May 4, 2012
“ We experiment; we assume; we fail; we experiment some more. Finally, tentatively, we succeed.
—Megan Garber on the City of Tomorrow and the dead dream of the dirigible. She continues, “[They are] a timely reminder not just of the short, happy life of airship hegemony, but also of the crazy contingency of history. …. Like the hot-air balloons that preceded it and the wing-thrusted planes that would render it all but obsolete, the Zeppelin represented a hope for a future that might have been, but, finally, was not — an accident of history whose demise was as inevitable as humans seeking the sky.”
