An early-years photo of the Goodyear-Zeppelin Akron Airdock. New life is at hand.
Akron-Summit County Library Photo
Akron may be getting its wings back. OK, maybe not wings, exactly. But soon, the city that rubber built and was uplifted by lighter-than-air (LTA) technology may be flying higher than ever, because a California company recognizes the Akron Airdock’s value.
There is nothing like the Akron Airdock and the LTA expertise still to be found in Northeast Ohio thanks to its presence—at least nothing in United States.
Akron lost a considerable chunk of its distinctiveness when the Airdock, built in 1929 by and formerly closely identified with Goodyear—both Rubber Company and Aerospace— ceased being a functioning powerhouse and became a big bump on the landscape. It should not have surprised us, I suppose, but it hurt—it hurt more than perhaps anyone but P.W. Litchfield could appreciate and understand, he being the Godfather of LTA.
Litchfield envisioned a glorious future in American airships, built here but gotten off the ground with the help of the best German “airheads.” I know this because I am co-author of Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron and, along with David Giffels, which was a yearlong weekly special section in the Akron Beacon Journalbefore being edited into a book by Deb Van Tassel Warner, the two of us and the University of Akron Press.
David wrote a chapter about the Germans coming to America to help us, before Hitler tried to kill every American he could get in the sights of his military forces. Now, such old hopes are new again, with the announcement of a partnership among Lighter than Air Research of California, the city of Akron and the University of Akron. Lighter than Air Research intends to develop state-of-the-art, electric-powered, zero-emission airships and build them in the Akron Airdock. Can someone please tell me the last time a California company came to Akron to build anything or, for that matter, when Akron last had a new and great opportunity to build something that could cause heads to swivel and eyes to bug-out as they look skyward, as we seek out the Goodyear’s blimp?
A good guess: Around the Twelfth of Never.
Much of the media’s coverage has concentrated on the historical aspects of lighter-than-air (and not focused on the sadly grand failures that wracked Litchfield). Without knowing as much as we will come to know about this project that is a partnership of the California company, the city of Akron, and the University of Akron, it’s an obvious path. What I see is a promising kernel of the seed-corn I once described as being rubber’s legacy in Akron. The Beacon Journal’s Jim MacKinnon hoed another row, reporting the Development Finance Authority of Summit County—the old Port Authority—has approved the sale of the Airdock, which it has owned since 2006, to Lockheed Martin.
Lockheed Martin will be allowed to sublease the Airdock to LTA Research to build airships, the prototypes of which already have been flown in what was once the world’s largest structure without interior supports. Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google and creator of LTA Research, is a man with personal fortune large enough to make his idea of using large airships for humanitarian aid around the world a reality. Other seemingly good ideas, including Litchfield’s for worldwide airship travel, turned into pipedreams.
Litchfield, a farsighted man whom Goodyear co-founder F.A. Seiberling lured to Akron in 1900 “as a collector would go after a rare species of butterfly that suddenly flutters into his presence.” A chemist, Litchfield was the missing ingredient needed to help Seiberling’s new East Akron factory flourish and ended up running the company. As I have written previously about Litchfield he “had a knack for seeing opportunity sooner and more clearly than others.” He sold Seiberling on the future of autos (and the tires Goodyear would build for them), and in other transportation, including lighter-than-air— from balloons and airships to dirigibles and blimps. He is the reason the Airdock exists.
Goodyear, after World War I when German airship building became verboten, forged a relationship with the German Zeppelin company and brought to Akron the so-called twelve disciples of Zeppelin led by engineer Dr. Karl Arnstein. Arnstein oversaw construction of the Airdock, and not even disasters involving two early airships built there—the USS Akron and USS Macon—was able to completely snuff out the hope for lighter than air technology that has risen and risen yet again, including today’s version.
So much hope . . . for rigid airships, military blimps, commercial blimps (like Goodyear’s semi-rigid airships still referred to as blimps and now built in its facility near Wingfoot Lake in Suffield Township in Portage County), aerostats that Lockheed Martin made for defense purposes. When I wrote what became the last chapter of both the Wheels of Fortune newspaper series and book it was tinged both with a finality of most tire-making in Akron and the hope left behind in knowledge of polymers at the University of Akron and the city’s remaining rubber research facilities and the physical presence of the Airdock which had become the world’s largest garage but was nevertheless a kernel of the seed corn that could someday spout again, turning history into a possible future.
Is this that new day? Can LTA Research become what the rubber companies became at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth? Could yet another generation of workers, an army of them, be summoned to the old, familiar front lines, the legendary Airdock, for this new venture to build airships for Sergey Brin’s humanitarian vision? Could this be real? Could it be the new hope Akron has sought?
When I climbed the catwalks high in the Airdock, up near the ceiling, to get the feel for this magnificent and legendary structure and to imagine what it must have been like when hundreds of workers scurried about below, building the Akron and the Macon airships, it was difficult even to see to the floor, much less back through the years. But I know that moment existed and, if it existed once, perhaps it could exist again.
I am neither futurist nor visionary but some of my last words in Wheels for Fortune, published more than 20 years ago, were: “In Building G at Lockheed Martin Tactical Defense Systems headquarters, executives haven’t given up on finding a way to use Plant A, the Airdock.” There have been failures. But could Brin and his LTA Research be the success always envisioned, the way forward on the wings of the past?
