Graf Zeppelin avec Packard à Mines Field, Los Angeles. 1929

“Roy, come and get this ---damn cat.”

On October 15, 1910, Kiddo the cat became the first of his kind to attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean by airship—and he wasn’t very happy about it.

When aeronaut Walter Wellman’s hydrogen airship, America, was preparing for take-off from New Jersey, Kiddo was found in the airship’s lifeboat. The wide-eyed grey tabby was not pleased about his unexpected journey, and his howling annoyed the airship’s chief engineer, Melvin Vaniman. (The duo seemed to have made-up after their spat—enough to pose for a photo together, at least.)

The America was the first airship to have radio equipment. Kiddo has the distinction of being the subject of the first ever radio communication from an aircraft in flight: “Roy, come and get this ---damn cat.”

The 71 hours that Kiddo and the rest of the crew spent in flight were fraught with storms and engine failure. After traveling just over 1,300 miles from their launch point, the America sent out a distress signal. Kiddo and the crew were evacuated via the airship’s lifeboat on to a Royal Mail steamship. The America—no longer weighed down by the boat, crew, and cat—drifted away and eventually crashed off the coast of Maryland.

According to the airship’s navigator, Murray Simon, Kiddo preferred the sea-faring portion of the journey; he described Kiddo as perched on the lifeboat’s sail, “washing his face in the Sun, a pleasant picture of feline content.”

(photograph and story courtesy of the Smithsonian)

I never get bored of seeing the sheer humongous scale of airships like this that flew nearly one hundred years ago.

Here’s Zeppelin LZ129 Hindenburg at the hangar in Lakehurst, USA in 1936 (the year before the disaster) AP Photo.

Wingfoot One drifting over North Perry Airport FL

Source details and larger version.

Up, up and away: my collection of vintage hot air balloons and dirigibles is taking off.

The Goodyear baby dirigible Puritan would have visited folks at Battery Park in lower Manhattan had it not been for the high winds, September 27, 1928. The little air ship was flown to Roosevelt Field, L.I. from Lakehurst, N.J.. From there, it flew over the city, then swooped low over the Battery, where it dropped a note saying that high winds prevented the scheduled landing.

Photo: Associated Press

Overflight of the U.S. Capitol building by Germany’s Graf Zeppelin - 1931.

I found this guy today. One more step towards making every ornament an allusions to postcards...

Picture dump time! These are fan-sketches I made of Dystopian Wars, my latest miniatures wargaming obsession. Turns out, I like boats and I cannot lie. Dystopian Wars (DW) is a steampunk/dieselpunk/atompunk alternate history wargame taking place in the year 187X, where great powers have great technology and lack great responsibility. The pictures are not in chronological order; I started with the Korean crafts, did the Polynesian ships and then the Union Atomic ship, then the Greek page, then the Persian Airships. Koreans and Greeks are going to be in the game, so they're baseless speculation on my part. Polynesians were a fan-thing for the Enlightened faction, and I wanted to include a bit of Solarpunk in the designs. Verdict is still out on that. Persian Airships are ludicrous fantasy on my part, based out of the idea of using an archetypical oil lamp as the hull for an airship. In addition, DW has a strong modularity component to it. Each plastic kit can build one thing out of several options, leading to great flexibility in the kits. The Prussians are the best example; if you don't glue down the bridge and primary weapons, you can just have any ship you could build with that kit. I tried duplicating that effect in sketch form, but with the Persians I got fed up and assembled full images of each variation.

Graf Zeppelin. Arrival in Leningrad. 1931

Inside of Zeppelin, 1930

Midjourney Images. Various flying vessels designed for illustrations for the World of Asdar. On Asdar, these are called skycraft, and some specifically, 'titanships,' because they use ancient 'titancraft' for levitation and thrust.

R34 returns to England after being the first airship to cross the Atlantic in 1919.