Zeppelin Takes Flight: Age of Airships Begins

Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was 62 years old, nearly bankrupt, and widely ridiculed when his first rigid airship lifted off from a floating hangar on Lake Constance on July 2, 1900. The LZ 1 flew for eighteen minutes, reached an altitude of 1,300 feet, and covered roughly three and a half miles before a winding mechanism jammed and forced an emergency landing on the water. Most observers dismissed it as a failure. They were spectacularly wrong about the technology s potential. Zeppelin had conceived the idea of rigid airships during the American Civil War, where he served as a military observer and made his first balloon ascent. Unlike the flexible gas bags that had been flying since the Montgolfier brothers, Zeppelin s design used a rigid aluminum framework containing multiple gas cells, which allowed construction on a scale impossible with earlier designs. The LZ 1 measured 420 feet long and 38 feet in diameter. The initial flight exposed serious control problems. The airship could not maintain a steady course, and the two 14.2-horsepower Daimler engines lacked sufficient power to overcome even moderate winds. Zeppelin made two more flights before running out of money and dismantling the LZ 1 for scrap. Most of Germany s scientific establishment pronounced rigid airships a dead end. Zeppelin spent six years raising funds and refining his designs before the LZ 3 demonstrated reliable flight in 1906. Public enthusiasm exploded. Germans donated millions of marks to fund Zeppelin s work after the LZ 4 was destroyed in a storm at Echterdingen in 1908, turning a disaster into a national fundraising phenomenon. The donations established the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin company. By 1910, Zeppelin airships were carrying commercial passengers. The DELAG airline operated the world s first scheduled air service, completing over 1,500 flights without a passenger fatality before World War I. The era of rigid airships would end with the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, but Zeppelin s persistence created the first viable form of air travel.