May 6 · This Day in America
It is the largest aircraft ever built — 804 feet of German airship, longer than three Boeing 747s — and it is gliding down to its mooring mast at Lakehurst, New Jersey, after an Atlantic crossing. Radio man Herb Morrison is there to record a routine arrival report for newsreel. Then, at the mast, the tail flowers into flame. In thirty-four seconds the Hindenburg is a falling skeleton of fire. Thirty-six people die. Morrison's voice cracks live into the microphone: "Oh, the humanity." His recording is rushed to New York and broadcast coast to coast — among the first times Americans heard catastrophe in a human voice, in something close to real time. The age of the great rigid airship ended that evening at a New Jersey naval station, in under a minute, with the whole country leaning toward a radio.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1954
For years it was treated as a wall in human physiology: no one could run a mile in under four minutes. On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister, a 25-year-old medical student, did it in Oxford — 3:59.4. Within months others followed. The lesson rippled far beyond track: the barrier had been as much in the mind as in the legs, and once one person crossed it, everyone could.
Source: www.history.com
“It burst into flames! ... Oh, the humanity, and all the passengers!”Herb Morrison, WLS radio, Lakehurst, 1937