Hindenburg disaster and wingsuits

The History Hour

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week's Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Barbara Waibel, author of a book on the Hindenburg and Director of Archives at the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen, Germany. She tells us about the history of airships.

We begin with some remarkable archive of the Hindenburg airship disaster in 1937. Then British scientist Jonathan Shanklin describes how he discovered the hole in the ozone layer in 1985.

In the second half of the programme we hear from a NASA scientist who worked on the Voyager space probe which took the famous 'Pale Blue Dot' photo of Earth. A physicist from Quebec remembers when a solar flare plunged the Canadian province into darkness. And we hear the exciting and dangerous story of the invention of the wingsuit.

Contributors: Barbara Waibel - Author and Director of Archives at the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen, Germany. Jonathan Shanklin - Scientist who discovered the hole in the ozone layer. Candice Hansen - NASA scientist. Aja Hruska - Physicist from Quebec. Jari Kuosma - Inventor of the commercial wingsuit.

(Photo: Hindenburg airship. Credit: Corbis via Getty Images)