A lesson from the long history of the Goodyear blimps is the realization that airships are exceedingly difficult to fly. That fact was well demonstrated 92 years ago, when the blimp Columbia crashed, spectacularly, in the middle of New York City.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.