That was WWI airplanes over Britain attacking Zeppelins with their machine guns.
There were a lot of compartments too, it was not all one giant space of hydrogen.
EDIT: I found it mentioned in https://www.military-history.org/feature/german-zeppelins-of...
> That autumn, the British pilots deployed a new weapon. No longer dependent on dropping bombs or explosive darts over the side, nor on the standard machine-gun ammunition that appeared to have no effect whatever on the giant gas-bags, the home-defence squadrons now filled their ammunition belts with a mixture of tracer and newly-designed explosive and incendiary bullets. The idea was to blow a hole in the fabric of an airship and then ignite the escaping hydrogen as it mixed with air.
Of course, once successfully blown open and ignited it would go up in flames like a torch. But it wasn't quite that simple to get to that point.
The main key would be a gasbag that’s not flammable.
Personally, I'd rather not be falling out of the sky while I'm on fire.
Piggy-backing on your comment at a tangent - how did they make such large quantities of Hydrogen in the early 1900s (and store and transport it safely)? This[1] has some interesting reading on it; there were gas cylinders but no standardisation of valves, not good lubricants for compressors, a different set of pipes for airship filling and airship topping-up, some stations which could remove and re-purify the Hydrogen, and two different methods of pre-war and post-war production are described.
This[2] has much more detailed history of the options, including a Popular Mechanics article from 1908.
[1] https://www.nevilshute.org/Engineering/AMBurgess/amb_hydroge...
[2] https://welweb.org/ThenandNow/Hydrogen%20Generation.html
Sulfuric acid and iron into hydrogen is much simpler.
Seems to me you're right. In some ways it's a damn shame that reporters and movie cameras were at Lakehurst that fateful day, unfortunately their presence set back airship development at least a half century.
The WWI matter that nosianu has raised about how hard it was to bring down hydrogen-filled airships due to the difficulty of igniting the hydrogen is well known and it ought to be a starting point for its reintroduction. New containment materials combined with what we've learned from the Hindenburg should also do the trick. On a regulatory point, if you kept hydrogen to cargo-only airships and where possible even routed them around heavily populated areas (at least until well proven) we could see hydrogen make a comeback.
Also, Hydrogen has that other advantage, it has about 8% more lift than helium. It occurred to me hydrogen's risk could be further mitigated if it were used in combination with helium where they shared the lifting - the hydrogen able of being vented, etc. and the helium bagged separately as permanent/primary buoyancy. Reckon that with a fresh look we've many new options to explore.