July 2: The day the airship was born
On July 2, 1900, the first Zeppelin, LZ 1, flew for eighteen minutes over Lake Constance. Tonight's film: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004).
Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was sixty-one years old when his airship finally left the ground. He had been laughed at for the better part of a decade. The military had shown little interest. The money had run out more than once. On the morning of July 2, 1900, he stood on the shore of Lake Constance, in southern Germany, and watched a 128-meter rigid airship, the LZ 1, rise from a floating hangar and crawl out over the water.
The flight lasted about eighteen minutes. The ship covered roughly six kilometers. On landing it was damaged. To the crowd that had gathered on the shore, the whole thing might have looked like a failure. It was not. It was the first controlled flight of a rigid airship in history, and it opened the door to an entire age of giant dirigibles, the kind that would soon cross oceans, carry passengers in dining rooms and sleeping cabins, and cast shadows long enough to frighten whole cities.
This is the part of the story I like best. The big, dramatic machines of early science fiction did not come from nowhere. They were copied from things people had actually built. The airship hanging in the sky, the flying wing, the robot the size of a building, the secret island airstrip. Almost all of it was already present in the engineering of the first years of the twentieth century, waiting for someone to push it one step further.
Kerry Conran pushed it one step further in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004). The film is set in an alternate 1939, where giant robots march on New York, airships dock at the top of the Empire State Building, and a flying-wing aircraft carrier patrols the clouds. Jude Law plays the mercenary pilot Joe Sullivan, known as Sky Captain. Gwyneth Paltrow is the reporter Polly Perkins. Angelina Jolie commands a squadron of amphibious fighters. The story is pulp, and it knows it. What matters is the look.
Sky Captain was shot almost entirely inside a blue-screen soundstage. There were almost no physical sets. The actors performed inside an empty blue room, and the entire world was painted in around them afterward, a process that took Conran years and pioneered the fully digital backlot that every fantasy blockbuster now uses as a matter of course. The Zeppelins von Zeppelin coaxed over Lake Constance in 1900 are the direct ancestors of the Hindenburg III that glides up to the Empire State Building in the film’s opening minutes.
That lineage is the whole reason to watch it tonight. You are not watching a film about the future. You are watching a film about a future that people in 1900 genuinely believed was coming, the one built out of aluminium, canvas, hydrogen, and a great deal of optimism. Sky Captain remembers that future more lovingly than almost any film made since.
For a while the technology looked unstoppable. The Graf Zeppelin circled the globe in twenty-one days in 1929, carrying fare-paying passengers across three continents, and the Hindenburg crossed the Atlantic with a passenger lounge and a dining room. The airship age did not last. The Hindenburg burned at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in May 1937, the airplane swallowed the long-range passenger market, and the Zeppelin became a period detail, a machine that belongs to a specific kind of story set between roughly 1900 and 1940. Conveniently, that is exactly the window in which Sky Captain lives.
So put it on tonight. Watch the robots come down the avenue, watch the airship slide past the skyline, and remember that the first of those airships flew for eighteen minutes over a lake in Germany and was wrecked when it came back down. Every giant machine on the screen starts somewhere that small.
What else happened on July 2
Two other July 2 events could just as easily have been tonight’s pick:
1937, Amelia Earhart disappears over the Pacific. She and her navigator Fred Noonan had taken off from Lae, New Guinea, before dawn, aiming for a sliver of land called Howland Island. Her last radio message to the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, around 8:43 in the morning, was that they believed they were over the ship but could not see it, and that fuel was low. Then silence. Nothing was ever recovered. If this were tonight’s topic, the film would be Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977): Earhart vanished without explanation, and the film’s central mystery hinges on ships and aircraft that similarly disappeared — scooped up by forces beyond human understanding.
1964, the Civil Rights Act is signed into law. President Lyndon Johnson signed it at the White House in a televised ceremony, barring discrimination in public places and in employment. If tonight turned on civil rights rather than airships, the film would be Gattaca (1997): the act outlawed discrimination based on inborn traits, and the film imagines a world where genetic code becomes the new basis for segregation, making the same fight for equality literal at the DNA level.
Sources
The main event: first Zeppelin flight, July 2, 1900
Wikipedia, “Zeppelin LZ 1” (the maiden flight over Lake Constance near Friedrichshafen, its 18-minute duration, the damage on landing): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin_LZ_1
Airships.net, “The First Zeppelins: LZ-1 through LZ-4” (the 420-foot length, the July 2, 1900 maiden flight, the distance covered): https://www.airships.net/zeppelins/
Wikipedia, “Ferdinand von Zeppelin” (the count’s role and the July 2, 1900 flight): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_von_Zeppelin
Tonight’s film: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
Wikipedia, “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_Captain_and_the_World_of_Tomorrow
The alternative events
Amelia Earhart disappears (1937), National Air and Space Museum, “Answering Your Questions About Earhart’s Disappearance”: https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/answering-your-questions-about-earharts-disappearance-except-big-one
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Encounters_of_the_Third_Kind
Civil Rights Act signed (1964), National Archives, “Civil Rights Act (1964)”: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/civil-rights-act
Gattaca (1997), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca