Fascinating Information about WWI German War Zeppelins (WWI factoid thread)

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German engineers used 250,000 cows.

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Zeppelins from pre-WWI Germany were notorious for leaking hydrogen. When the war began, German engineers gambled on huge zeppelins to win the war. The zeppelins would be used to drop bombs on city populations as weapons of mass destruction. These new scaled up zeppelins would require larger and airtight hydrogen sacks to lift the ship and additional bomb weight over long distances.

German engineers discovered cow intestines to be perfect leak proof material. They simply joined cow intestines by dipping them in water, stretching them over wood frames, and overlapping the joints. As the intestines dried, the microscopic intestinal polymers entangled and created a joint that was as strong and airtight as the intestine itself.

To create one Zeppelin airship, German engineers used 250,000 cows. Before the war's end, Germany had a fleet of over 13 massive zeppelins that reigned incendiary terror down upon the cities of Europe and Great Britain, most notably London.

FYI, this thread is most definitely Germans.

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Not at all. In fact, long chains dangled from the bottom of the Zeppelin to act as enemy airplane deterrents. The chains would rip the airplane's wings or destroy the props. British pilots specifically trained for nighttime flight and counter Zeppelin maneuvers.

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Don't we still keep a huge stockpile of helium because of that? I'm pretty sure I've read that.

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The National Helium Reserve, also known as the Federal Helium Reserve, is a strategic reserve of the United States holding over 1 billion cubic meters (1E9 m3) of helium gas. The helium is stored at the Cliffside Storage Facility about 12 miles (19 km) northwest of Amarillo, Texas, in a natural geologic gas storage formation, the Bush Dome[1] reservoir. The reserve was established in 1925 as a strategic supply of gas for airships, and in the 1950s became an important source of coolant during the Space Race and Cold War.

The facilities were located close to the Hugoton and other natural gas fields in southwest Kansas and the panhandle of Oklahoma, plus the Panhandle Field in Texas.[2] The natural gas in these fields contains unusually high percentages of helium, from 0.3% to 2.7%; they constitute the largest source of helium in the United States. The helium is separated as a byproduct from the produced natural gas.

After the Helium Acts Amendments of 1960 (Public Law 86–777), the U.S. Bureau of Mines arranged for five private plants to recover helium from natural gas. For this helium conservation program, the Bureau built a 425-mile (684 km) pipeline from Bushton, Kansas, to connect those plants with the government's partially depleted Cliffside gas field.[3] This helium-nitrogen mixture was injected and stored in the Cliffside gas field until needed, when it then was further purified.

By 1995, a billion cubic metres of the gas had been collected and the reserve was US$1.4 billion in debt, prompting the Congress of the United States in 1996 to phase out the reserve.[4][5] The resulting "Helium Privatization Act of 1996" (Public Law 104–273) directed the United States Department of the Interior to start liquidating the reserve by 2005.[6]

By 2007, the federal government was reported as auctioning off the Amarillo Helium Plant. The National Helium Reserve itself was reported as "slowly being drawn down and sold to private industry."[7] However by early 2011, the facility was still in government hands. In May 2013, the House of Representatives voted to extend the life of the reserve under government control.[8]

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