Moedebeck railed against the scientists tediously (as he thought) conducting meteorological experiments and writing about them in desiccated academic journals. Instead, he promoted more spectacle, more showmanship to get the blood pumping and the pulses throbbing. In the April 1897 issue of Illustrated Aeronautical News, he influentially weighed in on the Zeppelin airship: “We have complete confidence that the realization of this, the best of all projects so far, will enrich aviation with great experience.”19
The Moedebeck article caught the eye of Carl Berg, who hailed from a long line of Westphalian ironworks owners and had taken over the family firm in the early 1870s. In 1889 he had visited the Paris Exposition and seen the new, amazing “silver made from clay” metal—aluminum—and brought some samples home. Three years later, he entered the aluminum business full-time and acquired the license from the War Ministry to manufacture the army’s canteens and mess kits. Now he offered Zeppelin enough aluminum at a bargain-basement price to build the airship skeleton.
Incensed at Zeppelin’s success, Captain Gross of the PAB foolishly accused the count of copying design elements of Schwarz’s airship—for which insult Zeppelin challenged him to a duel. A showdown with heavy cavalry sabers was averted only when the kaiser forbade the confrontation on the grounds that “in the battle to conquer the air, both gentlemen were ‘Officers before the enemy’ and as is well known, there can be no duels during war times.”
With the road ahead now clear, Berg, the count, Bach, Duttenhofer, and Moedebeck founded the Society for the Promotion of Aviation (SPA), a company dedicated to building a Zeppelin airship.20
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THE SPA GOT right to work. In January 1898, the organization sent another appeal for 800,000 marks to members of the Association of German Engineers and major industrialists. Moedebeck did good work advertising it in the press without burdening readers with an acknowledgment of his own financial involvement. By June, some sixty-five shareholders had purchased bonds totaling 369,000 marks, with Berg alone contributing 100,000 (plus donating another 60,000 marks’ worth of aluminum). The rest was purchased by Zeppelin himself, giving him majority control.21
It proved surprisingly easy to recruit young talent attracted by the thought of working on such a futuristic project. Professor Bach recommended another of his former students, Hugo Kübler, aged twenty-six, a machinery expert, to serve as project manager and to oversee construction. Zeppelin insisted that he move into his house in Stuttgart, as “our close companionship…will be of service for promoting the work.”22
Soon joining them was the twenty-two-year-old Ludwig Dürr, another Bach pupil from Württemberg. Zeppelin assigned him the job of assembling the finished components of the airship under Kübler’s supervision.23
Dürr was a very odd duck, it soon became apparent. Long, lean, and missing his right middle finger (engineering accident), with prominent black eyebrows, a precisely cultivated goatee, and piercing eyes that focused on a page of impenetrable calculations with hawklike intensity, Dürr was an utterly humorless loner. Lacking any interest in culture—airships would be his art—he rarely emerged from his office, and when he did, it was only to participate in such solitary pursuits as hiking and bicycling.
At first, he was mocked by the workmen as just another, in the words of one observer, “unimpressive and retiring young man” with an airy-fairy university pedigree and no practical knowledge, but he soon proved them wrong.
There came a day when Dürr expressed disappointment in the quality of a factory-made turnbuckle (a device for adjusting the tension and length of cables), and Preiss, the locksmith in charge of certifying and testing them, decided to embarrass Dürr by challenging him to make one for himself. Dürr went over to Preiss’s machine and forged a new one from scratch. The locksmith recognized that no one could have made a better one, but where was the fun in that? So he claimed to have found a minute crack in it. Wordlessly, Dürr disappeared for a few hours and returned with a turnbuckle so flawless that even Preiss was taken aback.
From then on, nobody questioned Dürr’s skills. He soon became the only man alive bold enough to disagree publicly with Zeppelin on matters of design and construction: Because Dürr was always right and Dürr knew he was always right—even when he was wrong. For his entire life, virtually everyone—apart from Zeppelin, oddly enough—found him “a very difficult man to deal with.”24
In June 1898, the SPA headquartered itself at Friedrichshafen, a beautiful little town described in a guidebook as a “much-visited health resort and tourist destination” on the shore of Lake Constance. A castle—the summer residence of the Württemberg royal family—lent Friedrichshafen a touch of class, and there were several villas built for retired courtiers. Tourists came, though not in great numbers, to enjoy the spas and to taste the local delicacy, goats’ whey—touted as a medicinal tonic. In the evening, there was little to do, so visitors were advised to head to an inn where they could—the guidebook tried to sound enthusiastic—participate in conversations “with a large number of officials employed by the post office, railway, and customs” as well as “several local characters” whose talk “revolves around materialistic and business-related subjects.”25
Zeppelin built his construction facilities at Manzell (just west of Friedrichshafen) on the lakefront, the king of Württemberg helpfully providing the land rent-free for ninety-nine years. It was an idyllic place, a utopia for those seeking isolation and quiet between the snowcapped peaks of Switzerland, looming just across freshwater Lake Constance, and the emerald fields, vineyards, medieval castles, and forests of Württemberg. The water was green-hued, and the sky, on a clear day, icy blue.
More prosaically, Manzell was as flat as a pancake, the winds there were more constant than anywhere else in the vicinity, and the nearby water would provide a soft, calm landing area—factors critical for airship flight-testing.
Zeppelin’s arrival was just one of several signs the modern age was intruding on the area’s rustic charms. Electric street lighting was imminent, and lakeside steamship piers and railway stations were being built—all the better to import the industrial products needed by the count to achieve his dreams. The chemical company Griesheim-Elektron sent hydrogen, DMG its engines, Gradenwitz the gas valves and gauges, and the Rhine Metal Works the gas cylinders.
As the airship began to take shape, Zeppelin, now sixty, hired a colorful Swiss balloonist named Eduard Spelterini to give him flying lessons. Spelterini had once toured the world giving acrobatic performances in the company of an exotic trapeze artist named “Leona Dare”—born Susan Stuart in Mattoon, Illinois—whose star turn was to swing by her teeth from a dangling rope. He and Zeppelin got along surprisingly well. Maybe he reminded the count of old John Steiner from Saint Paul.26
The influx of private money allowed Zeppelin to move much faster than would have been possible had he stayed on the military track—so fast, in fact, that he announced that his first Luftschiff (airship) Zeppelin, LZ-1, would be launched on July 1, 1899. In the event, things went according to plan but not to schedule, and the count was forced to push back the over-optimistic launch date by a year.
Zeppelin himself remained serene, but several of his backers grew worried that every day’s delay increased the risk that LZ-1 would be obsolete before it even flew.
Because a new threat was on the horizon: the airplane.
7. A Wonderfully Ingenious Toy
ZEPPELIN PAID LITTLE attention to airplanes. If the history of the airship had seemed unpromising until he came along, then airplanes, if anything, suffered from a reputation still worse.
On the face of it, flying is easy. Or at least birds make it look so. They flap their wings to pick up speed and attain height and outstretch them to soar; they swoop and bank and dive with casual abandon. In nature, they seemingly demonstrated the principle that the Lord designed His creatures so th
at nothing is either wanting or superfluous. For centuries, then, it had been only reasonable to expect that man, His finest if haughtiest creation, could emulate the birds. If only a man donned artificial wings of fabric or feathers, leapt off a height, and furiously flapped his arms, he too could be a bird.
Many of these deluded souls died horribly at an alarming velocity. Part of the mystery why none of these “ornithopters” (aerial contraptions that replicated the flapping-wing action of birds) worked was eventually solved by a scientist named Giovanni Borelli in 1680.
In his tract The Movement of Animals, he demonstrated that birds were physiologically different from humans in critical respects. Ours is a puny species, aviationally speaking. In average healthy humans, muscles are fairly widely distributed and together comprise around 40 percent of body mass, but a third or more of a bird’s weight is concentrated in its breast muscles alone: namely, the pectoralis (which pulls the wing down) and the supracoracoideus (which raises the wing). Given also that our skeletons are relatively much heavier than those of birds, we’re simply too cumbrous and weak to conquer the air.
Add to that the disappointing revelations that our feathered friends produce exponentially more power per pound than we can, and that they can sustain elevated energy output for immensely long periods (think of those long migratory flights) and it was only natural for Borelli to conclude, sadly, that “it is impossible that men should be able to fly artificially, by their very own strength.”1
Borelli’s proof persuaded virtually everyone to give up on the quest for winged flight as a fool’s dream. In 1780, the august mathematician Monsieur Charles-Augustin de Coulomb added to the skepticism by calculating that for a man to fly he would require wings half a mile long beating three times per second. Since no man could ever achieve that tempo, let alone bear the wings’ enormous weight, he concluded that “no one but an ignoramus would make an attempt of this kind.”2 Three years later, budding aviators like the Montgolfiers settled instead on the easier alternative path of floating in a balloon.
By 1800, there was just one man left who believed that he could fly: a mild, studious Englishman named Sir George Cayley. He turned himself into the world’s first and only aerodynamics engineer. As such he was obliged to invent a fresh branch of science—by himself, from scratch.
Cayley’s first great insight was to break the ability to fly down into components, each of which represented a problem that needed solving. Cayley laid out the four factors of flight that, if harmonized into a system, would produce success.
First, aerodynamics. Movement produces a flow of air that exerts two forces on a vehicle. There’s perpendicular Lift, which raises the craft and is generated almost magically by the stream of air rushing over, around, and under the wings. And there’s Drag, which slows the aircraft owing to oncoming air resistance.
Second, propulsion. The aircraft must be pulled or pushed through the air by an engine or some other motive force (like muscle) to create Thrust. This works in the opposite direction to drag and must be greater than the latter to overcome it.
Third, structure and materials. The aircraft must be built in a way to avoid crumpling, buckling, or snapping as aerodynamic forces stress the structure. The aircraft’s total Weight (which includes pilot, passengers, fuel, and payload) works in the opposite direction of lift and so gravitationally draws the vehicle down. For steady, level flight, weight must equal lift.
Fourth, flight control and stability. There must be a means of regulating motion to enable banking, climbing, and diving. These include control surfaces such as horizontal hinged elevators on the tail, a vertical rudder, and ailerons, or flaps, on the wings’ trailing edge.3
Earlier aviators had copied birds by constructing wings that played the dual role of providing thrust and lift—and had failed by trying to do too much at the same time. And worse, since they had naturally assumed that the larger the wing the more work it could do, they had contrived ever-heavier, draggier, more uncontrollable craft.
So the first thing Cayley did was dispense with the ornithopter concept: no more all-in-one flapping wings. His wings would be fixed in place and exclusively assigned to provide lift. After that came structure and control. Get those three elements right, and all he had to do was add power to fly. He left that until later. By 1804 Cayley had built a working, yard-long model of a glider—an airplane without an engine. Today it seems like a child’s toy, but its radical new form amounted to a revolution.
Cayley had singlehandedly invented the shape that would be the basis of every airplane ever since. Instead of taking one part of a bird—its wings—and grafting them to a man to form a hybrid resembling some beast from a Greek myth, as so many others since the days of Daedalus and Icarus had done, Cayley copied the entire bird and removed the man. A thin wooden rod formed the glider’s nose and body, which he dubbed the “fuselage” (French for “spindle-shaped”), with a pair of kitelike wings mounted on it, while at the rear was a cruciform tail. When Cayley hand-launched his glider from atop a local hill that year, with his arm serving as engine, it was the first airplane in history to fly.
In Cayley’s triumphant words, “It was beautiful to see this noble white bird sail majestically from the top of a hill to any given point of the plain below it with perfect steadiness and safety.”4
But he never could find a means of sustained propulsion. In 1807, he conceived a mini-engine that burned gunpowder to generate a single horsepower—for all of fifty-seven seconds. Then he investigated larger steam and hot-air engines, but they too could not defeat the weight-to-power ratio that would similarly afflict Giffard, Renard, and other aeronauts for nearly a century to come: The output was too low to offset their extra weight. No airplane could take off, let alone fly. Depressingly, Cayley could not foresee a day when an engine’s weight-to-power ratio would fall below 163 pounds per horsepower.5
In 1809–10, he surrendered and published an extraordinary three-part scientific paper, entitled “On Aerial Navigation,” that detailed his decade’s worth of experiments and thoughts. Nobody had ever read anything like it, this aeronautical equivalent of Darwin’s Origin of Species or Newton’s Principia, but anyone who tried to follow in Cayley’s footsteps ran into the same wall: lack of power.6
Cayley himself may have given up the quest but not the dream. As he put it, wistfully, “an uninterrupted navigable ocean, that comes to the threshold of every man’s door, ought not to be neglected as a source of human gratification and advantage.” He felt “perfectly confident” that the “noble art [of flying] will soon be brought home to man’s general convenience, and that we shall be able to transport ourselves and families, and their goods and chattels, more securely by air than by water, and with a velocity of from 20 to 100 miles per hour.” All that was still required was “a first mover, which will generate more power in a given time, in proportion to its weight, than the animal system of muscles.”7
The aged Cayley derived some satisfaction from Giffard’s 1852 dirigible briefly managing to achieve a weight-to-power ratio of 110—unimaginable in his prime working years—but he always retained his faith that the future of flying would come in the form of the airplane, not the airship.
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IN 1866, NEARLY a decade after Cayley’s death, a rump of true believers in, or apostles of, his vision of heavier-than-air flight congregated to form the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain to advance the cause of “Aerial Navigation and for Observations in Aerology connected therewith.” According to the Duke of Argyll, its president, “the absence of the lighter motive power [of an engine] ought not to stop us from investigating the principle” of flight in order to prepare for that blessed day when a satisfactory one would pentecostally descend upon the world.
Until then, he continued, there was still plenty to explore, so much to know. Not only “are we still ignorant of the rudimentary principles” of
airplane construction, but knowledge of bird flight was paltry, and “we are equally ignorant of the force of the wind exerted on surfaces of various sizes, forms, and degrees of inclinations.” Thanks to the sainted Cayley, they had been led to the mysterious black box of aerodynamics, but the golden key to unlock it lay hidden still.
In their quest, the society’s members enthusiastically conducted their own studies of flight. For instance, Francis Wenham groundbreakingly observed that the swiftest “birds possess extremely long and narrow wings, and the slow, heavy flyers short and wide ones.” He speculated that a successful airplane should copy the former in having “high-aspect-ratio wings” (defined as wingspan divided by chord, or the breadth of the wing from leading to trailing edge) to generate additional lift. A couple of years later, Wenham conceived the world’s first wind tunnel, allowing him to conduct multiple experiments in a laboratory. By rigging a steam-powered fan to blow air at a top speed of 40 mph through a rectangular wooden duct, Wenham was finally able to begin measuring and quantifying the effects of wind on wings.8
A twenty-seven-year-old Londoner named Horatio Phillips heard Wenham’s lectures and thought he could do better. Wenham’s wind experiments had been conducted with flat plates set at different angles; in 1884, after building a more efficient wind tunnel of his own, Phillips used cambered, or curved, airfoils that dramatically increased lift. Cayley had long before speculated that cambering was a secret ingredient to flight but had done little with it. Phillips, on the other hand, proved that when air flowed quickly over the curved upper surface of a wing its pressure decreased and hence lift was actually generated by the relatively slow-moving, high-pressure air underneath pushing upward.
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