There are a lot of jobs in World War I that would compete for the "worst job" title, but manning a spy basket has to be somewhere up there. At the least, it earned the title of "loneliest job". Even despite all of its hazards, it's a job people would volunteer for!

When operating a zeppelin, captains would typically prefer to fly them above the clouds to prevent anti-aircraft from targeting them. This made observation and navigation difficult, though.

Luckily, zeppelins already had a solution sort of in the works. They'd often carry a hanging pod housing the radio antenna. Add a wicker chair and an unlucky crewmember, and you have a spy basket.

A crewmember in a spy basket would be lowered in the pod to below the clouds on a kilometer-long tether. At that distance, they can't see their carrier any more, and are basically completely by themselves in their basket.

With them in the basket is a simple chair/mattress, lamp, compass, and telephone. Now being the only member of the zeppelin crew who can see the ground, the spy basket operator's job is to call the helmsman and give directions.

The original spy basket was tested by blindfolding the zeppelin helmsman and seeing how well a crewmember in the basket below could remotely navigate by providing the bearings to take. The airship's captain was the first to try it, and he nearly fell out when the basket became entangled with the airship's aerial.

German spy basket designs incorporated fins on the back to keep it stable. The US later operated rigid airships with a similar basket, including on the USS Akron. When testing their basket (unmanned), it swung wildly out of control, swinging as high as the airship itself. They reeled it back in and decided not to bother.

It's not often these days that the United States Postal Service prints stamps with the exclusive purpose of them being collectible. In fact, they, along with the Mint, are pretty darn insistent on preventing anything special, misprinted, or otherwise collectible for its rarity escaping their production lines. This, of course, only results in misprints becoming the absurdly expensive coins and stamps for their rarity.

The USPS does still do commemorative stamps, of course, but they're still made with the intent people are going to stick them to letters, and they aren't sold at a big markup over regular stamps. Or any markup at all, now that I check, at least for 'Forever' stamps.

Anyways, that point is that they used to, back when it was called the United States Post Office! Commemorative stamps started in the US with the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition as a fundraising effort for the Post Office Department.

By issuing special stamps for the Exposition, they'd hoped people would buy the stamps and then not use them, thus giving the Post Office money in exchange for basically a souvenir. The full set had 16 stamps, several of which weren't even in the right denominations for mailing.

The most expensive was five dollars, or $167 in 2023 money, and the full set would cost $528 today! Despite that absurd cost, the Post Office's stamps were a huge success for them.

The souvenir stamps pretty clearly had their non-usage in mind. They were printed larger and with more elaborate art than a comparable stamp made to mail.

The cost made a lot of people in the budding stamp-collecting hobby rather upset. One result was the founding of the Society for the Suppression of Speculative Stamps, the purpose of which was to protest these frequently-made high-cost collectible stamps, since anyone trying to get a full set of US stamps would now go bankrupt.

Well, the Post Office wasn't deterred because they raked in money. This leads us to probably the most famous example of a commemorative stamp, and it involves zeppelins! Not the Hindenburg (this time), although that certainly didn't help.

The particular zeppelin involved in the downfall of expensive commemorative stamps was the Graf Zeppelin, actually the second airship called that. This one was sister of the Hindenburg and nearly the same size.

You may think the biggest problem with the zeppelin program was that they used flammable hydrogen instead of helium for a lifting gas, but coming in a close second was that every single aspect of them was extraordinarily expensive. This was made worse by their heyday being also the heyday of the Great Depression right around 1930.

The Graf Zeppelin was literally expensive just to look at: they charged tickets to see it from the ground. Among its financing schemes was a transatlantic airmail route, something quite rare in the early 30s.

The Luftschiffbau Zeppelin and the Post Office thus entered a partnership: The Post Office would create special stamps which could only be used for zeppelin mail, and it would also give a large cut of the income to the zeppelin company.

There were regular stamps that would send your letter across the ocean, of course, but one of the set was rather unique: For $2.60 (~$47 2023), your letter would go across the ocean... and then right back to you. It'd receive a special franking stamp! Perfect for collectors, useless for everyone else.

The Post Office expected much the same results as the 1893 Expo where people would buy these for the sole purpose of collecting and investing.

Unfortunately for the Post Office (and Luftschiffbau Zeppelin who would develop much bigger problems by 1937), people were a bit too broke in the 1930s to spend 50 times the cost of a loaf of bread on a collectible stamp. Barely 7% of the three million stamps the Post Office printed actually sold, and the rest were recalled and destroyed.

My books came.

Today's post is about something very interesting: Numbers! Well, specific numbers. Specific numbers relating to a specific thing. Okay, you got me, it's an aircraft post again.

I always knew the zeppelins, especially the ones in the Hindenburg class, were an impressive feat of engineering that hasn't really been replicated today (no the new 'zeppelins' don't count they're not rigid airships). And I guess the "why" is pretty obvious for a lot of reasons. Still, I wanted to go into the numbers on exactly what made the zeppelins such an unusual endeavor.

We'll start with the obvious one: The Hindenburg was massive. Well, big. Not lots of mass. It remains the largest single aircraft ever built. I knew that bit. But by how large of a margin? Way more than I'd though. It's 800 feet long! That's nearly three times second place, the Antonov An-225 Mriya (rest in peace). The Hindenburg even starts to rival some things that can't fly, being about half the length of the largest tanker ships today.

But let's talk about the "mass" part of the massive. It's a lighter-than-air ship using lifting gas to fly rather than aerodynamics. At maximum payload, it only weighed about 400,000 pounds. A lot, but the Mriya's max takeoff weight was (yes using past tense there makes me sad) 1.4 million pounds.

Let's focus on a specific one, the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin, ten years older than the Hindenburg (1927), a little smaller. So, all of that space, must have lots of room for cargo and passengers, right? Not really. Even 200,000 pounds of useful lift only goes so far. So the next number to be considered here is 20. Because for the Graf Zeppelin, 20 is how many passengers could be berthed. A transatlantic ticket cost about $12,000 in today's money. Hindenburg carried more (40-72), but nowhere near a modern plane.

(Not the inside of the Graf Zeppelin, but rather an American airship before gas cells are installed)

Even more impressive are the flying records the airships set. Graf Zeppelin happily set the record for longest non-stop flight, 6,168 miles, on its first intercontinental trip. It also was able to circumnavigate the globe, setting a speed record for doing that. It carried passengers in the process, at a cool $47,000 (today) per ticket to go back where to you started.