AERONAUTICS: Gold Rivet

Chuckling because he, a dentist, and so an engineer and founder of sorts, was asked to make a small gold rivet for the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corp., Dr. Henry Roehner, Goodyear Tire & Rubber’s rosy-round company dentist, last week took some gold used for making inlays and bridges, melted it, poured it into a plaster-of-paris mold. The resulting gold rod was about the size of a girl’s eye tooth. It weighed two pennyweights, worth less than $2 in coin value and not more than $5 as dental gold. As a golden rivet, however, its intrinsic value was incalculable, for it | was made to be fastened into the highest j part of the biggest (“master”) rib-ring of the biggest dirigible yet planned—the ZRS-4 which the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corp. was to start building this week for the U. S. Navy, with ceremonies which, however, the funeral of Senator Theodore E. Burton at Cleveland delayed a week.

The Goodyear-Zeppelin Corp. was formed five years ago. Paul Weeks Litchfield, present president of Goodyear Tire & Rubber had visited Friedrichshafen, home of the Zeppelin Luftschiffbau, where dirigible-building is an adult profession. Mr. Litchfield, who long before the War had induced Goodyear Tire & Rubber to build balloons, saw opportunity in dirigibles. He dickered with Dr. Hugo Eckener, as usual in need of construction money, for the American rights to build rigid airships and for the loan of some Zeppelin technical men. The Goodyear men incorporated Goodyear-Zeppelin Corp. The Zeppelin Works got a minority block of its stock. Dr. Eckener became a director/ Most important for the U. S. company was the transfer of Dr. Karl Arnstein, Prague-born chief engineer of the German company, to Akron.

At once Dr. Arnstein began designing two military rigid airships of 6,500,000 cubic feet capacity.* His design won first prizes in two competitions held by the Navy’s bureau of Aeronautics. Last year Goodyear-Zeppelin got its Navy contracts and started work.

Last week preparatory labors were almost done. Preparations consisted of building at Akron the largest airship factory and dock in the world. Its floor is a vast concrete spread of 364,000 square feet (more than 8 acres), the largest single uninterrupted floor area yet built. Over this is the dock structure, a cavernous semi-paraboloid building 211 ft. high, 1,175 ft. long. From the high perspective of a flying machine it looks like a peanut or silkworm cocoon. Although the dock was not entirely covered last week, 40,000 people could congregate under the finished portion to watch the ceremony of fastening the first sections of the first airship with Dentist Roehner’s gold rivet.

It is to be shortly after noon. Light through the girders and from many searchlights fall on a comparatively diminutive fabric of duralumin lying at one end of the dock. The duralumin section is 50 ft. long, 10 ft. high, and just one arc of the 133-ft. diameter ring which is to be the “keel” of the airship. A rope on standards marks off the round of the ring-to-be. Within the circumference are 400 dignitaries, official guests, each with a 3-in. disk of duraluminum, memento of the “ZRS-4 Ring-Laying.”

Drums and cymbals clash a silence. A shrill tweet from the bandmaster and out blares the pomp of “Hail to the Chief.” In through the giant curved rolling door at the end of the building marches Rear-Admiral William Adger Moffett, chief of the Navy’s bureau of aeronautics. With him are President Litchfield, Designer Arnstein, Commander Jerome Clark Hunsaker, who Drobably will head the Pacific Zeppelin Transport Co. (see col. 3). They mount a platform above the arc of the master ring. President Litchfield explains the ceremonies to spectators and microphones. Dr. Arnstein hands Rear-Admiral Moffett the gold rivet and a silver-plated hand riveting machine, which looks like a dentist’s forceps. Admiral Moffett places the rivet in the proper hole, squeezes it with his little machine. The band plays “Pomp and Circumstance.” The band then plays “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the gathering breaks up. That evening there is a dinner at Akron’s Portage Country Club.

U. S. bankers have anticipated by at least two years the commercial transoceanic operation of dirigibles. As expected (TIME, Sept. 16), Manhattan’s National City Bank interests organized the International Zeppelin Transport Corp. It will operate German-built dirigibles between Europe, North America, South America. National City’s Chairman. Charles Edwin Mitchell was at sea last week, returning from a conference with Dr. Eckener and President Jakob Goldschmidt of the Darmstadter and National Bank. He had Dr. Eckener’s declaration that a year will be necessary to enlarge the Zeppelin Works at Friedrichshafen and another year to produce the first regular trans-Atlantic airship.

The other forecast in incorporation (TIME, Sept. 16) was that of Pacific Zeppelin Transport Co. Ltd., by Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy (Goodyear Tire & Rubber financial adviser), Lehman Bros., W. A. Harriman & Co. and Pynchon & Co. It will operate Goodyear-built zeppelins from the Pacific Coast to Hawaii. If traffic warrants it will go to the Philippines. But not until at least 1933, after the Navy ships are finished, can Goodyear-Zeppelin build anything for this new operating company.

*Capacity of the Graf Zeppelin is 3,710,000 :ubic feet, of the British R-100 and R-101, 5,000,000 cubic feet each, the Los Angeles 2,500,000 cubic feet.