Word: nonrigid
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Ferdinand von Zeppelin. After he retired from the Kaiser's army, in 1891, Zeppelin dedicated his life to perfecting giant rigid dirigibles-built around a metal skeleton-that would retain their shape and could be guided. About the same time, a wealthy Brazilian, Alberto Santos-Dumont, developed the nonrigid dirigible and pleased girls by taking them on flights around Paris...
Full Circle. Ironically, the big nonrigid blimp was designed as an answer to the sudden death that had plagued the larger, rigid, lighter-than-air ships of the 1920s and '30s. The French Dixmude disappeared over the Mediterranean in 1923; the U.S. Navy's 680-ft. Shenandoah broke up in a storm over Ohio in 1925 ; the 785-ft. Akron splashed in the Atlantic in 1933; and her sister ship Macon was ditched in the Pacific in 1935. Then, on May 6, 1937, the biggest dirigible of all, the hydrogen-filled German Hindenburg, blew up and burned...