… yes they used cow gut/intestines 🐄🐄. 7 layers of cow gut where sewn onto a carrier layer of fabric to create an airtight balloon that could hold hydrogen lifting gas for some days 🎈. 50.000 cows where slaughtered for one gas-cell
Advantages over rubber of cow gut:
- rubber-cotton balloons got brittle with repeated uses with hydrogen filling. Cow gut is a flexible material that lasted longer, though expensive.
- rubber balloons can get statically charged. A small spark can flame all the hydrogen at once. Cattle gut does not charge as quickly as rubber.
Source:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldbeater's_skin#Applications
- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldschlägerhaut german article mentions some more numbers data.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship#Envelope
Also German-empire had unreliable access to colonies that produced rubber or cotton during ww1. So they used cow gut as a rubber-balloon replacement.
Layers where sewn in secret alternating patterns to make it airtight.
they realized that if layers of goldbeater’s skin were laid on top of each other when wet, they fuse together as they dry.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/zeppelins-made-out-of-cow-intestines.html
If the skin was moistened again and pieces were patch-worked together into large sheets, they’d dry with airtight seals. No other material — including rubber — could be this tightly sealed.
I couldn’t find anything on a specific pattern of the “fabric”, but what I did find was the natural glues(?) worked fine for it being airtight.
Oh, I am not doubting that there were specific patterns of this stuff, but I can’t find any references. (I have an interest in wartime engineering, s’all)
Why was it important that the patterns be secret?
So company manufacturing it can make more money with monopoly. Also it had military relevance, if your enemies copy this shit … yout get air-raided. The family holding secret knowledge on this was “Weinling”. Later germans found out on this smh and knitted them in a 7 layer pattern.
The method of preparing and making gas-tight joins in the skins was known only to a family called Weinling, from the Alsatia London area. The sheets were joined together and folded into impermeable layers
