Addison Bain

Addison Bain is a retired NASA scientist and hydrogen experthttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/html/e3-menu.html (Expert Interview)] credited with postulating the Bain Incendiary-Paint Theory (IPT), which posits that the Hindenburg disaster was caused by the electrical ignition of lacquer- and metal-based paints used on the outer hull of the airship. Thus Bain believes that the hydrogen in the airship had no part to play in the initiaton of the disaster.

This theory (proposed in 1997 and recently updated in his 2004 book, "The Freedom Element: Living with Hydrogen" ISBN 1878398970) has been generally accepted by people interested in promoting hydrogen as a transportation fuel and generally rejected by people involved with airships and their history.

The primary refutation is based on the work of A. J. Dessler, [http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/zf/LZ129fire.pdf] D. E. Overs, and W. H. Appleby. Their work, both theoretical and experimental, has concluded that even if the airship were covered with solid rocket fuel, as the IPT claims, it would still have taken 12 hours for the airship to burn had hydrogen not been present. It is worth noting that this refutation misses the point of the theory, which relates only to what started the fire, not how it continued. Naturally any fuel present would contribute to the flame once the flame had started.

The case for the IPT is explained in Bain's televised demonstration of the extreme flammability of a piece of the actual skin of the "Hindenburg" preserved from the disaster. ["Secrets of the Dead:" "What Happened to the Hindenburg?" 60 min., PBS Home Video, 2000.] Bain demonstrates the incendiary properties of the "Hindenburg" skin and then asks why the bits of skin ejected from the inferno continued to burn brightly on their way down instead of self-extinguishing once removed from the zone of densest hydrogen. This question of "self-extinguishing" is important since his critics point out that the components of the doping compound used on the skin should put themselves out if removed from any fuel for fire and should not have burned so quickly if the fire actually started with the skin instead of the hydrogen.

Critics also counter that Bain does not actually ignite the skin with a quick electrical charge but in uses a Jacob's Ladder with "continuous" electrical charge that took several strikes to ignite, which would ignite any sort of fabric. Additionally, Bain was required to correctly position the fabric to allow it to ignite. (Another part of the IPT hypothesizes that the mooring cables, which were designed to ground any static electricity on the surface of the airship, worked only partly in this instance; since some of the skin panels still carried an electric charge, at least one of them must have sparked, causing the initial outbreak of fire.) Thus it has yet to be proven that an electrical charge could ignite the "Hindenburg" skin. The design of the ship would likely exclude the skin being an ignition point because of (1) the properties of the doping process, (2) the insulation from the frame and skin of the grounding drop-lines, and (3) the inability of any experiment to ignite the skin via electrical spark consistent with the conditions of the 1937 disaster.

The television show "Mythbusters" also dedicated a recent episode to Bain's theory. Scale models of the "Hindenburg" were built and tested with skin reproductions. One model had no hydrogen while the other did. The only burn that replicated the "Hindenburg" burn used hydrogen.

References

External links

* [http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/zf/LZ129fire.htm Refutation and Discussion of Dessler, Overs, and Appleby]
* [http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/zf/LZ129fire.pdf The Hindenburg Hydrogen Fire: Fatal Flaws in the Addison Bain Incendiary-Paint Theory] 3 June 2004