Deep Dive Into Sputnik

June 9, 2026 by Al Williams 9 Comments

If you are an American of a certain age, you know the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, beating the United States to orbit. You might even remember ham radio operators tuning into the satellites beeping. But you probably haven’t heard much about the team that built the vehicle, the problems they had, or the clever design choices they made. [Hoog] has a video that details the birth of Sputnik. You can see the video below.

The original plan was to launch a massive space lab, but it proved too ambitious. Keep in mind that in the late 1950s, you didn’t have tiny computers, high-density power sources, or advanced materials, and no one really knew what to expect in the Earth orbit environment. Even the viability of radio from the ground to orbit wasn’t a given. But Sputnik’s 1-watt transmitter did the job.

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Inside The Heathkit Factory

May 15, 2026 by Al Williams 17 Comments

If you are a certain age, you doubtlessly remember Heathkit. They produced a wide array of electronic kits that were models of completeness and clear instructions. They started with surplus war parts in 1947 and wound up a major player in ham radio and early personal computers. But they made so many other things like TVs, radio control planes, and test equipment. All of it was made for you to build yourself. [Unseen History] released a video with the story of Heathkit from the start to the finish.

The company started out building kit airplanes, but after the war, they built a kit for an oscilloscope using military surplus. The less than $40 scope was still pricey in 1947 when a pound of bacon sold for 64 cents. But a “real” oscilloscope at the time would cost at least $400. The rest is history.

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The History Of Altec Lansing

May 12, 2026 by Al Williams 21 Comments

If you bought computer audio hardware a few decades ago, you may remember coming across products from Altec Lansing. That you probably haven’t thought of that name in some time doesn’t surprise us, the company has not fared well in recent years and has changed hands multiple times. [The Last Shift] tells the company’s history in a video you can watch below.

James Lansing started Lansing Manufacturing, offering high-end speakers for the fledgling “talkie” movie industry. It had some success, but the depression put them on shaky footing. Meanwhile, a company named All Technical Service Company, or Altec, was a large organization that serviced Western Electric movie theater equipment. Flush with cash, they merged with Lansing Manufacturing to form Altec Lansing. With a large infrastructure and Lansing’s engineering, they became a significant supplier to the military during World War II.

After the war, the company produced a landmark theater speaker system that became the gold standard in theater audio. However, Lansing didn’t like the big company environment and left to found a company that bore his full name, James B. Lansing, which you may know as JBL.

Altec Lansing continued to grow. However, a series of mergers and sales starting in 1969 caused the Altec Lansing company to decline. By the 1990s, Altec Lansing was making cheap PC speakers. A far cry from the gold-standard massive speakers made by the company during its heyday.

We love the history of technology and the people that drove them. Bing Crosby, for example. Or the lesser-known heroes like Edwin Armstrong.

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The Kentucky Cave Wars, And Going Viral In 1925

April 16, 2026 by Al Williams 10 Comments

Floyd Collins, the unfortunate star of this post. (Public Domain)

Information, it seems, flows at the speed of media. In the old days, information traveled with people on ships or horses, so if, say, a battle was won or lost, it could be months or even years before anyone back home knew what happened. While books and movable type let people store information, they still moved at the speed people moved. Before the telegraph, there were attempts to use things like semaphores to speed the flow of information, but those were generally limited to line-of-sight operations. Carrier pigeons were handy, but don’t really move much faster than people.

The telegraph helped, but people didn’t have telegraph stations in their homes. At least not ordinary people. But radio was different. It didn’t take long for every home to have a radio, and while the means of broadcasting remained in the hands of a few, the message could go everywhere virtually instantly. This meant news could go from one side of the globe to the other in seconds. It also meant rumors, fads, and what we might think of today as memes could, too.

You might think that things “going viral” is a modern problem, but, in reality, media sensations have always been with us. All that changes is the number of them and their speed.

One of the earliest viral media sensations dealt with William Floyd Collins, an unfortunate man who was exploring caves during the Kentucky Cave Wars.

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Four Choppers And A Blimp: The Bizarre Piasecki Helistat

April 14, 2026 by Tyler August 24 Comments

Over two decades after it was last deflated, detached from its gondola, and crated up at Lakehurst, the gas bag of an N-class ZPG-2W blimp was broken out and dusted off for what might have been the most bizarre afterlife in aviation history: as a key building block for the U.S. Forest Service’s Piasecki PA-97 Helistat.

Just look at it! It’s an antique blimp gas bag, four war-surplus helicopters pulled from the boneyard, and a whole maze of aluminum tubing. That the U.S. Forest Service, of all agencies, was the one building what amounts to the airship version of an X-plane is also weird enough to be called bizarre. Getting Frank Piasecki to design this thing, a man who did as much as almost anyone else to kill the airship, might be considered ironic, but to stay on theme, I’ll call it bizarre.

If you’re not already a quadrotor-blimp afficionado, we have some explaining to do.

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The “Tin Blimp” Was A Neither Tin Nor A Blimp: The Detroit ZMC-2 Story

March 10, 2026 by Tyler August 32 Comments

That fireball was LZ37. Nobody wanted to see repeats post-war.
Image: “The great exploit of lieutenant Warnefort 1916 England” by Gordon Crosby, public domain.

After all the crashing and burning of Imperial Germany’s Zeppelins in the later part of WWI – once the Brits managed to build interceptors that could hit their lofty altitude, and figured out the trick of using incendiary rounds to set off the hydrogen lift gas – there was a certain desire in airship circles to avoid fires. In the USA, that mostly took the form of replacing hydrogen with helium. Sure, it didn’t lift quite as well, but it also didn’t explode.

Still, supplies of helium were– and are– very much limited, and at least on a rigid Zeppelin, the hydrogen wasn’t even the most flammable part. As has become widely known, thanks in large part to the Mythbusters episode about the Hindenburg disaster, the doped cotton skin in use in those days was more flammable than some firestarters you can buy these days.

That’s a problem, because, as came up in the comments of our last airship article, rigid airships beat blimps largely on Rule of Cool. Who invented the blimp? Well, arguably it was Henri Griffard with his steam-driven balloon in 1857, but not many people have ever heard his name. Who invented the rigid airship? You know his name: Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin. No relation. Probably. Well, admittedly most people don’t know the full name, but Count Zeppelin is still practically a household name over a century after his death. His invention was just that much cooler.

That unavoidable draw of coolness led to the Detroit Airship Company and their amazing tin blimp. The idea was the brainchild of a man named Ralph Upton, and is startling in its simplicity: why not take the all-metal, monocoque design that was just then being so successfully applied to heavier-than-air flight, and use it to build an airship? Continue reading “The “Tin Blimp” Was A Neither Tin Nor A Blimp: The Detroit ZMC-2 Story” →

What One-Winged Squids Can Teach The Airship Renaissance

February 25, 2026 by Tyler August 31 Comments

It’s a blustery January day outside Lakehurst, New Jersey. The East Coast of North America is experiencing its worst weather in decades, and all civilian aircraft have been grounded the past four days, from Florida to Maine. For the past two days, that order has included military aircraft, including those certified “all weather” – with one notable exception. A few miles offshore, rocking and bucking in the gales, a U.S. Navy airship braves the storm. Sleet pelts the plexiglass windscreen and ice sloughs off the gasbag in great sheets as the storm rages on, and churning airscrews keep the airship on station.

If you know history you might be a bit confused: the rigid airship USS Akron was lost off the coast of New Jersey, but in April, not January. Before jumping into the comments with your corrections, note the story I’ve begun is set not in 1933, but in 1957, a full generation later.

The airship caught in the storm is no experimental Zeppelin, but an N-class blimp, the workhorse of the cold-war fleet. Yes, there was a cold war fleet of airships; we’ll get to why further on. The most important distinction is that unlike the last flight of the Akron, this story doesn’t end in tragedy, but in triumph. Tasked to demonstrate their readiness, five blimps from Lakehurst’s Airship Airborne Early-Warning Squadron 1 remained on station with no gaps in coverage for the ten days from January 15th to 24th. The blimps were able to swap places, watch-on-watch, and provide continuous coverage, in spite of weather conditions that included 60 knot winds and grounded literally every other aircraft in existence at that time. Continue reading “What One-Winged Squids Can Teach The Airship Renaissance” →