On october the fourth, 1930, a 777 foot long airship, the largest thing that had ever flown, larger than the titanic by volume was about to take off on a trip from london to india. As part of a scheme hatched by the British Empire to connect the farflung pieces of the empire, it was a moonshot. A scheme you call it, one of your chapters is titled is dreams and imperial vision . S. C. Gwynne a nice combination of all of them, airships as it turns out were competing with airplanes in the early century, starting in the first decade. Nobody really knew what was going to be the future of aviation back then. Both of them crashed all of the time. The problem with airships as we will see as we talk today is that there was a fundamentally flawed idea that essentially 40 years to play out completely, the airplanes crashed all of the time in the early days and they were fundamentally sound that could be improved. Part of what i am riding about is the two writing about, it is the focus of all of this effort to persuade people that airships were the way to go. A good time to explain the difference between a hot air balloon, a blimp, or a hot air n airship . S. C. Gwynne yes, go back to the 18th century when balloons were invented, they did an astonishing thing, they went up and nothing else would go up. It would go wherever the wind wanted it to go. That is a problem. In the 19th century, a frenchman solved the problem, by putting a motor with a propeller and a rudder onto a balloon edited to demonstrate how it worked by flying so many miles from paris and turning around and coming back and it was the french verb to direct or to steer is something that was you could steer or direct with, dirgible. The problem with balloons was that they were an envelope filled with gas and they at some point inside it would collapse upon themselves and you could not lift very much with them. 1900, marvelous German Military man, military lifer and inventor invented something called a rigid airship. A rigid airship had a skeleton, so that it could hold inside of the skeleton a lawn of hydrogen a lot of hydrogen filled gas bags. You could suddenly lift way more than anybody could before. His first airships were in the 400 foot category. Enormous things with a lot of gas bags in them, steel skeletons covered with a light kind of cloth. Von zeppelin one of the characters of the german story, who was bird would . Birdwood . S. C. Gwynne he is the man who drove the thing that we call the empire or the imperial airship scheme. What that idea was when britain came out of world war i they had the largest empire in human history. Their empire was a little wobbly and they were looking for ways to kind of reestablish their empire, establish a technological supremacy. They came up with this idea that given that their empire stretched from sydney, australia, to toronto, egypt, india, there were going to connect these farflung places they were going to connect these farflung places with rigid airships. All of these airships flying around all of the time and connecting up the empire. More important, what does airships were going to do was to reduce the travel time from australia to london from a month to 11 days, to india from 11 days to four days. To canada in two point five days. It is a radical thing, the man who drove, getting back to birdwood thompson who was the secretary of state for air, a wonderful title i think, he drove this vision of the future, he was going to reestablish himself with the technological supremacy. The old empire was built on technological supremacy, the pounding piston and the big steamships and the bigger guns, they were going to kind of use their own technology now to rule this new world that was more peaceful and linked together. The point is into perspective, why were airplanes not a good idea . Do you from london to karachi to go from london to karachi . This airship took off, hercules try motor, heavier than air airplane went to india and it took 12 days and 26 bone rattling stops. The airship could do it in two and with a single refueling stop in egypt. It was a radical kind of idea and a new way to think about the world, Christopher Thompson was this man, he was a man of empire, one of the last men of empire. You return to this comparison a couple times in the book, one of the startling weaknesses of the airship was there was nowhere to go in a storm, no safe harbor, no port of refuge. The difference between a plane and a boat versus traveling in an airship when a storm hit when bad things happen . S. C. Gwynne airships as i said were fundamentally flawed, we can see that. They were not readily apparent it was true then. They were vulnerable to wind. R101 our poster ship, the ship that is taken off for this, the trip to india who never made it. Im not giving anything away, it was flawed. It had 6 acres of surface area on it. If you have ever been in a small syllable in a significant wind, you know what wind can do. Imagine a 6 acres hitting wind. This becomes a problem. You are extremely vulnerable to the elements of the storms and updrafts and the weather of all sorts of things. One of the problems is, let a storm comes out we were up there in the storms in the airship . You are getting buffeted all of those reasons i just said you cannot go down. You cannot go down because something that big in a storm on the ground gets beaten to pieces. You cannot control it or stop the wind. It must stay up to avoid getting smashed to pieces. This introduces this wild concept where at least theoretically a plane can land. Theoretically, about, can find a safe harbor. An airship cannot land anywhere in a storm and it was an extremely tragic moment in the 1920s, the american airship, spent hours fleeing from the storms unable to essentially lose them, everywhere they went it was thunder and finally the same was hitting a downdraft and it was went down into the freezing Atlantic Ocean and it was one of those flaws, there are many. The flaw that we all kind of know because we have seen pictures of the hindenburg is the hydrogen flaw. That is a big one. Hydrogen, touch a spark to it, it goes up in a spectacular way. There was another flaw, vulnerability to wind and elements that are not being able to go down in a storm was another flaw. The full title of the book his majestys airship the life , and tragic death of the Worlds Largest flying machine , how far did the r101 make it almost to india on the trip to india . S. C. Gwynne it was heading out to india, it crosses the chan nel where it should not have been up in the storm, crosses the english, it is heading for egypt. It went down, 90 miles north of paris. It is in the air for nine point five hours, i chronicled the last flight, the doomed flight and what happens on the ship. We were able to preserve records because there were some survivors and because there was a lot of communication around. Yours learn that more people died in the r101 crash than in the hindenburg which loomed so much larger in history and memory. Why is the r101 not known as well . S. C. Gwynne the hindenburg as you know, and i know, absolutely worldfamous, Everybody Knows the hindenburg. The reason that they know it is because of the 30 seconds or whatever it was of film. They filmed this thing going up in a hydrogen fireball. If you go back to your 1937, lakehurst, new jersey, the airship, there was a film crew there and they filmed this thing and they were able to film it and this was shown in movie theaters all over the world, it was the ultimate reality television, nobody had ever seen anything like that before. It was not until the 1960s i think when a british producer finally married the sound because there was radio broadcast that we all know too where the guy is saying oh the humanity the soundtrack gets married to the video if you will in the 60s and we have the full package and everybody in the world knows about the hindenburg. It overwrote things, the r101 is a better story, the hindenburg story, the hindenburg stories what touched off and sparked. The r101 is this great empire sweeping story with all of these characters in it. Beyond that, the r101 goes down in a hydrogen fireball just like the hindenburg but nobody photographed it. There were another 75 fireballs by my estimation, airships going down or burning in their sheds are being shot down by british fighter planes or whatever was happening. Another huge number of airships had already gone up that way and the thing about the hindenburg, it was the only one way or we have a record of it. You can see what it looks like. Author s. C. Gwynne is our guest this month, if you live in the eastern and central time zones it is 202 you can also send a text at booktv. He is with us for the next hour and 45 minutes, start calling in, we will talk about all of his books, seven books, his latest book is his his majestys airship. Let us talk about the practicality of the form of travel, we were talking about the 35 airships blew up, one sentence from page 162 of his majestys airship. At least 15 giant rigid airships had gone up in a mens and of a Hydrogen Explosion that had nothing to do with fighting or combat missions. Ld 102, 1 04, 105, 117, the r 27, or 28, and the question is why, why did they continue to think after each one of these tragedies that they could make this work . S. C. Gwynne it is one of the great tales of human folly, i kind of realized sometimes you have a revelation and what are you really writing about . I am writing about early aviation, but really what i am doing is writing about human folly for the same reason why does this persist . Airships going up in volleyballs in 1906 and 1908 and fireballs in 1906 and 1908. People just believed that with the right technology you could fix this. There is a huge bash a lot of the reason that airships lasted as long as they did and by that i mean 40 years, starting in 1900 and the last one went down in 1931, that was it. Why did these things persist it is nationalism, a lot of it is there was something about the size or something that was so colossal and the technology, that ran them, it was so absolutely unusual. It is something that told a National Hearts brings in some way. The whole reason that one build the zeppelins that the creator of the zeppelins will do built the zeppelins is he was going to bomb innocent civilians and he was creating the first longrange bomber, the first weapon of mass terror. The first time that humans understood they could be annihilated from above. The whole early experiment, the zeppelins were big failures, especially after the british figured out if you shot an incendiary bullet at one, you got a very satisfying, videogamelike response. Anyway, it was wrapped up in German National pride and the germans in germany, people thought that the zeppelins were succeeding. They fail and we came out of the war, it opens the door to britain. Britain has this great plan, they will make their own airships and they will protect this idea and it is wrapped up in national pride. They will beat the germans at their own game and that will perfect making the r101 save as a house, like saying the titanic is unsinkable. The americans who were lesser players, but there are only three main players. Great britain and the United States but it was all very much tied up in some kind of idea of national pride. This kept things going way longer than they should have ever of gone. It is part hubris, overconfidence, straight out folly, it is wonderfully fun to write about. This eternal kind of human optimism and also i must say in the early days of the aviation industry, there were a lot of crashes. I still do not understand the mentality of people who are willing to be the first adopters of technology, almost certain to kill you. People would go up in airplanes although airplanes kept crashing and people would go up in zeppelins or rigid airships even though they kept crashing. There was an ethic coming out of world war i were people were just more accustomed to being in peril or taking risks than they were before. With any new technology there is that period where it is not work that well. It is dangerous. To me, if you look at airplanes as time went by, their ability to improve their speech, wing loading, they realized they did not think airplanes could ever carry very much. The improved wing loading. As we are moving towards will work two, airplanes are Getting Better and better incrementally and you can see it and the airships never got better. They never saw those solve those basic problems. Even when the americans fill theirs with helium, they crashed the airships. The story of the r101, the title is his majestys airship. Your first two books focusing on the financial industry, selling money, yng bankers fall of the lending boom, 1987 is one that came out. In outlaw bank came next in 2004, a wild ride into the secret heart of bcci. Empire of the summemoon is what you e best known for, the fall of the most powerful indian tribe and american history, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. And then the perfect pass american genius and the reinvention of football , then back to the civil war with hymns of the republic the story of the final year of t American Civil War , and this year with his majestys airship the life and tragic death of the Worlds Largest flying machine. S. C. Gwynne when you read that list out it makes me sound like i have a short Attention Span it is interesting, that is my career. I am more of a journalist. How do you pick the stories you choose to write about . S. C. Gwynne in the same way i would have picked them, most of my career was spent as a journalist at time magazine. In that, to some extent, there are stories you must do and you have to do, a bomb goes off in oklahoma city, have to go cover it. Mainly i pick stories because they i like that they are good narratives and good stories and i want a good narrative and a good story. I would also hope that that idea connects the subject to a large idea. Comanche indians, they held up the entirety of the advance, the manifest destiny america, as it was going west. If you look at my biography of Stonewall Jackson, there was a man who utterly and it was a complete failure who transformed the war. The opposite, let us say that i had been a toss or specialist in a large midwestern university, i would be in a field, my whole career. Here i just have gone where the best stories are. There are certain recurring interests. The civil war, two books of the civil war and i did a lot of time in research on that. That is the i think to some extent journalists, one of the appeals of journalism is whether you are a or whatever you are, or magazine, as i was, in your story and get all excited and you write the story and it is in the bottom of a birdcage at the back of the night and you start again. It is great, we are off to a new subject and a new something. That is more who i am. Born in western massachusetts, joining us from texas, first call from houston, texas, marshall, you were on with s. C. Gwynne. Good morning and thank you. I am interested in three things, one, your s. C. Gwynne process your writing process and what do think about agents . S. C. Gwynne writing process and agents . I wrote them down in case you need them later. S. C. Gwynne my writing process, people say do i write every day . I do not i am in the world of nonfiction so i cannot do we fiction up and write until noon every day or something. What i do requires either extensive reporting in current times or extensive research. Most of what i do really is research. The majority of the time that i spent is not writing which is weird. Sometimes it strikes me that i have been researching a book for two years and have not written a word. That is the way it is. Once ive done the research, i tend to write, i tend to do a lot of Background Research and then i will Research Individual chapters just before i write them. I do not understand writers who do not do this by there is a lot of them who do not, the outline, the outline is everything. It is the process of thinking your way through the story. The main thing i write, once ive done the research, then it is the outline and then what im going to do is put into the outline, three c, san houston, deals with the comanche. When i get down to three the i am actually going to go pack in information which is going to tell me you need to go to this book, this source, this reference. As i moved through the outline, by the time i am writing im not going i wonder where that particular piece of information is, it is in the outline. Im riding an annotated outline and that is the way i i am writing an annotated outline and that is the way i move through each chapter in a book. It is, it works for me, i have built a machine, going to write the story or chapter for me, it is also the concept, it has a really good, really thorough outline. As for advice to writers, i started out in the world of fiction. It took me much longer than it should have to realize that i am no good at that. I do not know, i can look at a blank page and i do not know how to pick a subject or where to write, something set in ancient egypt . I have no idea. If you pull me into nonfiction, and everything about how to figure all of that stuff out. I have been doing it for so long. Mostly as a journalist. To me, when i finally got over the idea i would be at Scott Fitzgerald or something, i am emphatically not ever going to be that. When i realized that nonfiction was the way to go, i started working with a journalist. What to write about, i am working for somebody now and im getting assigned. I am working for a newspaper and five stories a week, you are not going to sit around and wonder whether you are going to set your book in ancient egypt, your out on a store with an editor who is waiting for that thing to come back. It forced me to write because that is what journalism was. I covered business, for most of my early career but it was deadlines, stories, either i would pick them up or the editor would pick them up or the breaking news was determined. This is not a good answer, i am just sharing my own experience. When i realized that is what i was meant to do and was good at and understood it changed everything for me as a rider. Writer. What was the third . Host agent . S. C. Gwynne here is how my ward works, come up with an idea. I then write a 25 page book proposal. Some people write a sample chapter, i write the proposal as if to demonstrate the type of writing it would be. In the 25 pages, you in the early goings in my career it was used to get an agent. I have a book proposal here. It is going to be a book about of the summer moon. I wrote a book proposal a