U.S. Navy Blimp in front of Hangar #1, Naval Air Station Lakehurst, New Jersey, October 1933
27 May 2020
Growing up down the road from Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey, home the U.S. Navy’s lighter-than-air program, I always had a fascination with blimps and dirigibles. Many of my friends’ parents worked on the Navy blimps, and some of their grandparents were on the ground when the Hindenburg exploded and crashed. And growing up, I had always thought I knew the origin of the word blimp, but I was wrong. There are many speculative origins that have been proposed, including the one I fell for when I was a boy, but the origin of the word is unknown. There is one plausible origin story that very well be correct, but we can’t be sure.
People have been riding in balloons since 1783, when the Mongolfier brothers took to air in one. But it was not until World War I that lighter-than-air craft really came into their own, and it was during that war that the term blimp was coined.
Even in the first recorded use of the term that we know of, the anonymous writer asks where the word comes from. From the Daily Mirror, 25 January 1916:
“Blimps”
I was amused to hear what the Air Service call the lighter-than-air machines, i.e., the airships and balloons. They call them “blimp,” “submarine searchers” and “babies.” But why “blimps,” I wonder.
The next extant use of the term is about two weeks later by naval officer Harold Rosher in a letter to his father on 11 February. Rosher was killed shortly afterward, and his letters were collected and published that September:
Visited the Blimps [small airships] this afternoon at Capel. They are really most interesting.
Note that when preparing the letter for publication, the editor added the definition in square brackets, apparently thinking the general public would be unfamiliar with the word.
Blimp is used by American writer Ralph Paine, writing about the British craft, in 1918. Again, the unfamiliarity of the word is called out in the publication, this time with quotation marks:
Two can play at the bombing game, and in the Dover Strait the English “blimps” take a hand at it, those small dirigibles which gleam high overhead like silvered sausages. They are useful on the submarine patrol when the weather is fair and clear, and during the summer days they cruise for a dozen hours at a stretch, drifting above the shipping lanes. Their mishaps are often entertaining, with a spice of humor, for their crews do not take the “blimps” too seriously.
But by 1919 the word had become familiar enough to be applied to large or overweight persons. The first such use that I’ve found is in a description of the upcoming Jack Dempsey–Jess Willard fight in July 1919. At 6’6.5” (1.99 m) tall and 235 lbs. (107 kg), Willard was the largest heavyweight champion in history and known as the Pottawatomie Giant. The day before the fight, on 3 July 1919, sportswriter Grantland Rice penned the following:
The populace at large believes that Dempsey at least has an even chance and so once more they are coming in the hope to see a living story, not of fiction, but of fact, where the small stranger overthrows the giant blimp.
Dempsey went on to crush Willard the next day, with the larger man retiring to his corner after the third round.
Two weeks later, humor columnist Arthur “Bugs” Baer would use blimp to describe an overweight golfer two weeks later in his 17 July 1919 column:
“How many balls have we left, caddy?”
“Five, sir.” (Wondering where the old sapp gets that we stuff.)
THE OLD BLIMP KNOWS that he can’t finish the voyage with only five pills in his fuel tank. They cost fifteen smackers a dozen, too.
While no one knows for certain why the aircraft are called blimps, the most likely explanation is that it is echoic, coined after the sound made when something strikes the gasbag. Late in life, Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard, who had been a midshipman at Capel air station during WWI, claimed to have witnessed his then commanding officer, Lt. A.D. Cunningham, hitting the gasbag of one of the craft with his thumb, and amused by the sound uttering the word “blimp.” It’s a plausible story, but Goddard didn’t get around to relating the tale until 1951, and the gap of several decades militates against its accuracy. Another possibility could be that it was coined as a play on blob and/or lump.
The origin that I fell for as a boy was that the military had two classes of lighter-than-air craft, Type A, Rigid and Type B, Limp, and blimp comes from the latter. Unfortunately for this explanation, there is no historical evidence for such designations.
Sources:
Baer, Arthur “Bugs.” “Two and Three.” Atlanta Constitution, 17 July 1919, 13.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. blimp, n.1
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2014, s.v. blimp, n.1.
Paine, Ralph D. The Fighting Fleets. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.
The Rambler. “This Morning’s Gossip.” The Daily Mirror, 25 January 1916, 12.
Rice, Grantland. “Majority of Early Arrivals at Scene of Bout Favor Challenger.” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 3 July 1919, 23.
Rosher, Harold. In the Royal Naval Air Service. London: Chatto and Windus, September 1916.
Zimmer, Ben. “A Weighted Term Floats Back into the News.” Wall Street Journal, 8–9 June 2019, C4.
Photo credit: Department of the Navy, 1933.