nelson, editor of "The Spectator", wrote: "Don't believe the critics. If you like Queen's music, see the Queen film," and he likened the critics' negative reaction to the film to the original reaction to the song "Bohemian Rhapsody" and the popular musical "We Will Rock You". Also writing for "The Spectator", Toby Young described the film's success at the Academy Awards as "a triumph over snobby film critics".


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: The film, which has received multiple awards and nominations, won four awards at the 91st Academy Awards for Best Actor (Rami Malek), Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing, making it the film with the most wins at the ceremony; it was also nominated for Best Picture, which it lost to "Green Book". At the 76th Golden Globe Awards, the film was nominated for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama and Best Motion Picture – Drama, winning both. At the 72nd British Academy Film Awards, the film received seven nominations, winning for Best Actor in a Leading Role and Best Sound. The film was also nominated for Best Theatrical Motion Picture at the 30th annual Producers Guild of America Awards, and received an award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role at the 25th Screen Actors Guild Awards.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: In the wake of the renewed sexual abuse allegations against director Bryan Singer, GLAAD withdrew "Bohemian Rhapsody"'s nomination for the year's GLAAD Media Award in the Outstanding Film – Wide Release category. On 6 February 2019, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts removed Singer's name from "Bohemian Rhapsody"'s nomination for the BAFTA Award for Best British Film.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: When the film was nominated and won awards for Best Editing, several sequences were criticised online for poor editing and continuity errors. Editor John Ottman, aware of these lapses, explained that they were the result of mixing scenes that had been shot by Singer and Fletcher, as well as in response to the producers' notes and test audience feedback. He wished he could have handled them differently.


title: Bohemian Rhapsody (film)

text: In August 2021, guitarist Brian May revealed that there were ideas being thrown around for a sequel to "Bohemian Rhapsody", though it would be a matter of topping the original and could possibly take years to get the screenplay right.


title: Red states and blue states

text: Starting with the 2000 United States presidential election, the terms "red state" and "blue state" have referred to U.S. states whose voters vote predominantly for one party — the Republican Party in red states and the Democratic Party in blue states — in presidential and other statewide elections. Examining patterns within states reveals that the reversal of the two parties' geographic bases has happened at the state level, but it is more complicated locally, with urban-rural divides associated with many of the largest changes.


title: Red states and blue states

text: All states contain considerable amounts of both liberal and conservative voters (i.e., they are "purple") and only appear blue or red on the electoral map because of the winner-take-all system used by most states in the Electoral College. However, the perception of some states as "blue" and some as "red" was reinforced by a degree of partisan stability from election to election — from the 2000 election to the 2004 election, only three states changed "color"; and as of 2020, 35 out of 50 states have voted for the same party in every presidential election since the red-blue terminology was popularized in 2000, with only 15 having swung between the 2000 and 2020 election. This is still a substantial difference from the period 1960 to 1980 when every state, save for Arizona, voted for each party at least once. Although many red states and blue states stay in the same category for long periods, they may also switch from blue to red or from red to blue over time.


title: Red states and blue states

text: The colors red and blue are also featured on the United States flag. Traditional political mapmakers, at least throughout the 20th century, had used blue to represent the modern-day Republicans, as well as the earlier Federalist Party. This may have been a holdover from the Civil War, during which the predominantly Republican north was considered However, at that time, a maker of widely-sold maps accompanied them with blue pencils in order to mark Confederate force movements, while red was for the union.


title: Red states and blue states

text: Later, in the 1888 presidential election, Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison used maps that coded blue for the Republicans, the color perceived to represent the Union and "Lincoln's Party", and red for the Democrats. The parties themselves had no official colors, with candidates variously using either or both of the national color palette of red and blue (white being unsuitable for printed materials).


title: Red states and blue states

text: There was one historical use, associated with boss rule, of blue for Democrats and red for Republicans: during the late 19th century and early 20th century, Texas county election boards used color-coding to help Spanish-speaking and illiterate voters identify the parties; however, this system was not applied consistently in Texas and was not replicated in any other state. In 1908, "The New York Times" printed a special color map, using blue for Democrats and yellow for Republicans, to detail Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 electoral victory. That same year, a color supplement included with a July issue of "The Washington Post" used red for Republican-favoring states, blue for Democratic-favoring states, yellow for "doubtful" states and green for territories that did not have a presidential vote.


title: Red states and blue states

text: The 21st-century association of colors in American politics is contrary to the long-standing conventions of political color in most other countries whereby red symbols (such as the red flag or red star) are associated with leftist politics. As late as the 1990s, Democrats were often represented by red and Republicans by blue. According to "The Washington Post", journalist Tim Russert invented these terms during his televised coverage of the 2000 United States presidential election. The 2000 election was not the first during which the news media used colored maps to depict voter preferences in the various states, but it was the first time the current red-blue terminology was used. In previous elections, the color assignments or even the actual colors used were often different.


title: Red states and blue states

text: The advent of color television in America during the late 1950s and early 1960s prompted television news reporters to rely on color-coded electoral maps, though sources conflict as to the conventions they used. One source claims that in the elections prior to 2000 every state that voted for Democratic candidates but one had been coded red. It further claims that from 1976 to 2004 in an attempt to avoid favoritism in color-coding the broadcast networks standardized the convention of alternating every four years between blue and red the color used for the incumbent president's party.


title: Red states and blue states

text: According to another source, in 1976, John Chancellor, the anchorman for "NBC Nightly News", asked his network's engineers to construct a large illuminated map of the United States. The map was placed in the network's election-night news studio. If Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate that year, won a state, it was lit in red whereas if Gerald Ford, the incumbent Republican president, won a state, it was lit The feature proved to be so popular that, four years later, all three major television networks used colors to designate the states won by the presidential candidates, though not all using the same color scheme. NBC continued its color scheme (blue for Republicans) NBC newsman David Brinkley famously referred to the 1980 election map outcome showing Republican Ronald Reagan's 44-state landslide in blue as resembling a "suburban


title: Red states and blue states

text: Since the 1984 election, CBS has used the opposite scheme: blue for Democrats, red for Republicans. ABC used yellow for Republicans and blue for Democrats in 1976, then red for Republicans and blue for Democrats in 1980, 1984, and 1988. In 1980, when John Anderson had a relatively well publicized campaign as an independent candidate, at least one network indicated provisionally that they would use yellow if he were to win a state. Similarly, at least one network would have used yellow to indicate a state won by Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, though neither of them did claim any states in any of these years.


title: Red states and blue states

text: By 1996, color schemes were relatively mixed, as CNN, CBS, ABC, and "The New York Times" referred to Democratic states with the color blue and Republican ones as red, while "Time" and "The Washington Post" used the opposite scheme. NBC used the color blue for the incumbent party, which is why blue represented the Democrats in 2000.


title: Red states and blue states

text: In the days after the 2000 election, the outcome of which was unknown for some time after election day, major media outlets began conforming to the same color scheme because the electoral map was continually in view, and conformity made for easy and instant viewer comprehension. On election night that year, there was no coordinated effort to code Democratic states blue and Republican states red; the association gradually emerged. Partly as a result of this eventual and near-universal color-coding, the terms "red states" and "blue states" entered popular use in the weeks after the 2000 presidential election. After the results were final with the Republican George W. Bush winning, journalists stuck with the color scheme, as "The Atlantic"'s December 2001 cover story by David Brooks entitled, "One Nation, Slightly Divisible", illustrated.


title: Red states and blue states

text: Thus, red and blue became fixed in the media and in many people's minds, despite the fact that the Democratic and Republican parties had not officially chosen colors. Some Republicans argue the GOP should retain its historic association with blue, since most center-right parties worldwide are associated with blue. On March 14, 2014, the California Republican Party officially rejected red and adopted blue as its color. Archie Tse, "The New York Times" graphics editor who made the choice when the "Times" published its first color presidential election map in 2000, provided a nonpolitical rationale for retaining the red–Republican link, explaining that "Both 'Republican' and 'red' start with the letter 'R.'"


title: Red states and blue states

text: There are several problems in creating and interpreting election maps. Popular vote data are necessarily aggregated at several levels, such as counties and states, which are then colored to show election results. Maps of this type are termed choropleth maps, which have several well-known problems that can result in interpretation bias. One problem occurs when areal units differ in size and significance, as is the case with election maps. These maps give extra visual weight to larger areal units, whether by county or state. This problem is compounded if the units are not equally significant. A large county or state in area may have fewer voters than a small one in area, for example. Some maps attempt to account for this by using cartogram methods, but the resulting distortion can make such maps difficult to read. Another problem relates to data classification. Election maps often use a two-class color scheme (red and blue), which results in a map that is easy to read but is very generalized. Some maps use more classes, such as shades of red and blue to indicate the degree of election victory. These maps provide a more detailed picture but themselves have various problems associated with classification of data. The cartographer must choose how many classes to use and how to divide the data into those classes. While there are various techniques available, the choice is essentially arbitrary. The look of a map can vary significantly depending on the classification choices. The choices of color and shading likewise affect the map's appearance. Further, all election maps are subject to the interpretation error known as the ecological fallacy.


title: Red states and blue states

text: Finally, there are problems associated with human perception. Large areas of color appear more saturated than small areas of the same color. A juxtaposition of differing colors and shades can result in contrast misperceptions. For example, due to the simultaneous contrast effect, the Bezold effect, and other factors, an area shaded light red surrounded by areas shaded dark red will appear even lighter. Differing shades of red and blue compound this effect.


title: Red states and blue states

text: Cartographers have traditionally limited the number of classes so that it is always obvious which class a color shade represents. Some election maps, however, have violated this tradition by simply coloring each areal unit with a red-blue mixture linked to voting ratio data—resulting in an "unclassified choropleth map". These "purple maps" are useful for showing the highly mixed nature of voting, but are extremely difficult to interpret in detail. The lack of clear classes make these purple maps prone to the problems of color perception described above. However, there are pros and cons to both classified and unclassified choropleth maps. Each tend to show some patterns well while obscuring others. All these facts should be taken into account when looking at election maps.


title: Red states and blue states

text: The paradigm has been criticised on several fronts. Many argue that assigning partisanship to states is only really useful as it pertains to the Electoral College, as well as (more recently) the Senate, primarily a winner-take-all system of elections (with the exceptions of Nebraska and Maine).


title: Red states and blue states

text: The Democratic or Republican party of a particular state may have policies that depart—sometimes greatly—from those of the national party, sometimes causing that state to favor one party in state and local elections and the other in presidential elections. This is most evident in the Southern United States, where the state Democratic Party organizations tend to be more conservative than the national party, especially on social issues. Likewise, Republicans have elected many statewide officeholders in states that are very Democratic for presidential elections, such as Massachusetts, Illinois, Maryland, Vermont, and New Jersey.


title: Red states and blue states

text: The elections in Arkansas as well as West Virginia in 2004 were won by Republican President George W. Bush, but Democrats at the time held all four U.S. Senate seats and majorities of elected executive officeholders in those states, including the governorship of the latter. Similarly, Tennessee was won by Bush in both 2000 and 2004, but going into 2004, its governor was a Democrat and both chambers of the state legislature were controlled by Democrats as well. The converse can also be true, as in the case of Maine, which had two Republican U.S. senators, but Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry won the state's electoral votes. Likewise, Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Hawaii all voted for Democrat Kerry by wide margins, but all had Republican governors at the time.


title: Red states and blue states

text: In his address before the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Barack Obama spoke on the issue of blue states and red states, saying: "The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into red states and blue states — red states for Republicans, and blue states for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and have gay friends in the red states. … We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."


title: Red states and blue states

text: In April 2008, Republican presidential nominee John McCain predicted that the presidential election that November would not follow the red-state-blue-state pattern, saying, "I'm not sure that the old red state, blue state scenario that prevailed for the last several elections works. I think most of these states that we have either red or blue are going to be up for grabs." Arguably, this eventually proved to be somewhat true, but not in McCain's favor as Obama won three "red" states that had not voted Democratic in many years, namely Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana along with a part of deep red Nebraska, via the state's (much less conservative as a whole) second congressional district. Obama also came close to winning Missouri and Montana, losing both by a small margin. The only deviations from the preexisting red-blue paradigm were all in Obama's favor. In the 3 presidential elections since 2008, in those of 2012 and 2016, Nebraskans voted for Republican candidates, and in 2020, the 2nd district voted for the Democrats.


title: Red states and blue states

text: A purple state refers to a swing state where both Democratic and Republican candidates receive many votes without an overwhelming majority for either party. Purple states are also often referred to as "battleground" states.


title: Red states and blue states

text: The demographic and political applications of the terms have resulted in a temptation to presume this arbitrary classification is a definite and fundamental cultural division. Given the general nature and common perception of the two parties, "red state" implies a conservative region or a more conservative American, and "blue state" implies a more liberal region or a more liberal American. But the distinction between the two groups of states is less simplistic. The analysis that suggests political, cultural and demographic differences between the states is more accurate when applied to smaller geographical areas.


title: Red states and blue states

text: Traditionally, the practice of designating a U.S. state as red or blue is based on the first-past-the-post winner-take-all system employed for presidential elections by 48 of the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Electoral law in Maine and Nebraska makes it possible for those states to divide their electoral votes: winner-take-all both by congressional district and statewide.


title: Red states and blue states

text: Despite the prevalent winner-take-all practice, the minority always gets a sizable vote. Nearly every town, city and patch of farmland in the country is "purple", a mixture of people, each of whose own political preferences can vary. Individually and collectively, they are not reducible to red or blue.


title: Red states and blue states

text: Robert Vanderbei at Princeton University made the first "Purple America" map after the 2000 presidential election. It attempts to represent the margin of victory in each county by coloring each with a shade between true blue and true red. Due to the general absence of overwhelming victories, this technique results in mostly shades. After the 2004 election, Vanderbei and then others made similar maps summarizing the results. Quickly thereafter, the term "Purple America" entered the public lexicon as a way of stating that the United States is not as divided as the political pundits would have the people believe.


title: Red states and blue states

text: Cartograms developed by Gastner, Shalizi, and Newman at the University of Michigan provide another way to depict election results, which change from a red-blue paradigm to one of shades of purple.


title: Red states and blue states

text: Forty-seven of the 50 states were consistent in voting for George W. Bush or his Democratic opponent in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The exceptions were New Mexico (Al Gore in 2000 and Bush in 2004), Iowa (Gore in 2000 and Bush in 2004), and New Hampshire (Bush in 2000 and Kerry in 2004). The 2004 election showed two of these three states to be true to the presidential preferences of their respective regions, creating a greater regional separation; thus, an argument that the country was more divided from the 2000 election. All three of those states were very close in both elections. In 2008, Obama won in Iowa and New Hampshire by more than nine percentage points, and New Mexico by double digits.


title: Red states and blue states

text: During the Bush administration, the red-blue map was criticized by some for exaggerating the perceived support for President Bush. In the 2000 election, Bush received a smaller share of the popular vote than Al Gore, and four years later defeated John Kerry by this count by less than two and a half percentage points. However, because of the large geographical size of many states in the Central and Southern United States, the color-coded map appeared to show great support for Bush and the Republicans with smaller outliers of Democratic support on the coasts and near the Great Lakes.


title: Red states and blue states

text: In fact, many of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states which voted for Bush are relatively sparsely populated (Nebraska, for instance, has a population similar to the island of Manhattan). While the blue states represented a comparatively small geographic area, they contained large populations, which made President Bush's national endorsement less than the red–blue map would seem to indicate. Various different maps, such as ones which coded states based on the strength of their support for one candidate or another, ones which gave results based on county, or ones which displayed states according to the size of their population, were proposed as correctives to this perceived flaw.


title: Red states and blue states

text: Feelings of cultural and political polarization between red and blue states, which have gained increased media attention since the 2004 election, have resulted in increased mutual feelings of alienation and enmity. The polarization has been present for only four close elections (2000, 2004, 2016, and 2020). One trend that has been true for several election cycles is that states that vote Republican tend to be more rural and more sparsely populated (thus having fewer electoral votes) than states that vote Democratic.


title: Red states and blue states

text: Polarization is more evident on a county scale with the growing percentage of the U.S. electorate living in "landslide counties", counties where the popular vote margin between the Democratic and Republican candidate is 20 percentage points or greater.


title: Red states and blue states

text: In 1976, only 27 percent of U.S. voters lived in landslide counties, which increased to 39 percent by 1992. Nearly half of U.S. voters resided in counties that voted for George W. Bush or John Kerry by 20 percentage points or more in 2004. In 2008, 48 percent of U.S. voters lived in such counties, which increased further to 50 percent in 2012 and to 61 percent in 2016. In 2020, 58 percent of U.S. voters lived in landslide counties. At the same time, the 2020 U.S. presidential election marked the ninth consecutive presidential election where the victorious major party nominee did not win a popular vote majority by a double-digit margin over the losing major party nominee(s), continuing the longest sequence of such presidential elections in U.S. history that began in 1988 and in 2016 eclipsed the previous longest sequences from 1836 through 1860 and from 1876 through 1900.


title: Red states and blue states

text: Although the Electoral College determines the presidential election, a more precise measure of how the country actually voted may be better represented by either a county-by-county or a district-by-district map. By breaking the map down into smaller units (including many blue counties lying next to red counties), these maps tend to display many states with a purplish hue, thus demonstrating that an ostensibly blue or red state may, in fact, be closely divided. Note that election maps of all kinds are subject to errors of interpretation.


title: Red states and blue states

text: These county-by-county and district-by-district maps reveal that the true nature of the divide is between urban areas and inner suburbs and rural and exurban areas. In the 2008 election, most voters in most rural counties voted for Republican John McCain. Minnesota, New York, and Maryland, all of which Obama won state-wide, show this example with some exceptions. Inversely, in solidly red states, most voters in most urban counties voted for Democrat Barack Obama; good examples for this would be Dallas County, Texas and Fulton County, Georgia (the locations of major U.S. cities Dallas and Atlanta, respectively). Both provided Obama with double-digit margins of victory over McCain. An even more detailed precinct-by-precinct breakdown demonstrates that in many cases, large cities voted for Obama, and their suburbs were divided.


title: Red states and blue states

text: In the 2008 elections, both parties received at least 40% from all sizable socioeconomic demographics, except that McCain (Republican) received 37% from voters earning $15,000–$30,000, and 25% from voters earning under $15,000, according to exit polling. In 2008, college graduates were divided equally; those with postgraduate degrees voted for Obama by an 18% margin. By household income, Obama got a majority of households with less than $50,000 in annual income.


title: Red states and blue states

text: McCain got a slight majority (52% to 47%) of households consisting of married couples; Obama led almost 2–1 (65% to 33%) among unmarried voters. McCain held the more suburban and rural areas of both the red and blue states, while Obama received the large majority of the urban city areas in all the states. Independent candidate Ralph Nader did not win any electoral votes, yet he received 2% of the vote of voters from high-income households and voters with graduate degrees.


title: Red states and blue states

text: As a group, adults younger than age 40 voted for Obama. More married men voted for McCain, but more single men voted for Obama. Generally, the same held true for married versus single women, but a greater percentage of women overall voted for Obama than for McCain. Catholic and Protestant Christians were more likely to vote for McCain than for Obama, whereas voters of other faiths, as well as secular atheist and agnostic voters, predominantly favored Obama. White, middle-aged, Christian, married males made up McCain's largest constituency.


title: Red states and blue states

text: The "Democratic blue" and "Republican red" color scheme is now part of the lexicon of American journalism.


title: Red states and blue states

text: Neither party national committee has officially accepted these color designations, though informal use by each party is becoming common. Both parties have since adopted logos that use their respective colors (a blue "D" for Democrats and a red "GOP" for Republicans). National conventions for both major parties increasingly feature the parties' respective colors, from the colors emphasized on convention podiums to the color conventioneers can be seen wearing on the delegate floor. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee also alluded the color scheme when it launched a national "Red to Blue Program" in 2006.


title: Red states and blue states

text: The scheme has found acceptance and implementation from the U.S. federal government as the Federal Election Commission report for the 2004 presidential election uses the red-Republican and blue-Democratic scheme for its electoral map.


title: Red states and blue states

text: The choice of colors in this divide may appear counter-intuitive to non-American observers, as in most countries, red is associated with socialist, communist, or social democratic parties, while blue is associated with conservative parties. For example, the major center-right conservative parties in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Italy, Spain and France all use blue or its shades (whether officially or unofficially) whereas the major socialist, communist, or social democratic parties in each country are associated with red. If the U.S. followed such a pattern, blue would be used for the Republicans and red for the Democrats. However, the current U.S. scheme has become so ingrained in the American election system that foreign sources who cover U.S. elections, such as the BBC, "Der Spiegel" and "El Mundo" follow with the red-Republican, blue-Democratic scheme for U.S. elections.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: The "Hindenburg" disaster was an airship accident that occurred on May 6, 1937, in Manchester Township, New Jersey, United States. The German passenger airship LZ 129 "Hindenburg" caught fire and was destroyed during its attempt to dock with its mooring mast at Naval Air Station Lakehurst. The accident caused 35 fatalities (13 passengers and 22 crewmen) from the 97 people on board (36 passengers and 61 crewmen), and an additional fatality on the ground.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: The disaster was the subject of newsreel coverage, photographs and Herbert Morrison's recorded radio eyewitness reports from the landing field, which were broadcast the next day. A variety of theories have been put forward for both the cause of ignition and the initial fuel for the ensuing fire. The publicity shattered public confidence in the giant, passenger-carrying rigid airship and marked the abrupt end of the airship era.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: The "Hindenburg" made 10 trips to the United States in 1936. After opening its 1937 season by completing a single round-trip passage to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in late March, the "Hindenburg" departed from Frankfurt, Germany, on the evening of May 3, on the first of 10 round trips between Europe and the United States that were scheduled for its second year of commercial service. American Airlines had contracted with the operators of the "Hindenburg" to shuttle the passengers from Lakehurst to Newark for connections to airplane flights.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Except for strong headwinds that slowed its progress, the Atlantic crossing of the "Hindenburg" was unremarkable until the airship attempted an early-evening landing at Lakehurst three days later on May 6. Although carrying only half its full capacity of passengers (36 of 70) and crewmen (61, including 21 crewman trainees) during the flight accident, the "Hindenburg" was fully booked for its return flight. Many of the passengers with tickets to Germany were planning to attend the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in London the following week.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: The airship was hours behind schedule when it passed over Boston on the morning of May 6, and its landing at Lakehurst was expected to be further delayed because of afternoon thunderstorms. Advised of the poor weather conditions at Lakehurst, Captain Max Pruss charted a course over Manhattan Island, causing a public spectacle as people rushed out into the street to catch sight of the airship. After passing over the field at 4:00 p.m., Captain Pruss took passengers on a tour over the seasides of New Jersey while waiting for the weather to clear. After finally being notified at 6:22 p.m. that the storms had passed, Pruss directed the airship back to Lakehurst to make its landing almost half a day late. As this would leave much less time than anticipated to service and prepare the airship for its scheduled departure back to Europe, the public was informed that they would not be permitted at the mooring location or be able to visit aboard the "Hindenburg" during its stay in port.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Around 7:00 p.m. local time, at an altitude of , the "Hindenburg" made its final approach to the Lakehurst Naval Air Station. This was to be a high landing, known as a "flying moor" because the airship would drop its landing ropes and mooring cable at a high altitude, and then be winched down to the mooring mast. This type of landing maneuver would reduce the number of ground crewmen but would require more time. Although the high landing was a common procedure for American airships, the "Hindenburg" had performed this maneuver only a few times in 1936 while landing in Lakehurst.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: At 7:09 p.m., the airship made a sharp full-speed left turn to the west around the landing field because the ground crew was not ready. At 7:11 p.m., it turned back toward the landing field and valved gas. All engines idled ahead and the airship began to slow. Captain Pruss ordered aft engines full astern at 7:14 p.m. while at an altitude of , to try to brake the airship.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: At 7:17 p.m., the wind shifted direction from east to southwest, and Captain Pruss ordered a second sharp turn starboard, making an s-shaped flightpath towards the mooring mast. At 7:18 p.m., as the final turn progressed, Pruss ordered 300, 300, and 500  kg (660, 660, and 1100 lb) of water ballast in successive drops because the airship was stern-heavy. The forward gas cells were also valved. As these measures failed to bring the ship in trim, six men (three of whom were killed in the accident) were then sent to the bow to trim the airship.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: At 7:21 p.m., while the "Hindenburg" was at an altitude of , the mooring lines were dropped from the bow; the starboard line was dropped first, followed by the port line. The port line was overtightened as it was connected to the post of the ground winch. The starboard line had still not been connected. A light rain began to fall as the ground crew grabbed the mooring lines.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: At 7:25 p.m., a few witnesses saw the fabric ahead of the upper fin flutter as if gas was leaking. Others reported seeing a dim blue flame – possibly static electricity, or St. Elmo's Fire – moments before the fire on top and in the back of the ship near the point where the flames first appeared. Several other eyewitness testimonies suggest that the first flame appeared on the port side just ahead of the port fin, and was followed by flames that burned on top. Commander Rosendahl testified to the flames in front of the upper fin being "mushroom-shaped". One witness on the starboard side reported a fire beginning lower and behind the rudder on that side. On board, people heard a muffled detonation and those in the front of the ship felt a shock as the port trail rope overtightened; the officers in the control car initially thought the shock was caused by a broken rope.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: At 7:25 p.m. local time, the "Hindenburg" caught fire and quickly became engulfed in flames. Eyewitness statements disagree as to where the fire initially broke out; several witnesses on the port side saw yellow-red flames first jump forward of the top fin near the ventilation shaft of cells 4 and 5. Other witnesses on the port side noted the fire actually began just ahead of the horizontal port fin, only then followed by flames in front of the upper fin. One, with views of the starboard side, saw flames beginning lower and farther aft, near cell 1 behind the rudders. Inside the airship, helmsman Helmut Lau, who was stationed in the lower fin, testified hearing a muffled detonation and looked up to see a bright reflection on the front bulkhead of gas cell 4, which "suddenly disappeared by the heat". As other gas cells started to catch fire, the fire spread more to the starboard side and the ship dropped rapidly. Although the landing was being filmed by cameramen from four newsreel teams and at least one spectator, with numerous photographers also being at the scene, no footage or photographs are known to exist of the moment the fire started.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Wherever the flames started, they quickly spread forward first consuming cells 1 to 9, and the rear end of the structure imploded. Almost instantly, two tanks (it is disputed whether they contained water or fuel) burst out of the hull as a result of the shock of the blast. Buoyancy was lost on the stern of the ship, and the bow lurched upwards while the ship's back broke; the falling stern stayed in trim.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: As the tail of the "Hindenburg" crashed into the ground, a burst of flame came out of the nose, killing 9 of the 12 crew members in the bow. There was still gas in the bow section of the ship, so it continued to point upward as the stern collapsed down. The cell behind the passenger decks ignited as the side collapsed inward, and the scarlet lettering reading "Hindenburg" was erased by flames as the bow descended. The airship's gondola wheel touched the ground, causing the bow to bounce up slightly as one final gas cell burned away. At this point, most of the fabric on the hull had also burned away and the bow finally crashed to the ground. Although the hydrogen had finished burning, the "Hindenburg" diesel fuel burned for several more hours. In the face of this catastrophe, Chief Petty Officer Frederick J. “Bull” Tobin, in command of the Navy landing party for the airship, and a survivor of the crashed American military airship, USS "Shenandoah", shouted the famous order, “Navy men, Stand fast!!” to successfully rally his personnel to conduct rescue operations despite the considerable danger from the flames.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: The time that it took from the first signs of disaster to the bow crashing to the ground is often reported as 32, 34 or 37 seconds. Since none of the newsreel cameras were filming the airship when the fire first started, the time of the start can only be estimated from various eyewitness accounts and the duration of the longest footage of the crash. One careful analysis by NASA's Addison Bain gives the flame front spread rate across the fabric skin as about at some points during the crash, which would have resulted in a total destruction time of about 16 seconds (245m/15 m/s=16.3 s).


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Some of the duralumin framework of the airship was salvaged and shipped back to Germany, where it was recycled and used in the construction of military aircraft for the "Luftwaffe", as were the frames of the LZ 127 "Graf Zeppelin" and LZ 130 "Graf Zeppelin II" when both were scrapped in 1940.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: In the days after the disaster, an official board of inquiry was set up at Lakehurst to investigate the cause of the fire. The investigation by the US Commerce Department was headed by Colonel South Trimble Jr, while Hugo Eckener led the German commission.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: The disaster was well-documented. Heavy publicity about the first transatlantic passenger flight of the year by Zeppelin to the United States had attracted a large number of journalists to the landing. Thus many news crews were on-site at the time of the airship exploding, and so there was a significant amount of newsreel coverage and photographs, as well as Herbert Morrison's eyewitness report for radio station WLS in Chicago, a report that was broadcast the next day.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Parts of Morrison's broadcast were later dubbed onto newsreel footage. That gave the impression that the words and film were recorded together, but that was not the case.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: The newsreel footage was shot by four newsreel camera teams: Pathé News, Movietone News, Hearst News of the Day, and Paramount News. Al Gold of Fox Movietone News later received a Presidential Citation for his work. One of the most widely circulated photographs of the disaster (see photo at top of article), showing the airship crashing with the mooring mast in the foreground, was photographed by Sam Shere of International News Photos. When the fire started he did not have the time to put the camera to his eye and shot the photo "from the hip". Murray Becker of Associated Press photographed the fire engulfing the airship while it was still on even keel using his 4 x 5 Speed Graphic camera. His next photograph (see right), shows flames bursting out of the nose as the bow telescoped upwards. In addition to professional photographers, spectators also photographed the crash. They were stationed in the spectators' area near Hangar No. 1, and had a side-rear view of the airship. Customs broker Arthur Cofod Jr. and 16 year-old Foo Chu both had Leica cameras with high-speed film, allowing them to take a larger number of photographs than the press photographers. Nine of Cofod's photographs were printed in "Life" magazine, while Chu's photographs were shown in the "New York Daily News".


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: The newsreels and photographs, along with Morrison's passionate reporting, shattered public and industry faith in airships and marked the end of the giant passenger-carrying airships. Also contributing to the downfall of Zeppelins was the arrival of international passenger air travel and Pan American Airlines. Heavier-than-air aircraft regularly crossed the Atlantic and Pacific much faster than the 130 km/h (80 mph) speed of the "Hindenburg". The one advantage that the "Hindenburg" had over such aircraft was the comfort that it afforded its passengers.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: In contrast to the media coverage in the United States, media coverage of the disaster in Germany was more subdued. Although some photographs of the disaster were published in newspapers, the newsreel footage was not released until after World War II. Additionally, German victims were memorialized in a similar manner to fallen war heroes, and grassroots movements to fund zeppelin construction (as happened after the 1908 crash of the "LZ 4") were expressly forbidden by the Nazi government.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: There had been a series of other airship accidents prior to the "Hindenburg" fire; many were caused by bad weather. The "Graf Zeppelin" had flown safely for more than 1.6 million kilometers (1.0 million miles), including the first circumnavigation of the globe by an airship. The Zeppelin company's promotions had prominently featured the fact that no passenger had been injured on any of its airships.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: There were a total of 35 deaths out of 97 people on the airship, including 13 of the 36 passengers and 22 of the 61 crew; most survivors were severely burned. Among the killed was also one ground crewman, the civilian linesman Allen Hagaman. Ten passengers and 16 crewmen died in the crash or in the fire. The majority of the victims were burned to death, while others died jumping from the airship at an excessive height, or as a consequence of either smoke inhalation or falling debris. Six other crew members, three passengers, and Allen Hagaman died in the following hours or days, mostly as a result of the burns.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: The majority of the crewmen who died were up inside the ship's hull, where they either did not have a clear escape route or were close to the bow of the ship, which hung burning in the air for too long for most of them to escape death. Most of the crew in the bow died in the fire, although at least one was filmed falling from the bow to his death. Most of the passengers who died were trapped in the starboard side of the passenger deck. Not only was the wind blowing the fire toward the starboard side, but the ship also rolled slightly to starboard as it settled to the ground, with much of the upper hull on that part of the ship collapsing outboard of the starboard observation windows, thus cutting off the escape of many of the passengers on that side. To make matters worse, the sliding door leading from the starboard passenger area to the central foyer and the gangway stairs (through which rescuers led a number of passengers to safety) jammed shut during the crash, further trapping those passengers on the starboard side. Nonetheless, some did manage to escape from the starboard passenger decks. By contrast, all but a few of the passengers on the port side of the ship survived the fire, with some of them escaping virtually unscathed. Although the best-remembered airship disaster, it was not the worst. Just over twice as many (73 of 76 on board) had perished when the helium-filled U.S. Navy scout airship crashed at sea off the New Jersey coast four years earlier on April 4, 1933.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Werner Franz, the 14-year-old cabin boy, was initially dazed on realizing the ship was on fire but when a water tank above him burst open, putting out the fire around him, he was spurred to action. He made his way to a nearby hatch and dropped through it just as the forward part of the ship was briefly rebounding into the air. He began to run toward the starboard side, but stopped and turned around and ran the other way because wind was pushing the flames in that direction. He escaped without injury and was the last surviving crew member when he died in 2014. The last survivor, Werner G. Doehner, died November 8, 2019. At the time of the disaster, Doehner was eight years old and vacationing with family. He recalled later that his mother threw him and his brother out of the ship and jumped after them; they survived but Doehner's father and sister were killed.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: When the control car crashed onto the ground, most of the officers leapt through the windows, but became separated. First Officer Captain Albert Sammt found Captain Max Pruss trying to re-enter the wreckage to look for survivors. Pruss's face was badly burned, and he required months of hospitalization and reconstructive surgery, but he survived.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Captain Ernst Lehmann escaped the crash with burns to his head and arms and severe burns across most of his back. He died at a nearby hospital the next day.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: When passenger , a vaudeville comic acrobat, billed as "Ben Dova", saw the first sign of trouble he smashed the window with his movie camera with which he had been filming the landing (the film survived the disaster). As the ship neared the ground he lowered himself out the window and hung onto the window ledge, letting go when the ship was perhaps above the ground. His acrobat's instincts kicked in, and Späh kept his feet under him and attempted to do a safety roll when he landed. He injured his ankle nonetheless, and was dazedly crawling away when a member of the ground crew came up, slung the diminutive Späh under one arm, and ran him clear of the fire.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Of the 12 crewmen in the bow of the airship, only three survived. Four of these 12 men were standing on the mooring shelf, a platform up at the very tip of the bow from which the forwardmost landing ropes and the steel mooring cable were released to the ground crew, and which was directly at the forward end of the axial walkway and just ahead of gas cell #16. The rest were standing either along the lower keel walkway ahead of the control car, or else on platforms beside the stairway leading up the curve of the bow to the mooring shelf. During the fire the bow hung in the air at roughly a 45-degree angle and flames shot forward through the axial walkway, bursting through the bow (and the bow gas cells) like a blowtorch. The three men from the forward section who survived (elevatorman Kurt Bauer, cook Alfred Grözinger, and electrician Josef Leibrecht) were those furthest aft of the bow, and two of them (Bauer and Grözinger) happened to be standing near two large triangular air vents, through which cool air was being drawn by the fire. Neither of these men sustained more than superficial burns. Most of the men standing along the bow stairway either fell aft into the fire, or tried to leap from the ship when it was still too high in the air. Three of the four men standing on the mooring shelf inside the very tip of the bow were actually taken from the wreck alive, though one (Erich Spehl, a rigger) died shortly afterwards in the Air Station's infirmary, and the other two (helmsman Alfred Bernhard and apprentice elevatorman Ludwig Felber) were reported by newspapers to have initially survived the fire, and then to subsequently have died at area hospitals during the night or early the following morning.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Hydrogen fires are less destructive to immediate surroundings than gasoline explosions because of the buoyancy of diatomic hydrogen, which causes heat of combustion to be released upwards more than circumferentially as the leaked mass ascends in the atmosphere; hydrogen fires are more survivable than fires of gasoline or wood. The hydrogen in the "Hindenburg" burned out within about 90 seconds.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: At the time of the disaster, sabotage was commonly put forward as the cause of the fire, initially by Hugo Eckener, former head of the Zeppelin Company and the "old man" of German airships. In initial reports, before inspecting the accident, Eckener mentioned the possibility of a shot as the cause of the disaster, because of threatening letters that had been received, but did not rule out other causes. Eckener later publicly endorsed the static spark hypothesis, including after the war. At the time on a lecture tour in Austria, he was awakened at about 2:30 in the morning (8:30 p.m. Lakehurst time, or approximately an hour after the crash) by the ringing of his bedside telephone. It was a Berlin representative of "The New York Times" with news that the "Hindenburg" "exploded yesterday evening at 7 p.m. above the airfield at Lakehurst". By the time he left the hotel the next morning to travel to Berlin for a briefing on the disaster, the only answer that he had for the reporters waiting outside to question him was that based on what he knew, the "Hindenburg" had "exploded over the airfield"; sabotage might be a possibility. However, as he learned more about the disaster, particularly that the airship had burned rather than actually "exploded", he grew more and more convinced that static discharge, rather than sabotage, was the cause.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Charles Rosendahl, commander of the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst and the man in overall charge of the ground-based portion of the "Hindenburg's" landing maneuver, came to believe that the "Hindenburg" had been sabotaged. He laid out a general case for sabotage in his book "What About the Airship?" (1938), which was as much an extended argument for the further development of the rigid airship as it was an historical overview of the airship concept.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Another proponent of the sabotage hypothesis was Max Pruss, captain of the "Hindenburg" throughout the airship's career. Pruss flew on nearly every flight of the "Graf Zeppelin" since 1928 until the "Hindenburg" was launched in 1936. In a 1960 interview conducted by Kenneth Leish for Columbia University's Oral History Research Office, Pruss said early dirigible travel was safe, and therefore he strongly believed that sabotage was to blame. He stated that on trips to South America, which was a popular destination for German tourists, both airships passed through thunderstorms and were struck by lightning but remained unharmed.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Most members of the crew refused to believe that one of them would commit an act of sabotage, insisting only a passenger could have destroyed the airship. A suspect favored by Commander Rosendahl, Captain Pruss, and others among the "Hindenburg's" crew, was passenger Joseph Späh, a German acrobat who survived the fire. He brought with him a dog, a German shepherd named Ulla, as a surprise for his children. He reportedly made a number of unaccompanied visits to feed his dog, who was being kept in a freight room near the stern of the ship. Those who suspected Späh based their suspicions primarily on those trips into the ship's interior to feed his dog, that according to some of the stewards Späh had told anti-Nazi jokes during the flight, recollections by stewards that Späh had seemed agitated by the repeated delays in landing, and that he was an acrobat who could conceivably climb into the airship's rigging to plant a bomb.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: In 1962, A. A. Hoehling published "Who Destroyed the Hindenburg?", in which he rejected all theories but sabotage, and named a crew member as the suspect. Erich Spehl, a rigger on the "Hindenburg" who died of burns in the Infirmary, was named as a potential saboteur. Ten years later, Michael MacDonald Mooney's book "The Hindenburg", which was based heavily on Hoehling's sabotage hypothesis, also identified Spehl as a possible saboteur; Mooney's book was made into the film "The Hindenburg" (1975), a mostly fictionalized account of the Zeppelin's final flight. The producers of the film were sued by Hoehling for plagiarism, but Hoehling's case was dismissed because he had presented his sabotage hypothesis as historical fact, and it is not possible to claim ownership of historical facts.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Hoehling's (and later Mooney's) hypothesis goes on to say that it is unlikely that Spehl wanted to kill people, and that he intended the airship to burn after the landing. However, with the ship already over 12 hours late, Spehl was unable to find an excuse to reset the timer on his bomb.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: It has been suggested that Adolf Hitler himself ordered the "Hindenburg" to be destroyed in retaliation for Eckener's anti-Nazi opinions.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Since the publication of Hoehling's book, most airship historians, including Douglas Robinson, have dismissed Hoehling's sabotage hypothesis because no solid evidence was ever presented to support it. No pieces of a bomb were ever discovered (and there is no evidence in existing documentation that the sample collected from the wreckage, and determined to be residue from a dry cell battery, was found anywhere near the stern of the airship), and on closer examination, the evidence against Spehl and his girlfriend turned out to be rather weak. Additionally, it is unlikely that Rigger Knorr would not remain at cell 4 to further assess the purported damage claimed by Kubis. In an interview with the TV show "Secrets & Mysteries", Hoehling himself asserted it was only his theory and also suggested a short circuit could be another potential cause of the fire. Additionally, Mooney's book has been criticized as having numerous fictional elements and factual errors, and it has been suggested that the plot was created for the then-upcoming 1975 film. Although Mooney alleges that three "Luftwaffe" officers were aboard to investigate a potential bomb threat, there is no evidence they were on board to do so, and military observers were present on previous flights to study navigational techniques and weather forecasting practices of the airship crew.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: However, opponents of the sabotage hypothesis argued that only speculation supported sabotage as a cause of the fire, and no credible evidence of sabotage was produced at any of the formal hearings. Erich Spehl died in the fire and was therefore unable to refute the accusations that surfaced a quarter of a century later. The FBI investigated Joseph Späh and reported finding no evidence of Späh having any connection to a sabotage plot. According to his wife, Evelyn, Späh was quite upset over the accusations – she later recalled that her husband was outside their home cleaning windows when he first learned that he was suspected of sabotaging the "Hindenburg", and was so shocked by the news that he almost fell off the ladder on which he was standing.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Neither the German, nor the American investigation, endorsed any of the sabotage theories. Proponents of the sabotage hypothesis argue that any finding of sabotage would have been an embarrassment for the Nazi regime, and they speculate that such a finding by the German investigation was suppressed for political reasons. However, it has also been suggested that numerous crewmen subscribed to the sabotage hypothesis because they refused to accept any flaws with the airship or pilot error.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Some more sensational newspapers claimed that a Luger pistol with one round fired was found among the wreckage and speculated that a person on board committed suicide or shot the airship. However, there is no evidence suggesting an attempted suicide or official report confirming the presence of a Luger pistol. Initially, before inspecting the scene himself, Eckener mentioned the possibility for a shot as the cause of the disaster, because of threatening letters they received. At the German enquiry Eckener discounted a shot – among many possibilities – as the cause as nearly impossible and highly improbable.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Hugo Eckener argued that the fire was started by an electric spark which was caused by a buildup of static electricity on the airship. The spark ignited hydrogen on the outer skin.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Proponents of the static spark hypothesis point out that the airship's skin was not constructed in a way that allowed its charge to be distributed evenly throughout the craft. The skin was separated from the duralumin frame by non-conductive ramie cords which had been lightly covered in metal to improve conductivity but not very effectively, allowing a large difference in potential to form between the skin and the frame.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: In order to make up for the delay of more than 12 hours in its transatlantic flight, the "Hindenburg" passed through a weather front of high humidity and high electrical charge. Although the mooring lines were not wet when they first hit the ground and ignition took place four minutes after, Eckener theorised that they may have become wet in these four minutes. When the ropes, which were connected to the frame, became wet, they would have grounded the frame but not the skin. This would have caused a sudden potential difference between skin and frame (and the airship itself with the overlying air masses) and would have set off an electrical discharge – a spark. Seeking the quickest way to ground, the spark would have jumped from the skin onto the metal framework, igniting the leaking hydrogen.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: In his book "LZ-129 Hindenburg" (1964), Zeppelin historian Douglas Robinson commented that although ignition of free hydrogen by static discharge had become a favored hypothesis, no such discharge was seen by any of the witnesses who testified at the official investigation into the accident in 1937. He continues:


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Unlike other witnesses to the fire whose view of the port side of the ship had the light of the setting sun behind the ship, Professor Heald's view of the starboard side of the ship against a backdrop of the darkening eastern sky would have made the dim blue light of a static discharge on the top of the ship more easily visible.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Harold G. Dick was Goodyear Zeppelin's representative with Luftschiffbau Zeppelin during the mid-1930s. He flew on test flights of the "Hindenburg" and its sister ship, the "Graf Zeppelin II". He also flew on numerous flights in the original "Graf Zeppelin" and ten round-trip crossings of the north and south Atlantic in the "Hindenburg". In his book "The Golden Age of the Great Passenger Airships Graf Zeppelin & Hindenburg", he observes:


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: In addition to Dick's observations, during the "Graf Zeppelin II's" early test flights, measurements were taken of the airship's static charge. Ludwig Durr and the other engineers at Luftschiffbau Zeppelin took the static discharge hypothesis seriously and considered the insulation of the fabric from the frame to be a design flaw in the "Hindenburg". Thus, the German Inquiry concluded that the insulation of the outer covering caused a spark to jump onto a nearby piece of metal, thereby igniting the hydrogen. In lab experiments, using the "Hindenburg"s outer covering and a static ignition, hydrogen was able to be ignited but with the covering of the LZ 127 "Graf Zeppelin", nothing happened. These findings were not well-publicized and were covered up, perhaps to avoid embarrassment of such an engineering flaw in the face of the Third Reich.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: A variant of the static spark hypothesis, presented by Addison Bain, is that a spark between inadequately grounded fabric cover segments of the "Hindenburg" itself started the fire, and that the doping compound of the outer skin was flammable enough to be ignited before hydrogen contributed to the fire. The "Hindenburg" had a cotton skin covered with a finish known as "dope". It is a common term for a plasticised lacquer that provides stiffness, protection, and a lightweight, airtight seal to woven fabrics. In its liquid forms, dope is highly flammable, but the flammability of dry dope depends upon its base constituents, with, for example, butyrate dope being far less flammable than cellulose nitrate. Proponents of this hypothesis claim that when the mooring line touched the ground, a resulting spark could have ignited the dope in the skin. However, the validity of this theory has been contested (see Incendiary paint hypothesis section below).


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: An episode of the Discovery Channel series "Curiosity" entitled "What Destroyed the "Hindenburg"?", which first aired in December 2012, investigated both the static spark theory and St. Elmo's Fire, as well as sabotage by bomb. The team, led by British aeronautical engineer Jem Stansfield and US airship historian Dan Grossman, concluded that the ignition took place above the hydrogen vent just forward of where Mark Heald saw St. Elmo's Fire, and that the ignited hydrogen was channelled down the vent where it created a more explosive detonation described by crew member Helmut Lau.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: An episode of the PBS series "Nova" titled "Hindenburg: The New Evidence", which first aired in April 2021 on SBS in Australia, focuses on the static electricity hypothesis. It confirms that the "Hindenburg" fabric outer skin and metal airframe were, by design, electrically isolated from each other (via air gaps between skin and frame), and finds that although this may have been done with safety in mind, it likely put the airship at greater risk for the type of accident that occurred. It also finds that there likely was a leak of hydrogen gas at the "Hindenburg" stern, as evidenced by the difficulty the crew had in bringing the airship in trim prior to the landing (its aft was too low). The episode also features laboratory experiments, conducted by Konstantinos Giapis of Caltech, designed to explain how the fatal spark occurred. Through them Dr. Giapis demonstrates the effects of rainy weather on representations of the airship's skin, airframe and a landing rope — and successfully generates sparks between skin and frame. As Giapis notes, when its landing ropes were cast to the ground, the "Hindenburg" had a significant electrical charge (many thousands of volts with respect to ground), due to its altitude, about , and to stormy weather conditions. Although these ropes, made of Manila hemp, would have become more electrically conductive as they absorbed falling rain, Giapis finds the ropes would have conducted electricity even when dry, effectively grounding the airship the instant they touched earth.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: But even as the voltage of the airship's frame dropped, the voltage at its outer skin would have remained largely unchanged, due to its isolation from the rest of the airship. Thus, the voltage difference between frame and skin would have grown dramatically, greatly increasing the risk of a spark. Yet, significantly, the fire didn't erupt until four minutes later, raising the question of what could account for such a delay. From his experiments, Dr. Giapis theorizes that during the landing, the "Hindenburg" behaved like a capacitor — actually an array of them — in an electrical circuit. (In his analogy, one of the two conductive plates of each "capacitor" is represented by a panel of the airship's charged outer skin, the other plate by the grounded portion of the airship.) Further, Giapis finds that the Cellon dope painted on the fabric skin acted like a capacitor's dielectric, increasing the skin's ability to hold charge beyond what it held before the airship became grounded — which he says would explain the delay in spark formation. Once the ropes dropped, charge would continue building on the skin and, according to his calculations, the additional time required to produce a spark would be slightly under four minutes, in close agreement with the investigation report. Giapis believes that there were likely many sparks occurring on the airship at the time of the accident, and that it was one near the hydrogen leak that triggered the fire. Additionally, he demonstrates experimentally that rain was a necessary component of the "Hindenburg" disaster, showing that the airship's skin would not have conducted electricity when dry, but that adding water to the skin increases its conductivity, allowing electric charge to flow through it, setting off sparks across gaps between skin and frame.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: A. J. Dessler, former director of the Space Science Laboratory at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and a critic of the incendiary paint hypothesis (see below), favors a much simpler explanation for the conflagration: lightning. Like many other aircraft, the "Hindenburg" had been struck by lightning several times in its years of operation. This does not normally ignite a fire in hydrogen-filled airships due to the lack of oxygen. However, airship fires have been observed when lightning strikes the vehicle as it vents hydrogen as ballast in preparation for landing. The vented hydrogen mixes with the oxygen in the atmosphere, creating a combustible mixture. The "Hindenburg" was venting hydrogen at the time of the disaster.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: On the 70th anniversary of the accident, "The Philadelphia Inquirer" carried an article with yet another hypothesis, based on an interview of ground crew member Robert Buchanan. He had been a young man on the crew manning the mooring lines.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: As the airship was approaching the mooring mast, he noted that one of the engines, thrown into reverse for a hard turn, backfired, and a shower of sparks was emitted. After being interviewed by Addison Bain, Buchanan believed that the airship's outer skin was ignited by engine sparks. Another ground crewman, Robert Shaw, saw a blue ring behind the tail fin and had also seen sparks coming out of the engine. Shaw believed that the blue ring he saw was leaking hydrogen which was ignited by the engine sparks.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Eckener rejected the idea that hydrogen could have been ignited by an engine backfire, postulating that the hydrogen could not have been ignited by any exhaust because the temperature is too low to ignite the hydrogen. The ignition temperature for hydrogen is , but the sparks from the exhaust only reach . The Zeppelin Company also carried out extensive tests and hydrogen had never ignited. Additionally, the fire was first seen at the top of the airship, not near the bottom of the hull.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Most current analyses of the fire assume ignition due to some form of electricity as the cause. However, there is still much controversy over whether the fabric skin of the airship, or the hydrogen used for buoyancy, was the initial fuel for the resulting fire.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: The theory that hydrogen was ignited by a static spark is the most widely accepted theory as determined by the official crash investigations. Offering support for the hypothesis that there was some sort of hydrogen leak prior to the fire is that the airship remained stern-heavy before landing, despite efforts to put the airship back in trim. This could have been caused by a leak of the gas, which started mixing with air, potentially creating a form of oxyhydrogen and filling up the space between the skin and the cells. A ground crew member, R.H. Ward, reported seeing the fabric cover of the upper port side of the airship fluttering, "as if gas was rising and escaping" from the cell. He said that the fire began there, but that no other disturbance occurred at the time when the fabric fluttered. Another man on the top of the mooring mast had also reported seeing a flutter in the fabric as well. Pictures that show the fire burning along straight lines that coincide with the boundaries of gas cells suggest that the fire was not burning along the skin, which was continuous. Crew members stationed in the stern reported actually seeing the cells burning.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Two main theories have been postulated as to how gas could have leaked. Eckener believed a snapped bracing wire had torn a gas cell open (see below), while others suggest that a maneuvering or automatic gas valve was stuck open and gas from cell 4 leaked through. During the airship's first flight to Rio, a gas cell was nearly emptied when an automatic valve was stuck open, and gas had to be transferred from other cells to maintain an even keel. However, no other valve failures were reported during the ship's flight history, and on the final approach there was no indication in instruments that a valve had stuck open.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Although some opponents of this theory claim that the hydrogen was odorized with garlic, it would have been detectable only in the area of a leak. Once the fire was underway, more powerful odors would have masked any garlic scent. No reports of anyone smelling garlic during the flight surfaced and no official documents have been found to prove that the hydrogen was even odorized.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Opponents of this hypothesis note that the fire was reported as burning bright red, while pure hydrogen burns blue if it is visible at all, although many other materials were consumed by the fire which could have changed its hue.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Some of the airshipmen at the time, including Captain Pruss, asserted that the stern heaviness was normal, since aerodynamic pressure would push rainwater towards the stern of the airship. The stern heaviness was also noticed minutes before the airship made its sharp turns for its approach (ruling out the snapped wire theory as the cause of the stern heaviness), and some crew members stated that it was corrected as the ship stopped (after sending six men into the bow section of the ship). Additionally, the gas cells of the ship were not pressurized, and a leak would not cause the fluttering of the outer cover, which was not seen until seconds before the fire. However, reports of the amount of rain the ship had collected have been inconsistent. Several witnesses testified that there was no rain as the ship approached until a light rain fell minutes before the fire, while several crew members stated that before the approach the ship did encounter heavy rain. Albert Sammt, the ship's first officer who oversaw the measures to correct the stern-heaviness, initially attributed to fuel consumption and sending crewmen to their landing stations in the stern, though years later, he would assert that a leak of hydrogen had occurred. On its final approach the rainwater may have evaporated and may not completely account for the observed stern-heaviness, as the airship should have been in good trim ten minutes after passing through rain. Eckener noted that the stern heaviness was significant enough that 70,000 kilogram·meter (506,391 foot-pounds) of trimming was needed.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: The incendiary paint theory (IPT) was proposed in 1996 by retired NASA scientist Addison Bain, stating that the doping compound of the airship was the cause of the fire, and that the "Hindenburg" would have burned even if it were filled with helium. The hypothesis is limited to the source of ignition and to the flame front propagation, not to the source of most of the burning material, as once the fire started and spread the hydrogen clearly must have burned (although some proponents of the incendiary paint theory claim that hydrogen burned much later in the fire or that it otherwise did not contribute to the rapid spread of the fire). The incendiary paint hypothesis asserts that the major component in starting the fire and feeding its spread was the canvas skin because of the compound used on it.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Proponents of this hypothesis argue that the coatings on the fabric contained both iron oxide and aluminum-impregnated cellulose acetate butyrate (CAB) which remain potentially reactive even after fully setting. Iron oxide and aluminum can be used as components of solid rocket fuel or thermite. For example, the propellant for the Space Shuttle solid rocket booster included both "aluminum (fuel, 16%), (and) iron oxide (a catalyst, 0.4%)". The coating applied to the "Hindenburg"s covering did not have a sufficient quantity of any material capable of acting as an oxidizer, which is a necessary component of rocket fuel, however, oxygen is also available from the air.


title: Hindenburg disaster

text: Bain received permission from the German government to search their archives and discovered evidence that, during the Nazi regime, German scientists concluded the dope on the "Hindenburg's" fabric skin was the cause of the conflagration. Bain interviewed the wife of the investigation's lead scientist Max Dieckmann, and she stated that her husband had told her about the conclusion and instructed her to tell no one, presumably because it would have embarrassed the Nazi government. Additionally, Dieckmann concluded that it was the poor conductivity, not the flammability of the doping compound, that led to the ignition of hydrogen. However, Otto Beyersdorff, an independent investigator hired by the Zeppelin Company, asserted that the outer skin itself was flammable. In several television shows, Bain attempted to prove the flammability of the fabric by igniting it with either an open flame or a Jacob's Ladder machine. Although Bain's fabric ignited, critics argue that Bain had to correctly position the fabric parallel to a machine with a continuous electric current inconsistent with atmospheric conditions. In response to this criticism, the IPT therefore postulates that a spark would need to be parallel to the surface, and that "panel-to-panel arcing" occurs where the spark moves between panels of paint isolated from each other. Astrophysicist Alexander J. Dessler points out a static spark does not have sufficient energy to ignite the doping compound, and that the insulating properties of the doping compound prevents a parallel spark path through it. Additionally, Dessler contends that the skin would also be electrically conductive in the wet and damp conditions before the fire.