On the morning of Wednesday, June 3, 1925, residents of Akron awoke to a strange sight in the sky over the booming Ohio city. Floating through the morning mists at 60 miles an hour was the world’s smallest dirigible, just 110 feet long with seating for three. Those who heard the roar of the motors and the whirl of the propellers just after 6 a.m. that day were witnesses to the first flight of, depending on your point of view, either a fanciful and quickly forgotten business venture or one of the world’s most successful marketing gambits.
Archival images in an extensive photo collection shared via JSTOR by the University of Akron show the cigar-shaped craft—filled for its maiden voyage with highly flammable hydrogen gas—in its hangar near Wingfoot Lake, a rural area east of the city where the test flight was supposed to take place. It was now far from its original flight plan, as its designer and pilot charted a course over central Akron and the home of Paul W. Litchfield, his boss. (A detour that would become a bit of a tradition.) Litchfield was the leading evangelist for this small, non-rigid airship, which he named Pilgrim. As the Cleveland Plain Dealer described it on June 4, Litchfield believed it would “blaze the way for a host of ‘family’ airships which some day may be seen in the skies as commonly as automobiles are encountered on the road.” Instead, the Pilgrim became almost unique in the skies, and in the American imagination. This silver airship was the first Goodyear Blimp.
On its inaugural flight, the Pilgrim didn’t carry a brand name. It wasn’t meant as advertising for the Goodyear Rubber & Tire Company, which had been founded in Akron almost thirty years earlier. It was a prototype for Litchfield’s vision of a horizon dotted with “air yachts.” He imagined dirigible mooring masts erected at every respectable country club. “Anyone can learn to operate the craft in a couple of days,” he had promised the United News service in January 1925. “For traveling de luxe or for hunting or fishing they will be just the thing.”
Litchfield, Goodyear vice president and general manager, had predicted they would be available to the public by 1926, at a cost of $50,000 each, but his dreams were delayed by restrictions on the use of helium; the craft was the first designed to utilize the nonflammable gas. Indeed, it would be the US government’s strict control of the valuable resource, then extracted in Texas, which ultimately stymied civilian lighter-than-air travel, writes historian Martin L. Levitt.
But there was enough helium to keep the Pilgrim aloft—for its first official flight, to mark Akron’s centennial in July 1925, and for the debut of the Santa Claus Express, which rained gifts down on the city that December. By 1927, the Pilgrim was emblazoned with Goodyear’s well-known logo, and in 1928, it was joined by Puritan. Litchfield named this second blimp for the yacht that had won the America’s Cup in 1885, a nod to his dreams of making them “as popular as sailing yachts and motor boats,” but this craft and those that followed were built as public relations tools. Soon the company’s growing fleet of billboard blimps seemed to be everywhere: amid the skyscrapers of New York City, face-to-face with the Capitol dome in Washington, DC, floating beachside in Florida, and hovering above the Chicago World’s Fair. The last became an iconic image, writes cultural historian Jeffrey L. Meikle, the “streamlined Goodyear blimp floating serenely overhead, an emblem of smooth efficiency and effortless control.”
It wasn’t all smooth sailing. Flying through sleet in Eastern Kentucky in 1930, the Puritan “ran into a mountain,” the Associated Press reported in a story that made the front pages as far away as Hawaiʻi. No one was injured in that crash, but two years later in New York, thousands watched as the wind-battered Columbia was tossed through the air over Queens before crashing, killing one on board. But those catastrophes—and the most unforgettable airship disaster, the explosion of the Hindenburg in 1937—couldn’t deflate enthusiasm for the Goodyear Blimp. (World War II, however, would ground them; several of the company’s blimps were requisitioned by the US Navy.)
A century after the company debuted the Pilgrim over Akron, fervor for the Goodyear Blimp remains. (Though the name is now a misnomer; the non-rigid blimps of the twentieth century have now been replaced with semi-rigid airships.) Today there are four in service—three in the United States and one in Europe, each more than twice the size of the original. Those who study advertising have struggled to make sense of how these crafts—originally designed to usher in a new era of air travel—became the ultimate brand ambassadors. The answer may be the Rose Bowl—and California traffic.
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On New Year’s Day 1930, the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company entered its newest blimp, Volunteer, as the first aerial float in the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, not far from its Los Angeles factory. For the occasion, the airship was decorated like a sea-faring yacht, and it continued to float over that afternoon’s football game, reporting on nearby traffic conditions. The endeavor was a success, and the blimp reappeared numerous times over the years, ferrying photographers, then movie cameras, and then, in 1955, equipment to broadcast live on NBC from the airship. It was the first time such a technological feat was undertaken, and it was the start of a new future for the Goodyear Blimp, today a fixture in the skies—and on TVs—during the United States’ biggest events.
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