Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  Zeppelin would not fly again for nearly forty years, and the two men soon lost touch with each other.

  The next day, Zeppelin boarded a train and departed, leaving Steiner to attempt a few captive ascents using the last of the gas. The professor-captain was obliged to end his Saint Paul visit early, having lost about $400, and left for Grand Rapids, Michigan, and La Crosse, Wisconsin, doomed forever to lead a peripatetic existence.20 He would later, perhaps prompted by his travails with the Saint Paul gas works, invent a portable hydrogen-gas generator, but he never built the futuristic ship of the air that would assure him a fortune.21

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  AS ZEPPELIN WHILED away the weeks traveling by train through Milwaukee and Chicago, then Baltimore and Philadelphia, until he reached New York, sailing for home on November 19, 1863, his mind nibbled at the problem of aerial navigation, but finding no solution, he put it aside.22

  Fatherland, and father, called. His country needed him, and Zeppelin senior wanted his son to cease his gallivanting. Zeppelin dutifully joined the king of Württemberg’s staff on April 10, 1865, a day after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox and brought to an end the ruinous Civil War.23

  Germany, meanwhile, faced its own civil war. The kingdom of Prussia, by far the mightiest of Württemberg’s neighbors, was threatening to assimilate the patchwork of lesser German entities into a Kleindeutschland: a “Small Germany” managed by a Prussian hegemon that excluded Habsburg Austria, the ancient protector of the southern states. Zeppelin and most of the others in his circle preferred, however, a Large Germany arrangement in which independent states like Württemberg and Bavaria would continue to enjoy their Austrian alliance. Prussia’s intention, he felt, was to provoke a war with its weaker rival in Vienna.24

  Zeppelin, promoted to captain and named an aide-de-camp to the king in March 1866, observed the calamitous battle of Tauberbischofsheim four months later during the subsequent Austro-Prussian War.25 He witnessed at first hand the collapse of the Württemberg forces at the hands of the better-trained and better-equipped Prussians. The terms of Austria’s surrender were surprisingly lenient: The Habsburgs were to withdraw from the south and to acknowledge Prussian paramountcy in a new “North German Confederation” of twenty-two formerly independent states.

  While Württemberg escaped formal annexation into the confederation, the treaty demanded the “Prussianization” of its army.26 In 1868, Zeppelin, sent by his king to Berlin as part of a stipulated military-exchange program, was attached to the 1st Guards Regiment of the Dragoons, an elite cavalry unit.27 He found the Prussians rude and arrogant; bored by their interminable conversations about horses, drink, and women (in that order of precedence) in the officers’ mess, Zeppelin was relieved to come home in the spring of 1869.

  He had other reasons, as well. That May, Zeppelin was introduced to Baroness Isabella von Wolff during a visit to her family’s palace (in what is now Latvia) on the occasion of his brother’s wedding to her cousin. Zeppelin fell instantly for her. To his father he described Isabella as an “extremely simple but not at all narrow minded” lass who was “clear-headed, with courage and grit[;] a gay, kindly creature, interested and experienced in house-keeping, a pretty doe-like appearance.”28

  The attraction was mutual, and in August they married. As Isabella wrote to her brother, she and Zeppelin were each but half of two: We “live in quiet privacy. No duties and invitations rob my husband from me, and our house is not besieged by strangers. Oh, such a life is indescribable.”29

  Isabella was not as “extremely simple” as Zeppelin had at first imagined. She proved to be a shrewd, clever observer of human nature and advised Zeppelin—who was not—about whom to trust, how to handle critics, and what needed to be done. Her “courage and grit” were undeniable. Over the coming years, Zeppelin relied on her to back him up and to sustain him in his darkest moments.

  In their lighter moments, noticed a friend, the pair adopted a “good-natured, teasing tone” in their chats in which they would gently point out the other’s small mistakes. He found her quirks amusing (she believed she could cure all sickness with homeopathy), and she tolerated his more exasperating faults (he was terrible with finances).30

  The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the last in a series of struggles to unify Germany, allowed Zeppelin to make his mark on military history. He instigated a daring raid on French positions on July 23 in which everyone else in his unit was killed or captured, with only the wounded Zeppelin managing to escape back to his own lines. The exploit gained him the Württemberg Royal Cross, First Class, and got his name in the papers—the New York Evening Post commented that it proved “the Germans have got the right stuff in them”—but his Prussian superiors were not as enthused by his unauthorized hotheadedness. This young officer, they noted, was certainly one to watch—but also one to be watched.31

  Their caution was justified. Zeppelin possessed a swollen confidence in his own capabilities, but his true talent was an extraordinary ability to alienate and annoy those above him—or rather, those above him he thought should be below him. In the various spheres of his life, Zeppelin habitually raised the stakes with a frontal assault when withdrawal, taking cover, or a flanking maneuver might have reaped richer dividends. Often, his sheer charisma and indefatigability—and a modicum of luck—forced success, but failure would more than once bring him to the brink of bankruptcy and humiliation.

  His raid was a case in point: By conventional military standards, it was unnecessary, foolhardy, and left good men needlessly dead; by Zeppelin’s, he had seen an opportunity, made a decision, and acted upon it. Lacking as he did any capacity for second thoughts, of course he was right, and anyone who gainsaid his infallibility he regarded as not merely an honest critic but a traitor.

  What was always important to Zeppelin was devotion and loyalty, to him and to what would eventually become his life’s work: the airship. In later years, he would gather around himself a band of followers equally obsessed with bringing his vision to reality. Along the way, some wavered in their dedication or expressed a mild reluctance to sacrifice their all to the cause, and these quickly found themselves exiled from his tribe, like biblical unfortunates forever condemned to wander the wilderness. He would accept advice only from a very trusted few, and even they, to survive, knew when to give up any hope of changing his mind. Perhaps he could have learned something from that American captain who criticized General Schurz, but he refused to.

  In mid-September, Zeppelin was present when the Germans triumphantly began besieging Paris. With the French army in disarray, only the capital still stood defiant. Paris was completely cut off from the world, and the world assumed, as did the besiegers, that its millions of trapped inhabitants would soon submit—or else starve. Parisians were accordingly rationed to small amounts of milk, coffee, bread, and sugar, but this being France, wine was bounteous and the zoo provided much exotic meat, the streets everything else. One upscale menu offered elephant soup, kangaroo stew, roast camel, antelope terrine, wolf in deer sauce, and baked cat with rat garnish.

  Even if the crowded restaurants remained brightly lit, the city was otherwise dark and silent. Not a single piece of news, not a letter, not a journal could pass through the blockade. At least not until September 23, 1870, when a small balloon named the Neptune shot skyward and sailed over the enemy lines. Its pilot, Jules Duruof, said he could hear the crackle of the soldiers’ muskets firing at him from below. The Neptune carried a sack containing three thousand letters, one of which Duruof brought to the offices of the Times of London after he landed twenty miles outside Paris.

  Over the following week, three more balloons would be sent, together bringing another twenty-five thousand letters to the outside world. Many more followed. The plucky Parisians took to christening their air force with names redolent of French genius—Lavoisier, La Liberté, Lafayette—to remind the s
tolid Prussians of their lack of it.32

  Even so, it was just a matter of time before the city fell, as it did at the end of January 1871. The French defeat resulted in a united Germany, with the king of Prussia, Wilhelm I, anointed German emperor and Oberster Kriegsherr (Supreme War Lord).

  As for Zeppelin, what he witnessed of the balloons only affirmed everything that Steiner had warned him about: There was no disciplining, no controlling, no navigating them. Of the sixty-five launched, nearly all had landed in friendly territory, but they had been scattered all over the place and obviously could never return. Others, like one that wandered over the Irish Sea and another briefly spotted over Bavaria, were never seen again.

  To Zeppelin’s mind, the French balloons provided food for thought, perhaps, but in the continued absence of a way to navigate and drive them, they amounted to nothing but empty calories. He spent little time mulling the possibilities of lighter-than-air flight in the aftermath of the war.

  Instead, he embarked on a rather dull army career in the new Germany. In January 1872, he was appointed to command a squadron of the 15th Schleswig-Holstein Uhlans (light cavalry), and was promoted to the rank of major in November of the following year.33 All signs pointed to his making general in another twenty-odd years and retiring, fat and sleek, to die on his estates shortly thereafter.

  But then his horse stumbled during an exercise and changed his life.

  2. The Fever Dream

  THE WORRIED COUNTESS spent her days placing ice wraps on Zeppelin’s forehead and her nights watching doctors applying leeches to draw out the bad blood. For a week since March 18, 1874, when he’d landed badly after falling from his horse, her husband had been bedridden with shivering fits and a high temperature. He was on the mend now, but Zeppelin had once fallen into delirium and scared her by raving about “flying ships” and “passengers who [flew] through the sky” faster than a train.1

  The mystery behind these ravings was solved when it turned out that a staff officer had thoughtfully brought him a stack of reading material to pass the time. He’d included a recently published pamphlet written by one of Zeppelin’s distant relatives, Heinrich von Stephan, then serving as postmaster of the newly created Deutsches Reichspost (Imperial German Post Office).

  In A World Postal System and Airship Travel, Stephan conjured up an entrancing vision of an era of global communication and trade based on a German-built network of airships. “Providence,” he inspiringly concluded, “has surrounded the entire earth with navigable air. This vast ocean of air still lies empty today and wasted, and is not yet used for human transportation.”

  The electrifying impact the pamphlet had on Zeppelin can be seen in the four dense pages he feverishly scribbled on the night of 25–26 March, headlined “Thoughts about an Airship.”2

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  ZEPPELIN’S VISION, BASED on what he’d read in Stephan’s pamphlet, was ambitious in both scope and physical size. His dream airship would be gigantic: some 706,200 cubic feet of hydrogen to fill a gasbag 196 feet long and 40 wide (Steiner’s Hercules had been about 40,000 cubic feet). He didn’t bother speculating how he would power such a colossus, vaguely alluding instead to the “forward motion of the machine” produced by a “suitable prime mover” and leaving it at that.

  The factor that solely concerned Zeppelin was that of maintaining control over a stable, steerable airship—the key to aerial navigation. To this end, he spoke of adding “planes” or “wings”—large horizontal rudders that could swivel upward or downward, like a Venetian blind—on the sides either to allow the airship to gain height as air flowed past them or to help keep it on an even keel.

  As for the structure of the airship, he dismissed the idea of a single huge gasbag. In a cigar-shaped object, if the airship’s nose tilted upward the hydrogen would naturally pool in the tip, leading to loss of control. To hold the gas in place, he proposed including eighteen independent “gas cells,” or sealed bags of hydrogen, within the outer envelope, or skin. In this manner, even if a few of the gas cells were punctured, the airship should be able to stay aloft. A dangerous flaw with one-big-bag balloons was that if the outer envelope tore or leaked, it crumpled and sagged as gas escaped, leading to a sudden, violent descent.3

  Over the next several years, Zeppelin pondered the practical problems of his bold and imaginative vision, but the army remained his more prosaic concern. A move to Ulm to join the 2nd Württemberg Dragoons, where the staff duties were not overly onerous, gave him time to sketch out a few more ideas. In his diary for April 4, 1875, Zeppelin wrote that the airship would carry large quantities of premium-priced mail and cargo to fund its voyages. For additional income, Zeppelin planned to build cabins for twenty passengers, who would pay substantial amounts to travel aboard this wonder of the world above mountains and lakes, across trainless tundras, and to distant continents.4

  On November 29, 1877, he wondered whether ascent and descent could be regulated “by two [propellers] on a vertical axis? The wings [planes] could then be dispensed with.” Ultimately, he dispensed with the whole idea of this hybrid airship-helicopter. Seven months later, on June 9, 1878, Zeppelin had moved on to thinking about the fabric of the balloon envelope, which he felt should be “of Chinese silk, very light and, if varnished, almost entirely gasproof.”5

  And then this burst of activity stopped. His promotion to lieutenant colonel and the birth of his only child, Hella, the following year had brought increasing army and family responsibilities.

  Notwithstanding the break, what emerges from these jottings is that Zeppelin, thinking as an engineer, conceived of his airship as a package composed of autonomous but interconnected parts. Each piece—the planes, the gas cells, the power plant, the envelope—had to function harmoniously to make the whole thing work in the face of potentially destructive natural forces, like wind or gravity. Such systematic thinking was also a metaphor for his own views on how to ensure a successful future for Germany.

  Germany post-1871 was a new country composed, like an airship, of divergent pieces. To unite them, the once-independent states needed what he called a “revitalizing idea,” a kind of nationalist magnet, to unite them, or they would be spun apart by—and here Zeppelin exemplified the views of a robustly old-line noble—the centrifugal forces of “liberal despotism,” “capitalist industry,” “the unthinking mob,” and atheism.6 To Zeppelin, in other words, his airship would be a political statement.

  It was only in May 1887 that Zeppelin definitively identified the airship with German nationalism when he submitted a lengthy memorandum to the king of Württemberg titled “The Necessity of Dirigible Balloons.” In it, the count passed briefly over the possibility that the airship might have “general commerce” applications—his original idea, of transporting wealthy tourists to foreign climes, now seemed childishly naive—and instead he proposed that the very raison d’être of the airship was war against a France keen to avenge her humiliation, which he considered the greatest threat to German unity. A large airship, such as he conceived, would be used to transport “[army] personnel, [military] cargo, and explosive shells” for aerial bombing and to perform reconnaissance over long distances.7

  His memorandum was read, digested, and ignored. The king of Württemberg, Karl I, had more immediate need for Zeppelin in a rather different capacity.

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  AS THE PROCESS of national unification continued apace, the various constituent kingdoms of Germany retained symbolic “diplomatic” relations with Prussia. King Karl requested that Zeppelin, now a colonel, serve as Württemberg’s ambassador to Berlin.

  Ambassadors holding army rank like Zeppelin were being groomed for high command: They attended the German emperor’s court in the expectation that they would learn how to think politically rather than in a strictly military manner. It was Zeppelin’s misfortune to walk straight into the combinati
on of beartrap, snake pit, and lion’s den that was Berlin in the late 1880s.

  The most pressing issue at hand was completing the integration of the Württemberg army into the Prussian, or rather the German, one. At the heart of the problem was that Zeppelin was wearing two hats, or more specifically a hat and a helmet—those of Württemberg’s ambassador and of a German officer—and serving two masters—his king at home and the new German emperor, Wilhelm II.

  The latter, aged twenty-nine, succeeded to the throne on June 15, 1888. Wilhelm’s was a touchy, prickly, panicky personality consumed by insecurity and prone to hysterics when informed that, occasionally, he could not have his way. Kaiser Wilhelm desired to turn Germany into a great global power, and for that he needed a united, unswervingly loyal army. The vast majority of officers did the sensible thing and happily fell into line. As a soldier, Zeppelin was sympathetic to the idea, but as an ambassador his first obligation was the defense of Württemberg’s interests.

  Zeppelin had cautiously kept out of the internecine political battles raging around him, biding his time until his posting was due to end in early 1890 and he could return to his airship research. Then Zeppelin submitted to the Prussian Foreign Ministry what he considered to be a helpful memorandum on the need for the Württemberg army to retain some of its autonomy and for King Karl not to become a “mere rubber stamp” (admittedly, not the subtlest choice of words).

  The memorandum was passed upstairs to the emperor, who read it with mounting disapproval. Unwilling to overlook any perceived slight, Wilhelm smelled treachery in Zeppelin, who had in the meantime returned to Württemberg blissfully ignorant of the bomb he’d detonated back in Berlin.

  Livid, the kaiser scrawled abuse in the margins. He was egged on by General Ludolf von Alvensleben, a Prussian martinet, who advised Wilhelm that “it is the most sacred duty of commanders to monitor the loyalty of their officers, to stamp out [provincialist or anti-German] ideas, and to eliminate any disloyal elements.” Zeppelin was a marked man, and his downfall was planned for that fall’s Kaisermanöver—war games—which Wilhelm had instituted to weed out underperforming officers and to talent-spot the more promising.