The Hindenburg had a pressurized, airlock-sealed smoking room despite carrying 7 million cubic feet of hydrogen gas, with a single electric lighter as the only permitted ignition source.
Key Takeaways
The smoking room on B Deck was kept at higher pressure than the rest of the ship to prevent hydrogen ingress, separated by a double-door airlock.
Hydrogen is lighter than air and rises, so the bottom-deck location was actually among the safer spots; only a Bay 12 cell leak at the very bottom posed real risk.
The true danger was fire spreading to the gas cells above, not hydrogen pooling near the smoking room itself.
Pressurization served a dual purpose: genuine safety engineering and public relations for a nervous traveling public.
The room doubled as the ship’s bar, making it the most popular space aboard.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters drew a broader point about paradigm carry-over: airships inherited multi-day travel norms from ships and trains, so amenities like bars and smoking rooms were expected, not reckless.
The ubiquity of smoking in mid-20th-century culture was a recurring thread; commenters noted planes, submarines, and every public space normalized it, with ashtrays still legally required in modern aircraft lavatories as a fallback if someone smokes anyway.
The pressurization mechanic prompted comparisons to game-based intuition building, with one commenter citing Oxygen Not Included as an unexpected teacher of differential air pressure concepts.
Notable Comments
@-warren: Notes that FAA requires ashtrays in aircraft lavatories even today because a ban alone does not eliminate the act, so a safe disposal point is mandatory.
@stmw: “Today we worry about using Rust ‘unsafe’ too often. They had a smoking room on a hydrogen airship!”
