Jewish Invention Myths: The Airship/Blimp
Another day, another jewish invention myth.
Today we are covering the jewish claim that they invented the airship or as it sometimes known: the blimp. (1) Unlike some so-called ‘jewish inventions’ we at least have a plausible candidate who was actually jewish called David Schwarz put forward as the jewish inventor of the airship/blimp. (2)
The problem is that this simply isn’t remotely true.
The first airship/blimp design was produced by Fr. Francesco Lana-Terzi, S.J. of Brescia, Italy who first published an airship design in 1670. This is known as a ‘Vacuum Airship’ and can actually be constructed and works. (3)
Lana-Terzi’s fellow Jesuit Fr. Bartolomeu de Gusmão, S.J. followed in his footsteps in 1709 and created a hot air balloon called the Passarola, which ascended to circa 95 metres in Lisbon in front of the King of Portugal and the future Pope Innocent XIII. (4)
Then in 1783 French mathematician, engineer and general Jean Baptiste Meusnier outlined the first true dirigible airship in a paper called ‘Mémoire sur l'équilibre des machines aérostatiques’ to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris on 3rd December 1783, which included sixteen watercolour drawings of his design that featured – among other things - three propellers and was steered by a rudder. (5)
Before Meusnier could construct his airship; he died of wounds received during the Siege of Mainz in 1793.
Using Meusnier’s ideas French engineer Henri Giffard constructed his own improved version of Meusnier’s design and successfully flew it in 1852 (6) and is generally credited as being the first person to invent the airship as we’d now understand it. (6)
Airship development continued a pace after Giffard’s invention with – for example - an American inventor named Solomon Andrews of New Jersey offering his version of the airship to Union forces during the American Civil War (7) and German engineer Paul Haenlein flying an airship with an internal combustion engine running on the coal gas used to inflate the envelope in 1872. (8)
So, what of David Schwarz?
Well Schwarz – a jew from Hungary who lived most of his life in Croatia then all part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburgs - was active much later and created an airship in 1892 with an aluminium envelope which the famous Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin had to pay Schwarz’s widow Melanie 15,000 marks for in 1897 in order to legally nullify Schwarz’s 1892 contract with German industrialist Carl Berg to exclusively supply Schwarz with aluminium for airships which Zeppelin needed for his. (9)
So, no Schwarz didn’t invent the airship/the blimp and in fact contributed remarkably little to the development of the airship but because he created a slightly different one decades after they’d first been invented by Henri Giffard using Jean Baptiste Meusnier’s basic design. Jews apparently want to claim that they invented it all along.
Go figure.
References
(1) https://boulderjewishnews.org/2009/an-informal-list-of-jewish-inventions-innovations-and-radical-ideas/
(2) https://christianislamicforum.wordpress.com/dedicated-to-our-jewish-brethren/
(3) https://web.archive.org/web/20210424104423/http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/jmac/sj/scientists/lana.htm
(4) https://www.skytamer.com/1700-1799.html
(5) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00420830
(6) https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-27224-0_2
(7) Glenn Degner, Lumen Winter, 1933, ‘Minute Epics of Flight’, 1st Edition, Grosset & Dunlap: New York, p. 36
(8) http://jrul.libraries.rutgers.edu/index.php/jrul/article/view/1865/3298
(9) Degner, Winter, Op. Cit., p. 44
(10) Peter Brooks, 1992, ‘Zeppelin: Rigid Airships 1893–1940’, 1st Edition, Smithsonian Institute Press: Washington D.C., pp. 27-31