He had the clues, he had the evidence, and now it was up to him and him alone to solve the mystery of aerial navigation.
5. The System
ONCE A HOBBY, Zeppelin’s interest in airships now turned into a single-minded obsession. He’d once seen the airship as a useful tool, of empire and of war, but now it became a symbol of something much greater: his craving for the restoration of his honor. Languishing under the suspicion of disloyalty for having, as he saw it, told the truth and performed his duty, Zeppelin wanted rehabilitation, both at the emperor’s court and within his beloved army. By achieving the impossible he would demonstrate his fidelity to the cause of national unity and transform Germany into a Great Power through air power.
In the Middle Ages, bishops had competed against one another to endow the grandest cathedral; in the eighteenth century, kings strove to build the most magnificent palace. By the late Victorian Age, no Great Power could legitimately call itself one unless it had commissioned a major civil-engineering project to symbolize its national pride and imperial superiority. Immensity was key to boggling the imaginations and stunning the senses of rivals.
America, the up-and-comer among the global players, completed the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 and cooperated with France, the grande dame lately fallen on hard times, in dedicating the Statue of Liberty three years later. The French, reinvigorated, doubled down by beginning construction of the Panama Canal in 1881 and then scoring an impressive triumph in 1889 with the inauguration of the Eiffel Tower. Meanwhile, Britain built the Tower Bridge in 1887 to keep its hand in the game, but all knew that with its mighty navy, world-spanning empire, and tireless economy, London was the reigning champion anyway.
Wilhelm II’s Kaiserreich was destined to rule the skies. The airship would dazzle the emperor’s enemies in Europe, ferry his legions to the distant plains of Africa, traverse the Atlantic to awe the Americans, wrest the Holy Land from the grip of the Turks, and force the Celestial Kingdom of China to bend its knee. So let France and America and Britain have their Ozymandian steel and stone monoliths, their iron and copper monuments—Germany would outdo them all in silk and gas.
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FOR MONTHS AFTER his resignation, Zeppelin confined himself to his study to toil at designing his airship. A monster of conceit, Zeppelin believed himself to be the lone genius who would birth the future. As he wrote at the time, men of grand vision (such as himself) should ignore the naysayers and the petty whiners, “among them highly-skilled technicians, [who] have failed [at making airships].” Rather, he alone had “solved” the problem of the airship and aerial navigation. “I have solved it, not because I knew any more than my rivals, but by the simple, sober thinking of a serious man, whom nature has endowed with common-sense.”1 He would always insist that “my system is the best, the only conceivable one for military purposes, and, if airships are ever possible at all, then they will be mine.”2 Later, he would purr with self-satisfied pleasure when they were commonly referred to as “Zeppelins,” in recognition of his intense devotion to, his unquenchable enthusiasm for, and his unceasing belief in what he would always call “my airships.”
Yet, as he soon found, the proverbial “lone genius” will rarely, if ever, be capable of conceiving, designing, testing, manufacturing, financing, marketing, distributing, publicizing, and popularizing a successful product. The prolonged process, rather than a single act, of invention relies instead on connecting networks and leveraging technologies to form a system. In Zeppelin’s case, he quickly realized that he could not hope to develop a means of propulsion without outside help. Thanks to his (truncated) engineering education, he may have been technically knowledgeable, but Zeppelin was no Giffard, a man who could build his own engine.
Technologically speaking, in these months Zeppelin settled on the optimal source of airship propulsion. The internal combustion engine was only just beginning to emerge as the motor of choice for the coming century. Its rate of adoption would become unstoppable—in 1876, for instance, world-leading Britain nationally generated a measly 2,000 horsepower by means of internal combustion; by 1907, that figure had exploded to 1,528,962—but that triumph was by no means predictable when Zeppelin first began researching the subject.3
By being in the right place at the right time, Zeppelin was fortunate in being able to call upon a most useful network: Württemberg happened to be home to the Daimler Motor Works (Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft, or DMG), the most advanced automobile-manufacturing company in the world. And where there were Daimler automobiles there were internal combustion engines, and more important, Gottlieb Daimler.
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INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINES (ICE) worked by combusting a fuel (gasoline, for instance) with an oxidizer such as air to transform chemical energy into mechanical motion. They were simple to run, could stop and start at will, produced a stable supply of power, and needed only occasional refueling. These characteristics gave them some advantages over battery-operated electric motors, which were relatively light and nippy but needed recharging after only moderate use, and steam engines, which could handle heavy loads but required a long time to heat up and a constant fire burning whether or not they were being used.
Like their electrical counterparts, internal combustion engines were, at least in their practical form, a fairly new energy technology. The first ICE to operate on the modern four-stroke principle—intake, compression, power, and exhaust—was made by Nicolaus August Otto in 1876. It was a metal behemoth that stood twelve feet high and produced half a horsepower. Obviously, it was unsuitable for airships.
That’s where Gottlieb Daimler came in. The son of a Württemberg baker, Daimler was born in 1834 and attended the same polytechnic academy as the count—they probably even had the same professors and took the same courses. Zeppelin, of course, entered the army while Daimler joined the Brotherhood of Reutlingen, an industrial enterprise located twenty miles south of the capital of Stuttgart that had been established by a charismatic theologian named Gustav Werner on Christian Socialist principles.
Hoping to dull industrial capitalism’s sharper edges, Werner had set up a paper mill, a machine factory, and a carpentry shop to give the marginalized—orphans, disabled workers, and the deserving destitute—a hand up by training and employing them. One of the orphans, a fifteen-year-old fellow Württemberger named Wilhelm Maybach, caught Daimler’s attention. The teen, Daimler noticed, was pedantically precise, exceedingly perceptive, and creatively brilliant and would focus for days and weeks, even months, on a single niggling problem until he cracked it. Daimler took him under his wing as a machinist, and the two men would be business partners until the older of the two died thirty-seven years later.
The duo made an odd couple. Daimler, an engineer with a talent for self-promotion, had a volcanic temper, while Maybach, shy and retiring, seems never to have raised his voice. The bespectacled Maybach was also content to stay hidden in the background and never minded that Daimler garnered all the glory and most of the money. Daimler always looked after Maybach and made sure he was compensated properly, but it would be Daimler’s name that would go down in history as the father of the automobile.
Daimler took Maybach with him to join Nicolaus Otto’s internal combustion concern, Gasmotorenfabrik Deutz. Daimler became the factory manager while Maybach served as chief designer. Together they modified the existing Otto Engine to output 3 horsepower. After paying Daimler and Maybach a modest lump sum, Otto patented their improvements, took the credit, and pocketed the windfall of orders that came in. In 1880, Daimler and Otto fell out so bitterly that Otto fired Daimler. Maybach soon followed, and the pair decided to set up their own company to specialize in making small, lightweight engines for vehicles of all types. (It was Daimler who conceived the famous three-pointed-star logo—the spokes representing land, sea, and air—that would be adopted by Mercedes-Benz in 1926 after a company merger
.)
In 1882, they moved into a cottage in Cannstatt (now part of Stuttgart) and worked secretly in the greenhouse. By 1885 they had developed a 1-horsepower engine that weighed just 132 pounds. As an experiment they mounted a scaled-down version on a wooden-framed bicycle and Daimler’s son rode it—the world’s first motorcycle—on a two-mile stretch of road at speeds of up to 7.5 mph.
After proving that a combustion engine could power a human-controlled land vehicle, in the following year Daimler and Maybach created the first four-wheeled “motor car” by installing a 1.1-hp engine weighing 88 pounds into a modified horse-drawn carriage. Locals were amazed to see the contraption zipping along the road at a 10-mph clip. They soon adapted the engine to fit into a fifteen-foot boat that propelled itself along the river at a rate of 6 knots (7 mph). With land and sea conquered, only the air remained.
In August 1888, they lent a balloonist, Karl Woelfert, a small 2-horsepower model that he installed into a hydrogen-filled gasbag. Woelfert diced with death by keeping an open-flame burner close to the gas, but succeeded in making a very short flight. (He would die, after a still shorter one, in an explosion in 1897.) Daimler and Maybach weren’t impressed by this performance and decided to focus instead on their car and boat business. In 1889, they built their first custom-made automobile, managing to coax 1.65 hp and 15 mph out of it.4
Despite numerous orders for their engines, Daimler and Maybach needed capital for expansion. Max von Duttenhofer, a munitions maker, answered the call and in November 1890—the same month Zeppelin left the army—became chairman of the new business, Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft. Within three months relations with Duttenhofer had become so fraught that Maybach resigned and worked from home, where he busied himself on a clandestine project dubbed Phoenix, an engine that he predicted would initially output 2 horsepower but would be capable, he claimed, of exponentially improved performance. Daimler, sensing that his time too would soon be up with Duttenhofer, quietly financed his protégé.
On April 13, 1891, Zeppelin sent Daimler a letter containing an exhaustive list of questions regarding the technical capabilities of internal combustion engines. Daimler politely replied with a summary, but did not mention the secret Phoenix program.5
Notwithstanding the limited power and heavy weight of the current generation of engines—which could not hope to propel a craft of the size Zeppelin was projecting—the count had let his imagination soar far, far beyond what anyone had ever before conceived. In one sketch, for instance, the count depicted a long, thin cylinder with semi-spherical ends. The machinery, fuel, and control gondola (where the pilot would sit) were suspended below, amidships. Tiny propellers were located near the rear. The “engine,” however, was conveniently left vague, as were the composition and shape of the internal skeleton.6
Happily unrestrained by tedious reality, the count added “transport vehicles” for passengers and cargo. Borrowing from the idea of a train, the engine-bearing airship would serve as an “air locomotive” for two unpowered balloon-carriages that would trail along in its wake. Zeppelin calculated the useful lift of each of these as 1,100 pounds, sufficient to carry, say, seven soldiers or a small artillery piece. He recklessly predicted that it would be able to stay in the air for twelve hours, which in itself would have been an extraordinary feat, but soon amended that figure to no less than 7.5 days.7
In coming up with these incredible numbers, Zeppelin had badly erred in his calculations of air resistance—not entirely his fault, given the primitive knowledge of aerodynamics at the time. Zeppelin had assumed that the width or diameter of a vehicle’s head is the primary cause of air resistance, while the length of its body plays a minor role. Hence he gave his locomotive-airship a narrow head and believed that increasing its length in the form of a train would have virtually no effect.8 In fact, as the latest research was beginning to show, the total drag imposed by the body is much greater than that of the head, owing to its increased area.9
He wrote on June 29, 1891, to General Alfred von Schlieffen, the new chief of the Imperial German General Staff (the powerful body in charge of planning and operations), and urged him to send an officer of the Prussian Aeronautical Battalion (PAB) to examine the blueprints and a small model he had built. The general, who had once been friendly with Zeppelin, replied on July 4 that he was “readily willing” to do so and that Captain Rudolf von Tschudi, the commander of the PAB, would be only too pleased to arrange a visit.10
The PAB had been founded in 1884, two months before Renard and Krebs’s first La France flight, to investigate the military potential of the air. Befitting its origins, the PAB specialized in conducting meteorological experiments, honing reconnaissance skills, and practicing artillery spotting from small tethered balloons.
Zeppelin recognized that he needed the PAB imprimatur if he were to stand any chance of interesting the army in his airship, but to his mind, its personnel, too concerned with small-scale experiments and limited uses, lacked the imagination to see the big picture: His airship would be a Wonder of the World, its grandiosity, gigantism, and ambition its greatest attributes. He even named his planned ship of the skies the Deutschland, all the better to symbolize its connection to a glorious German future.11
Captain von Tschudi was agreeably polite when he and Zeppelin met on July 24. Tschudi warned that some of his colleagues were jealous that Zeppelin was intruding on their bailiwick but he nevertheless encouraged him to build a full-scale prototype to show the PAB. Depressingly, that meant Zeppelin would have to find the funds himself. Since the count himself estimated that cost to be between 250,000 and 600,000 marks, a very large sum, it was clear that Tschudi expected to hear no more from Zeppelin. He would not be the last to underestimate Zeppelin’s determination.12
A week later, a small article in a newspaper caught Zeppelin’s eye. It stated that Renard, he of La France, had on July 27 conducted an experiment at Chalais-Meudon—the French army’s testing ground—with an improved dirigible with the minister of war present. Nothing concrete resulted from the trial, the chief feature of which, said the newspaper, was “a new engine developing high power with very little weight.”13
Zeppelin was alarmed at what he believed to be the rapid progress of the French. The next day he wrote that “it is urgently necessary that Herr Daimler should have more faith in the possibilities of a dirigible airship, as soon as there is available a sufficiently light, yet reliable engine.”14
In the meantime, there was still the matter of the skeleton. This being the small world of Württemberg, Zeppelin introduced himself to Professor Carl von Bach of his old haunt, the Technical University of Stuttgart.15 The count believed that Bach, an expert on the mechanics of materials, could help him calculate how best to construct the airship infrastructure. Following a prolonged exchange of letters discussing technical details, they finally met on November 5, 1891.16 Bach, disappointingly, lacked the time to work alongside the count and in any case preferred a background role as a consultant, but he nevertheless soon proved useful.
His first contribution was to suggest aluminum alloy, a wonder metal created by modern science, as the appropriate material for the airship skeleton. Not only was it amazingly light, but it possessed impressive tensile strength. The downside was that refining aluminum was a complex, and predictably expensive, process for much of the nineteenth century, in some instances making it more valuable than gold (the French emperor Napoleon III reserved aluminum plates for formal state dinners). But that was changing. Thanks to the introduction of new electrolytic and chemical processes in the late 1880s to produce it in greater quantities at lower prices (in 1888, aluminum cost 59 French francs per kilogram to make; by 1899, it would plummet to less than 3), the metal was potentially feasible for a dirigible infrastructure.17
Bach’s second contribution was to recommend Theodor Kober, a twenty-six-year-old former student of his, as Zeppelin’s technical designer. Kober had rec
ently passed his diploma examination with a grade of IIb, classifying him only as “quite good to good,” but he worked cheap and, Bach added, was an “energetic, farsighted, determined character eager to work.” In May 1892, Zeppelin welcomed Kober aboard, saying that “I hope to God that by our joint efforts we will succeed in doing something useful for our German Vaterland.”18
Kober proved an admirable fit: He was young, mild-mannered, pliable, not so skilled as to question Zeppelin’s decisions with any great authority, and easily overawed by the count’s gale-force personality. Kober willingly, for instance, signed a contract stipulating that, like the slaves entombed in the pyramids with their pharaohs to serve them in the afterlife, he must “dedicate his whole energy to the execution and testing of the airships planned by me [Zeppelin], and…bring this task to its end in case of my death.”19
The count, as a man who habitually dismissed the opinions of so-called experts who claimed certain technical problems as insurmountable, believed—even when he was wrong—that impossibilities were merely inconveniences that had not yet been fixed. A determined willingness was all that was needed to solve problems, and to that end Zeppelin and Kober immediately set to work making “many hundreds of enquiries at the Royal Materials Testing Office” in Stuttgart regarding the suitability of various metals and fabrics.20
In late 1892, Zeppelin had the break he’d been hoping for. That October, Maybach, who had been working quietly on his own since his acrimonious departure from Duttenhofer’s DMG, set up a workshop in the ballroom of an abandoned hotel and hired seventeen mechanics and apprentices to help him finish the clandestine Phoenix project, which featured two upright cylinders cast in a single block, his patented spray-nozzle carburetor, and a camshaft for controlling the exhaust valves. The lightweight Phoenix would initially output 2 horsepower, but the design was as adaptable as Maybach had promised: By 1896, the engine would produce 4 horsepower, then 6 in 1897, 8 by 1898, and 16 by about 1900.
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