Kind: captions
Language: en
a new piece of the hindenburg puzzle has
surfaced
ironically it was available from the
beginning
but no one had been interested at the
time
i was here at lakehurst for the 75th
anniversary we had a memorial service
and a guy comes up to me and says i've
got some film in the hindenburg disaster
you probably don't really care but this
was taken by my uncle
and if you want to see it i'll show it
to you so this is right where we message
right where we met in 2012
yeah where you showed me this film on
your laptop yeah and if you remember i
was so excited i took my cell phone and
i took some photos
i asked you permission and i took photos
of the film on your laptop because it's
like
this is special yeah my dad
had bought this nifty kodak camera
a wind-up movie camera eight millimeter
and he couldn't come because he worked
so he asked
my uncle and my mom if they would take
some shots and
see the hindenburg land and as soon as i
started looking at it i realized
it looked really different and it looked
really interesting
and yet harold skank's film which starts
earlier
and is shot from a different angle than
all the other photographers
is never seen by investigators it was
at the time publicly put out that he had
it
nobody ever asked for it there was
plenty of footage taken by the newsreels
and nobody really
cared i guess about angles but perhaps
this new angle will make a difference
after 80 plus years might this footage
show something new
and what could a closer inspection of
the film reveal
to learn more about the film's history
dan grossman brings it to color lab
a world-class facility that restores
historic film
for the library of congress national
archives
and others i'm excited you have
something for me to look at right i am
excited for you to look at it
so here is the film we've been talking
about wow
and i also brought you the camera that
it was filmed on
oh wow film archivist pat doyan
is an expert in preserving and restoring
rare vintage fans
provenance here and you believe that the
film was shot
with this uh exact camera yes i do i can
see that this is the kind of box that
this film would have been packaged in
i can see that you had it processed by
kodak
there's an address there's a stamp from
the time
so this is all really good information
and when we look at it over the light
table there's a few things we can tell
now there's a number here
three six eight one four oh okay that
was written on the box and you can see
it's also
on this leader and who wrote that would
kodak yes that would have been
uh for processing okay so right now i'm
going to look for
what they call a date code so kodak
put some symbols on the film to
tell us when it was manufactured
so i'm looking at the date code and i
see a triangle square
so how do you know what a triangle in a
square means so there's a reference
check that out and we can see
this film was manufactured between july
to december 1936
1936 the year before the accident
when someone would buy a film for 1937.
great
we can see the aperture plate the little
cutout on the left side
the camera's aperture plate defines the
frame of the picture
where the image extends in between the
sprocket holes
this one here which matches our film has
the
square in between the two perforations
is exactly what we're seeing right here
oh yeah of course it looks just like
your book
it tells us that it was shot with this
model of camera
the cine kodak 8 model 20.
a year before the disaster in an eerily
prophetic ad
featuring the hindenburg kodak suggested
using their cameras to film moments that
make history
it also tells me that it was camera
original camera original
this film was exposed in a camera it's
not a copy
if it was a print you wouldn't see the
circles or the squares
because the printer blocks that off so
what's your verdict on the film
so it's a little shrunken and
it's got some aging here it's got a
little silver mirroring
which tells me that it's an old film
this doesn't happen right away
overnight it takes uh years and years
sometimes decades
so all of this taken together i can't
say with a hundred percent
certainty but everything points to this
film being an authentic
film that it was shot at that time this
is a good day
after digitally scanning the film dan
and pat
take a look on a large screen this is
the first time this footage
has been widely seen
wow look at how much detail we get from
this scan
the roll of film will last only two
minutes
to conserve it harold skank shoots brief
moments
the ground crew assembling the giant
ship passing over the hangar
the landing lines are the last thing
harold skank records
before disaster strikes and as it
exploded he had the camera
at his side and it was a wind-up camera
so he he had the presence of mind to
switch the switch on and pick it up
at that moment
[Music]
thanks to that aperture plate you
actually see the nose and the tail at
the same time
is that unusual yes it is the spring
runs down
after rewinding he rolls again
getting the aftermath you can see
details of the girder structure
where the gas cells were be a lot of
information for us
about how this flame progressed