Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  The following morning, August 18, woken by a commotion outside, Zeppelin drew the curtains and surveyed the open lot across the street. And there he spied a large silken balloon, gaily painted and patchworked, and fitted with a small wicker basket. He’d heard of these legendary, magical things, of course—everyone knew of them—but never had he encountered one.

  Right there and then, Zeppelin decided to postpone his trip back home.

  * * *

  —

  ZEPPELIN WAS INDEED a fancy European aristocrat and not a charlatan, but how he ended up in Saint Paul, Minnesota, is something of a roundabout story.

  He could trace his ancestry back to a minor thirteenth-century baron named Heynrikus de Zepelin from Mecklenburg in northern Germany whose kinsmen served as mercenaries in the Swedish, Danish, and Prussian armies that occupied their time ravaging and ravishing their way across Europe. For the next five hundred years, successive Zepelins did little other than demonstrate a prodigious talent for drunkenly gambling away the family’s estates, ultimately obliging an impecunious, teenaged Ferdinand Ludwig to roam far south and enter the military service of Duke Frederick of Württemberg in the late eighteenth century.

  When all-conquering Napoleon upgraded the duchy of Württemberg into a kingdom in 1806, Ferdinand was promoted to count and changed his name to “Zeppelin” (the Württembergers preferred a double p). In 1834, his son Friedrich did very well, marrying Amélie Macaire d’Hogguer, the daughter of a wealthy Franco-Swiss cotton manufacturer, and Ferdinand—our count—came along four years later.

  He was born into a world of international nobility, where a title served as passport to the elites in Saint Petersburg, Vienna, London, and Paris—or even, in a pinch, Berlin, a backwater. Following the family’s martial tradition, Zeppelin entered the Royal Army College at Ludwigsburg in October 1855 and emerged as a lieutenant with one of Württemberg’s most swagger regiments, the 8th, based in Stuttgart, the kingdom’s capital, in September 1858. During the Franco-Austrian War of 1859 (Württemberg was an Austrian ally), he saw no action while serving on the staff of the quartermaster-general as a specialist in topography and logistics.

  That Zeppelin, a curious mix of the unconventional and the traditional, was even in the quartermaster-general’s office rather than serving on the higher-status front lines marked him as quirky. Since boyhood, Zeppelin had been fascinated by mechanics, by making machinery work, by practical invention. Before being admitted to the Royal Army College, Zeppelin had attended the prestigious polytechnic school in Stuttgart. Such institutions were in the vanguard of imparting a technical, scientific, and engineering education to smart middle-class boys and ambitious working-class lads. Rich young nobles like Zeppelin were few and far between. Still stranger, during his time with the quartermaster-general, Zeppelin took temporary leave to enroll at the University of Tübingen to study (though he did not take a degree) mechanical sciences—again, a field rather déclassé for a man of his pedigree.

  It was a fashion of the era for young officers to tour the armies of foreign nations and report on their armaments and tactics; for those of Zeppelin’s breeding, of course, these semi-official visits also allowed them to forge connections with their upper-class counterparts. In 1861–62, the young count visited Vienna, where he was introduced to the Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph I and watched army exercises. Then he was off to Trieste, to visit the fleet, and then the well-known fleshpots of Genoa, Marseille, and Paris, to visit the girls (as he explained to his morally upright, purse-strings-holding father, “In order to know the different people better, I have had to devote some of my time to women”). At Compiègne in northern France he was a guest of Emperor Napoleon III, whose mother had, small world, once been the Zeppelins’ neighbor. Later he traveled to Belgium and Denmark before going to England, where he hobnobbed at the Army and Navy Club and the Athenaeum before being invited to watch the Grenadier Guards go through their paces.4

  America, then enduring its Civil War, beckoned. How could one miss the clash of those gargantuan armies clanking through the Virginia hinterland? Needing permission from his king for yet another furlough, Zeppelin explained that “the Americans are especially inventive in the adaptation of technical developments for military purposes” and pledged to seek information useful for the Württemberg army.5

  That was pro forma, of course. His real hope, as he confided to his sister, was that, as he had missed all the fun during the Franco-Austrian War, combat “might be revealed to me in its bloody truth and that the phantom [of experiencing real fighting], before which I had hitherto quailed, might become a living reality.”

  To his father, who was unenthusiastic about the idea, he laid out a rather more elevated motive. He wished to discover the extraordinary vibrancy of American democracy, he said, but Zeppelin senior nevertheless forbade him, saying that the existence of slavery and the fact that commoners could vote—he was unclear as to which was worse—“exclude[d] them from playing a worthy part in civilization.” His son persisted, and in the end the paterfamilias gave way, as Zeppelin knew he would. In April 1863, Zeppelin boarded the Cunard ship Australasia for the long voyage to America.6

  After docking in New York on May 6, Zeppelin traveled to Washington, D.C., checking in to the posh Willard Hotel near the White House. His title, as usual, opened doors—even in the great republic. (Zeppelin noticed that “America is definitely a land of contrasts. Everything aristocratic is in opposition to its fundamental ideas, yet nowhere is so much fuss made about a simple traveling count.”) The Prussian ambassador, Baron von Gerolt, introduced him to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, who in turn arranged an audience with President Abraham Lincoln, who took time out of a busy day running a war to meet with an obscure junior officer from a small faraway kingdom.

  Lincoln was unlike anyone else Zeppelin had ever met in his limited social circle. When the count turned up, dressed to the nines in the traditional frock coat and top hat, he was surprised by the president’s utter absence of pretense. When Zeppelin entered the room, “a very tall spare figure with a large head and long untidy hair and beard, exceptionally prominent cheek-bones, but wise and kindly eyes” rose like a specter from behind the desk. When Zeppelin asked for a pass allowing him to travel freely among the Northern armies as an observer, pompously adding that his military credentials included being descended from half a millennium’s worth of knights and counts, Lincoln, a commoner born penniless and landless, remarked that he certainly wouldn’t hold that against him. A puzzled Zeppelin got his pass.7

  On May 28, Zeppelin attached himself to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, where a friendly German-speaking officer named Captain Frederick Rosencrantz steered him through the inevitable culture clashes. After being mistaken for a major general several times, for instance, Zeppelin cut off his lieutenant’s heavy epaulettes and gold-trimmed velvet collar, which so distinguished him from the tousled, down-home look affected by American officers in the field. One night he attended the mess of General Carl Schurz, commanding the XI Corps, and he couldn’t believe his ears when Schurz outlined a plan of attack and a mere captain declared, “Surely, General, you won’t do anything as stupid as that.” While everyone laughed, including Schurz, Zeppelin was incredulous that such insolence was tolerated, even encouraged, in any army.

  He did get to see the “phantom” of combat, though. Zeppelin volunteered to accompany a detachment to map General Robert E. Lee’s positions, only for some Confederate cavalry to hotly pursue them for a short time. Zeppelin found the experience thrilling, but ultimately he wasn’t impressed with American soldiering. As he reported, there was “no systematic cooperation, no local patrol work, no enemy intelligence, no general staff, no maps, no corps combining all the different arms, no tactics adapted to local topography—all these shortcomings continue even after several years of war.” There was nothing, as far as he could see, that the Yankees could teac
h Germans about fighting.

  And that was why he missed Gettysburg, instead embarking on an arduous trip west to see the famously vast frontier for himself. Like many foreign visitors, he would be amazed by the sheer size of his host country. “After traveling so long [three days] at the speed of an American locomotive over a level countryside,” he wrote to his father, “one cannot but feel that this can go on and on and that there is no end to it.”8

  His airships would later sail placidly across such colossal distances, but for the time being he satisfied himself with walking across the street to see the balloonist.

  * * *

  —

  PROFESSOR JOHN STEINER (he sometimes preferred “Captain,” an honorary military rank, as his scholarly one was invented) was having another hard day. His first flight had been scheduled the day before for 4 P.M., but at the last minute local gas company officials had informed him that they were rationing his household coal gas because customers were complaining about his monopolizing their supply. Unable to fill the balloon bag, he’d had to cancel the scheduled flights, and today he faced the prospect of disappointing yet more thrill-seekers, if not for lack of gas then for the winds that were picking up. Worse, tomorrow’s forecast called for heavy rain in the morning. Saint Paul was looking worryingly like an expensive write-off, a disaster in the making for itinerant aeronauts like Steiner who subsisted hand to mouth.9

  Steiner’s balloon, heroically christened Hercules—though the only Herculean thing about it was the effort it took to get it aloft—was a forlorn thing. Normally, by now he’d be astounding crowds eager to accompany him on rides several hundred feet up. On these safe “captive” or “Army” ascensions, as they were known, the balloon would be tied to the ground by rope so as to prevent a “free flight”—the type of untethered flying reserved for professionals like Steiner.

  Free flights were inherently risky. It was impossible to judge when, how, and where you would come down. Six years earlier, for instance, Steiner had made his name as a daredevil by attempting to fly across Lake Erie into Canada. Upon encountering a fierce storm, his balloon hit the water and bounced along like a skipping stone. Steiner survived only by jumping out. His balloon, the third he’d wrecked, wasn’t so fortunate.10

  So, when Zeppelin strode toward Steiner on that morning of August 18, the despondent aeronaut only perked up when he realized that here was a fellow German, though at the time “Germany” was merely a convenient geographical expression for a place, jigsawed into dozens of minor kingdoms, grand duchies, princely states, principalities, and free cities, that wouldn’t exist until united in 1871.

  Steiner, it transpired, was from Bavaria, adjacent to Zeppelin’s Württemberg. Aside from this coincidence, Zeppelin and Steiner had little else in common. Steiner had emigrated to America in 1853 at the age of seventeen, and his background was shadowy. He preferred it that way. Even his name was studiedly innocuous. He was a man with no past, but one who had forged, in a manner of speaking, his own future in the New World. A single clear photograph exists of him, taken sometime during the Civil War: Steiner, with the bushy mustache and manly muttonchop whiskers popular at the time, wears a brand-new officer’s coat nattily outfitted with store-bought gold epaulettes and brass buttons.

  He had volunteered for a civilian position in the Union’s nascent Balloon Corps and, experienced aeronauts being few and far between, was given command of the Eagle in Cairo, Illinois. Later, he was sent west and in April 1862 was using his miniature tethered balloon to observe Confederate positions and to direct artillery fire. That December, he resigned from the Balloon Corps following a dispute over pay and headed out to make his fortune.11

  Steiner’s time with the Balloon Corps piqued Zeppelin’s curiosity. The ostensible reason he was in America, after all, was to report back on military affairs. As he told his father, embroidering Steiner’s credentials slightly, “I have made the acquaintance of the famous aeronaut Prof. Steiner, who has invented a new kind of balloon suitable for military reconnaissance.”12

  If there was anything Steiner had right then, it was spare time to chat. The two men talked for some time about the problems of flight. Perhaps Zeppelin related the amusing story of his grandfather, the first count, who in 1811 had allowed a tailor from Ulm named Albrecht Berblinger to fly his rudimentary hang glider across the Danube to impress the king of Württemberg. It ended badly when Berblinger crashed, not fatally (aside from his aeronautical career), into the river.13

  Steiner, for his part, was accustomed to dealing with customers who treated a balloon ascent as a thrill ride. They asked whether it was dangerous, nervously entered the basket, went up several hundred feet, enjoyed the sensation of seeming weightlessness, gasped at the extraordinary vista laid bare below, and descended a quarter of an hour later. Zeppelin was uncommon in wanting to understand the technicalities of the experience.

  Steiner was only too delighted to discuss the secrets of flying and its military applications. He pointed out that the reason the Balloon Corps kept its balloons “captive” was that otherwise they would be the sport of the wind. If the currents began to blow the wrong way or too hard, the hapless aeronaut would find himself scudding over hostile territory, crashing into a forest, plummeting helplessly groundward, or soaring high enough to pass out from cold and lack of oxygen.

  There was no way, in short, to control free-flying balloons in terms of speed, direction, or altitude, rendering them useless as a reliable means of transport, either for passengers, mail, or cargo. Indeed, it was difficult to keep even a tethered balloon stable in the slightest breeze.14 Balloons held the tantalizing possibility of revolutionizing travel, but their impracticality remained insuperable. It was as if humans had discovered fire but lacked any way to regulate the flame.

  Thus was Zeppelin’s introduction to the seemingly unattainable fantasia of what had become known as “aerial navigation”—the quest to master the sky and traverse vast distances of the globe by steering a powered, controlled air vehicle.15

  Steiner believed he had found the miracle solution. In Zeppelin’s words, he intended to build a ship of the air that would dispense with the traditional spherical or lightbulb-shaped gasbag and have instead “a very long, thin shape,” like a cigar. “Furthermore,” explained Zeppelin to his father, “he has added a strong rudder and in that way the balloon is hindered less by wind and it will reach its destination more smoothly and more surely.” Steiner boasted that his plan was to return to the army “and make test flights with his newly improved balloon. If those tests bring good results he will go to Europe (Paris first) in two years.”16

  Zeppelin, daring and heedless of risk, instantly suggested that he and Steiner undertake a free flight. Today was out of the question, unfortunately, but why not tomorrow?

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, August 19, 1863, it was raining, but the weather eventually improved. Zeppelin was eager to set off, but Steiner slotted him in for the final flight of the day, when they could sail unhampered by a line of customers waiting their turn.

  From the get-go, Steiner was bedeviled by his meager supply of gas. Usually, the Hercules could lift around five people, but when the former governor of Minnesota, Alexander Ramsay, and his ten-year-old daughter, Marion, got in for their ride, the politician—discreetly described by an eyewitness as possessing a “specific gravity”—was obliged to hop out of the basket after the balloon sagged beneath the combined weight. Steiner saved Ramsay further embarrassment by taking the adorable Marion up by herself—to much good-natured applause from the local press.

  Then, finally, it was Zeppelin’s turn. As he recalled in a later newspaper interview, while he waited to go up he “bought all of the spare gas that the Saint Paul gas works would let me have.” (When someone was willing to pay so much cash upfront, the company’s customers evidently got short shrift.)17

  He clambered in
to the basket alongside Steiner. They rose, still tethered to the ground, to an altitude of six or seven hundred feet. Unlike so many other visitors to the aerial realm, Zeppelin was not awestruck by the revelatory panorama surrounding him. Neither then nor at any other time in the course of his long life did he declaim upon a feeling of liberation from the surly bonds of earth or exult in a sensation of kinship with the Lord of Nature. There was not an ounce of heady romance in his stoutly technical mind. He was concerned only with how balloons worked, their utility, and what objectives they might attain. Flight, to Zeppelin, was not proof of the wondrous capacity of mankind but a problem to be solved.

  So he approached his first flight with the crabbed perspective of a staff officer of the Topographical and Logistical Department of the Württemberg quartermaster-general. As he dutifully informed his father later that same day, he at once noticed that “the ground is exceptionally fitted for demonstrating the importance of the balloon in military reconnaissance.” Saint Paul is situated in a valley; Zeppelin judged that a nearby ridge of hills “form[ed] a very good defensive position against an aggressor.” Should the attacker deploy his forces on the other side of that ridge, “there [was] no tower, no elevation high enough” to observe them unless one had a balloon.18

  This was all very important intelligence if Württemberg ever decided to declare war on Minnesota, but to Zeppelin’s bitter disappointment there would be no free flight that day, no cutting of the rope. The gas he had bought turned out to be of such poor quality that Steiner “could not get the bag filled sufficiently to essay a long flight.”19 The duo stayed aloft for a time but eventually had to be winched down.