Travel across the Atlantic Ocean in the days before jet aircraft was not exactly a trivial matter. Surface passenger liners took a week to travel between Europe and the United States. So in the 1930’s when Germany announced trans-Atlantic crossings by zeppelin which would take just a couple of days, the affluent jumped at the opportunity (“affluent” because it cost $400 U.S. for a one-way ticket, at a time when most workers in the U.S. earned less than a dollar an hour; in fact, minimum wage in 1938 was a quarter an hour). The result would easily have been a public relations coup for Nazi Germany, but Mother Nature had other ideas. More