Daimler, as has been mentioned, had been secretly funneling money to Maybach even as he remained associated with DMG. The two planned to launch the Phoenix in a new enterprise that would destroy the already ailing DMG—which built just eleven automobiles in 1892–93—and humiliate the hated Duttenhofer.21
It was at this point that Maybach, at Daimler’s instigation, initiated Zeppelin into the secret of the Phoenix.22 Henceforth Zeppelin began referring to “the Daimler engine”—as the Phoenix would be dubbed—in his papers and plans and also began calling upon Maybach for advice.23
Maybach had gained a client for his and Daimler’s covert start-up firm, but Zeppelin gained far more: He now had access to the world’s most efficient and advanced engine.
* * *
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ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1893, Zeppelin emerged from his lair. In a letter to General von Schlieffen, who’d long since assumed that the count had given up the ghost, he confidently boasted that his “safe and fast-flying air trains will confer on the Army many advantages: for example, reconnaissance over hundreds of miles of enemy territory in a few hours; assured supplies for all troops from the nearest depots every day without the delays of road transport; transfer of important officers and important information from one army to the other; bombardment of enemy fortresses or troop concentrations with projectiles.”
He proposed that Schlieffen appoint a committee of experts to examine his design; if they favored it, which of course they would since he was Count von Zeppelin, he requested that the War Ministry budget 650,000 marks to build the full-size prototype Captain von Tschudi had earlier suggested.24
The blueprints he supplied bore the typical Zeppelin hallmarks—of genius and of ego. Designed according to the count’s idiosyncratic dictates, the airship retained his sky-train concept, with a powered front dirigible—the locomotive—385 feet long, the trailing second unit 52.5 feet long, and the third 131 feet long. More than 75,000 square feet of Chinese silk soaked in 660 pounds of varnish for airtightness would cover the front dirigible, with its 336,000 cubic feet of hydrogen capacity. Attached beneath its hull were two open gondolas, one near the bow, and the other the stern. A Daimler engine was installed in each, with Zeppelin claiming they would drive the ship at 20 mph for twenty hours—rather unlikely.
Based on his conversations with Professor Bach, Zeppelin had concluded that the gas envelope needed a rigid aluminum skeleton to maintain its shape and provide adequate support for the weight of the equipment and machinery. Thus he planned to install a series of six-inch-wide tubular rings or hoops, each 36 feet in diameter and spaced about 26 feet apart along the length of the airship. Each was strengthened by a solid vertical strut. The rings were connected and held in place by longitudinal girders of the same material and diameter. There were four of these: One ran along the top of the hull, another the bottom, and the other two along the sides. The rings were braced radially with twenty-two wires each. Within, the gas would be contained, as Zeppelin had always promised, in independent cells.25
So eager was Zeppelin for his masterpiece to be evaluated that he soon gained a reputation as a pest, though the count preferred to call it persistence. He sent letters to all and sundry within the government and the military, all of which seemed to vanish into the ether.26 Finally, on November 4, more than six weeks after his first approaching Schlieffen, the Ministry of War, mostly to make him go away, agreed to form a committee to judge his design. Far from being appeased, Zeppelin pressed harder. He wrote: “May I venture to assume that, should the future committee find no errors in my calculations, the Royal Ministry of War will be willing and able to provide the funds necessary” to build the airship?27
No, he shouldn’t assume anything of the sort, the ministry annoyedly replied: This was merely the first step in a very, very long process. Then, for more than three months, Zeppelin heard nothing back, despite sending several more letters of inquiry.28 Just as he began to suspect that yet another conspiracy against him was being hatched in Berlin, the once-laggardly War Ministry transformed into a fireball of energy. In mid-February 1894, it told a surprised Zeppelin that the committee would convene on March 10—lightning-fast by government standards.29 Berlin had been spooked by something, but what?
It turned out that the Russians were building an airship.
6. The Pivot
AT THE TIME, diplomatic relations with Russia had chilled after Kaiser Wilhelm II had elected not to renew their alliance, and German bankers had cut off lending to Saint Petersburg. The vacuum had quickly been filled by French promises of battleships and financing, heightening the kaiser’s fears that Germany might be “encircled” from the west and the east. Those fears became a reality in December 1893, when the Russians concluded a treaty with France pledging mutual military support in the event of a German attack. Hoping to counter the Germans’ fearsome army in that unhappy event, the Russians wanted an equally fearsome air weapon and had (mis)placed their faith in an itinerant Austro-Hungarian named David Schwarz, a former timber merchant.1 At some point, he had happened to read some newspaper articles about La France’s success in 1884 that inspired him to dream of building his own powered airship. But his would be different from anyone else’s in one major respect: It was going to be made of metal, the whole thing, including the gas balloon. And that metal was aluminum.
His countrymen may not have been interested, but the War Ministry in Saint Petersburg certainly was. After much delay, mounting costs, and a torrent of excuses, Schwarz managed to have a finished prototype ready on March 22, 1894, but it was, predictably, a piece of junk.
The airship was small, containing just 115,560 cubic feet of hydrogen within a cylindrical aluminum body, its skin a mere 0.2 mm thick. Unfortunately, lacking as he did technical knowledge, Schwarz had not realized that hydrogen expands and contracts as altitude and temperature change. In the absence of independent, adjustable gas cells, intolerable pressure or vacuum stresses would be placed on the rigid aluminum shell if a pilot attempted to rise beyond 650 feet—about the same height as the tethered ascensions of the old traveling aeronauts and army observers in their rather less expensive and complex balloons.
Schwarz didn’t even get that far. As he filled it with gas in a Russian winter, the sheeting bulged inward and collapsed in on itself owing to a sudden drop in temperature. His employers, furious at the failure and suspecting Schwarz of misappropriating funds, abandoned the project, forcing him to flee the country just ahead of the secret police. Schwarz died a few years later of cardiac arrest, but he had nonetheless given the count the kiss of life.
Before the ignominious demise of Schwarz’s airship, the German military attaché in Saint Petersburg had sent reports home regarding its progress, and it was these, combined with the French alliance, that had so alarmed the War Ministry and prompted Zeppelin’s out-of-the-blue invitation to present his design. If the Russians had a powered airship, then Germany needed one, too—and Zeppelin’s was their only option.
* * *
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THE LONG-DELAYED MEETING took place in the vice chancellor’s office at the well-regarded Royal Technical University in Charlottenburg, just outside Berlin. Zeppelin, at least, could not complain that he wasn’t being taken seriously: The most eminent physicist in Germany, for instance, Hermann von Helmholtz, served as chairman. Also sitting on the committee was Professor Heinrich Müller-Breslau, a leading structure analyst and bridge designer; Professor Adolf Slaby, an electrical engineer and an expert on the internal combustion engine; and a certain Richard Assmann, an eminent meteorologist and specialist in measuring atmospheric humidity and temperature in a balloon. If any group of individuals could authoritatively appraise the virtues of Zeppelin’s rigidly structured, powered airship, it was this one.
Less happy for Zeppelin, however, was the presence of Captain Hans Gross and Major Stephan von Nieber. The latter had been raised to command of the PAB
the year before, and Gross was a rising star in the unit.2 Aged thirty-four and equipped with a dashing handlebar mustache, Gross was the youngest member of the committee, but he had already made a name for himself by breaking the world record for altitude by ascending to thirty thousand feet.
Neither Nieber nor Gross was inclined to back a project that ran against the grain of the PAB doctrine that airpower was best restricted to short-range reconnaissance and scientific observation conducted by small balloons. With Nieber being new to the job, it fell to Gross to serve as the in-house lighter-than-air expert.
Despite Zeppelin’s confidence that the committee would fall in love with his perfect airship, the hearings were a debacle. No one believed it would fly as far and as fast as the count was claiming, and Gross pointed out that it had no discernible military applicability. But the most damning indictment was delivered by the engineer, Müller-Breslau. According to his calculations of how the infrastructure would compress, bend, stretch, and twist under stress and strains, the airship was fatally weak.
In this respect, the inexperience of Zeppelin’s Grade IIb technical designer, Kober, had weighed disastrously against him, for he had accounted only for vertical rigidity; that is, the airship could probably handle the bending stresses of ascents and descents for a limited time thanks to its struts and rings, but he (and Zeppelin) had ignored the need for horizontal strength. In short, the flimsy longitudinal aluminum girders would buckle at the slightest breath of a crosswind. It was as if Zeppelin wanted to build a house with a roof and a floor but no walls.3
Müller-Breslau’s embarrassing revelation convinced Zeppelin that Kober had to go. His skills simply weren’t up to the task, but he had done the best he could and had been, more important still, loyal to a fault—always a crucial consideration with Zeppelin. The two parted on good terms, the count providing a gracious reference letter noting the young man’s sterling character and perseverance.4
The committee unanimously and predictably concluded on July 10, 1894, that it must “refrain from realizing the project.”5 Zeppelin rejected its rejection out of hand. At the end of August, he submitted a detailed rebuttal of the committee’s findings, including with it an angry denunciation of Müller-Breslau as biased and ignorant. At the War Ministry, the letter was widely ridiculed, its author still more.6
Yet Zeppelin was not entirely wrong to complain about Müller-Breslau’s conclusions. The science of stress analysis was in its infancy, and Müller-Breslau was not an aeronaut; he was accustomed to studying large immobile structures, like bridges, not lightweight, airborne vehicles.7 In light of this, Zeppelin demanded in a fiery rebuttal that the committee be reconvened. Normally, such a demand would have been ignored: Zeppelin had had his chance and had flubbed it. But, almost unprecedentedly, he was given a second one.
The reason was that Professor Müller-Breslau, now chairman after Helmholtz’s death, was, notwithstanding Zeppelin’s derision, a genuine scholar in that he kept an open mind and was committed to arriving at an honest and unbiased conclusion. The professor, having perused Zeppelin’s arguments, conceded several points where he might possibly have erred and recommended that the committee take another look at the count’s proposal.
Just before Christmas 1894, the committee reconvened to discuss Zeppelin’s amended scheme. For this second round, Zeppelin had added a metal truss that ran the entire length of the hull, like a splint to secure a broken limb. It was a crude solution to the problem of lateral bending, but Müller-Breslau conceded that the truss was probably “sufficient for working the ship through wind currents of moderate strength” as long as it traveled at low speed.
Even so, Captain Gross insisted that if the military had to have a powered airship for transporting troops and matériel, it must be capable of a minimum cruising speed of 28 mph to overcome high winds—and the most Zeppelin’s (theoretically) could do was a puny 13.5 mph, less than the once-standard benchmark of 15 mph.8
On March 2, 1895, the committee released its final verdict: “The highlighted flaws of the project presented have to be considered so essential that we cannot recommend its continued progress” to the War Ministry.9
It was over for Zeppelin. In May, he tried one more time to interest Wilhelm II, who asked General Walther Bronsart von Schellendorff, the war minister, whether he might throw Zeppelin a little cash to salve his amour propre? The minister replied that perhaps he could borrow it from Jules Verne, Zeppelin’s airship being as fantastical a creation as Captain Nemo’s submarine.10
Zeppelin’s anger only strengthened his resolve. If the military, in yet another snub after his humiliating dismissal from the army, was determined to be fools, and the ivory-tower experts snobbishly refused to acknowledge his genius, then he would show them the error of their ways. He would take his idea to the businessmen, the rising power in a rapidly industrializing nation as the twentieth century approached. They, men who possessed the drive to solve problems to make profits, would bring the airship to fruition.
Zeppelin’s decision to circumvent the traditional avenues of the military, the court, the government, and the elite universities was a distinct turn in his character. As a noble of ancient pedigree, dealing with vulgar businessmen—people in “trade”—tended to offend his sensibilities, but if he wanted to build his airship, he needed them.
Zeppelin’s pivot had been inspired by a single, seemingly throwaway line buried deep inside the committee report’s dense pages: “Only if the machines were already in service and had proved their value in civil transport could any attempt be made to use them for military purposes.”11 Zeppelin suddenly realized that he’d been putting the cart before the horse in trying so obsessively to gain army support and funding. So immersed in the military world was he that he had never considered building an airship for civilian use.
In the summer of 1895, he wrote to Duttenhofer at DMG to ask his opinion of the committee’s conclusions and was gratified when Duttenhofer agreed that they were pedantic and unfair. Duttenhofer proposed inviting Wilhelm Gross (no relation to Captain Hans Gross), the chief design director of the huge Krupp armaments concern, “to come and examine carefully to see who is right on the points in dispute,” as Zeppelin put it.12
Duttenhofer had his own reasons for being so helpful. The troubled company’s car business had vaporized after Daimler and Maybach departed, but Duttenhofer had patched things up and the prodigal sons were coming back—and were bringing with them the precious Phoenix engine. Perhaps it could power an airship as well as it could a car, thought Duttenhofer, who urgently needed to show his long-suffering shareholders that DMG could make money.
Herr Gross of Krupp soon earned Zeppelin’s eternal gratitude by dismissing Müller-Breslau and the other experts as dolts. Jubilantly, Zeppelin wrote that Gross reckoned the ship would have a speed of 28 mph, thereby satisfying the other Gross’s demand.13
Regrettably, Herr Gross’s estimates were as hopelessly optimistic as Zeppelin’s. Gross was a former artilleryman and, despite Zeppelin’s bragging that he was “Germany’s leading expert on the resistance of air to moving bodies,” he had conducted his experiments with Krupp’s artillery shells—which behave very differently as they hurtle through the air than a large, self-propelled vehicle. Zeppelin should have known this, and indeed probably suspected that that was the case, but Gross had nonetheless provided him with a major psychological boost at a critical moment.14
In December 1895, Zeppelin published a manifesto based on Gross’s calculations intended to raise 800,000 marks to fund a working airship. The manifesto marks a key shift in Zeppelin’s concept of an airship. He had finally dropped the cumbersome sky-train plan in favor of a much simpler all-in-one vehicle.
He sent the pamphlet to a large number of industrialists and bankers, but the effort was a fiasco: Zeppelin managed to scrounge together just 100,000 marks from some old friends and a few members of the Württemberg ro
yal family. As he walked down the streets of Stuttgart, Zeppelin was ridiculed and taunted as a lunatic.15
Attempting to drum up support, Zeppelin tried a different approach in January 1896. With Professor Bach’s backing, he successfully applied for membership in the prestigious Association of German Engineers. A month later Zeppelin found himself presenting his project before its Württemberg chapter of 435 members. Afterward, several professors praised the design as a “very important, expert piece of work” and a “laudable manifestation of [the] deepest German thoroughness.”16
Determined to bury Müller-Breslau, Gross, and their accomplices once and for all, Zeppelin followed up this success by appealing to the association to form its own committee of engineering experts to evaluate his proposal. If they reported positively, he would then have the ammunition he needed to go out and find willing moneymen.17
On October 25, 1896, the engineers’ committee favorably presented its case for Zeppelin to the association board, which published the report on December 21. It was better than even Zeppelin could have hoped. Zeppelin’s project was important in its own right, the association concluded, in order to explore the world-changing potential of conquering the air. Though many people were “skeptical about everything pertaining to aviation,” the association believed that similar objections had been thrown at the inventors of the great steamships and continent-crossing trains. The first step on the path of progress, then, must be “the construction of an airship based on the Zeppelin model.”18
Another important ally appeared in the form of Hermann Moedebeck, a former PAB man who was counted as the Brahmin of ballooning—much to Captain Gross’s envy. He now edited the enthusiasts’ journal Illustrated Aeronautical News and regarded his job as being to publicize the glorious future of German airships to a patriotic nation. It was Moedebeck who realized that not only did one have to set the German people’s imagination aflame with the tantalizing possibilities of flight, one also had to make it relevant to them so that the public’s excitement would sweep away the naysayers.
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