Helium to Germany

When word of the Hindenburg explosion at Lakehurst, N. J. last spring was flashed to aged, vigorous Dr. Hugo Eckener, technical chief of the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin Company, he gasped, "We must have helium." Though Germany has lost by accident 32 of the 120 Zeppelins she has built* there was no thought of abandoning huge lighter-than-air craft--as they have been abandoned in Great Britain, France, Italy and the U. S. With what General Goring clarioned as "unbending will," work was pressed on her sister ship, the LZ-130, commenced on another Zeppelin double in passenger capacity. The U. S. Bureau of Mines, world's chief producer of the helium necessary for these ships, was quickly authorized by a shocked, sympathetic, albeit businesslike Congress to supply it. Last week plans for shipping the light gas and resumption next June of U. S.-Europe Zeppelin flights were announced.

Colorless, odorless, non-inflammable helium gas, with 92% of hydrogen's lifting power, is so far produced in large commercial quantities only at the 18-acre Government plant at Soncy, seven miles from Amarillo, Tex. There by a complicated process of washing, cooling, and separation it is extracted from the natural gas underlying that area. Present production is about 5,000,000 cubic feet out of a 24,000,000 cubic foot annual capacity--with reserves estimated at enough for the next 5,000 years. Two other small plants in the U. S. at Dexter, Kans. and Thatcher, Colo., for which the Government is now dickering with Girdler Corp., have together produced about 10,000,000 cubic feet of helium since 1927.

Because of its war potentialities the Government's helium sales program establishes--after critical investigation of necessity--yearly quotas for any nation that applies for gas. So far only one nation, Germany, has applied and its share for 1938 is 17,900,000 cubic feet, enough to fill the LZ-130's 7,000,000-odd cubic foot gas bag and compensate it for the loss of about 300,000 cubic feet each time it crosses the Atlantic on the airship's projected 18 round trips this year. As helium costs about 1-c- per cubic foot to produce and is sold by the Government at an estimated 1 1/4-c- per cubic foot, each completed trip will cost the LZ-130 at least $6,000 for helium alone.

This week the 3,663-ton North German Lloyd freighter Dessau docks at Houston, Tex. Under her decks are 486 empty steel cylinders to carry back to Germany the first installment of U. S. gas. At 2,500 Ib. per sq. in. pressure, 5,600 cu. ft. of helium can be compressed into each cylinder. In the U. S. helium for medical treatments (asthma, croup), deep-water diving, laboratory experiments, is shipped 200,000 cu. ft. at a time in cylinders 40 ft. long, 4 ft. in diameter which travel four to a flatcar.

46 others were lost in the World War--the rest, except for the Graf Zeppelin and the decommissioned Los Angeles at Lakehurst. were dismantled or forfeited to the Allies.

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