Phillips had at last extinguished the ancient assumption that a bird’s wings’ flapping was the source of the mysterious power of lift. From then on, fixed cambered wings were the rule in airplane design.9 Yet these wonderful advances could not, despite myriad attempts, be translated into practical success. Still lacking a suitable engine, their airplanes simply could not fly. It was as if one had learned the rules of chess but lacked the board and pieces to play it.
* * *
—
HIRAM MAXIM INTENDED to become aviation’s grandmaster, and he could well afford as many boards and pieces as he wanted. Born the son of a Maine farmer in 1840, he had limited schooling but an unquenchable fascination with machines. In 1881, he emigrated to Britain and two years later marketed the Maxim machine gun, the rapid-firing weapon that earned him fame (and infamy) during several imperial wars in Africa, as well as a very, very large fortune. Having conquered the world of armaments and looking for new ones, in 1889 Maxim set his sights on designing airplanes.
By throwing the enormous sum of £100,000 at the problem of flight, Maxim believed, he could solve it within five years. He constructed a large hangar, hired two American mechanics, purchased a lot of experimental equipment, and knuckled down to build yet another world-shattering invention.10
Five years. Maxim was as good as his word. In the summer of 1894, his airplane debuted. A devotee of the principle that bigger is better, Maxim had birthed a colossus. Nothing else like it had ever existed. The appositely named Leviathan had a wingspan of 104 feet and a total surface area of 4,000 square feet spread over its four stacked wings (making it a quadraplane). He installed two 180-horsepower steam engines, together weighing 620 pounds, whose boiler alone added another thousand. Their sheer brute force would drive two propellers, each with a diameter of nearly 18 feet, designed to push the 8,000-pound airplane through the air. For once, it seems, engine power was not lacking, though the tremendous weight of the craft—about that of a hippopotamus—militated, to put it mildly, against success.
The machine’s four-wheeled undercarriage ran along an 1,800-foot-long railway track with a guardrail attached to prevent the airplane from rising more than two feet above the ground. Maxim’s objective at this stage was not to fly a great distance with any altitude, only to demonstrate that his invention was capable of generating sufficient lift to leave the ground under its own power. On his third test run on July 31, the machine’s wheels lifted off the track near the end of the rails. Maxim and his two-man crew struggled to contain the beast, but it broke through the guardrail and shot upward for a brief time. “I found myself floating in the air,” said Maxim, “with the feeling of being in a boat.” He immediately shut off the steam and the plane gently landed.11
Maxim held two more public demonstrations over the course of the following year, but after so much labor and so much money, even he had to call it quits, and the mighty Leviathan was quickly relegated to the status of a historical curio. Perhaps Maxim was hurt by the eminent British scientist Lord Kelvin’s dismissive, if not inaccurate, comment that it resembled “a kind of child’s perambulator with a sunshade magnified eight times.”12
Maxim nevertheless does deserve credit for trying, but what he could never do is achieve true powered or sustained flight, defined as the ability of an aircraft to demonstrate a continual horizontal or rising path without loss of airspeed. Maxim’s airplane had in fact taken off by dint of the momentum it acquired as it barreled down the rails, making its “flight” more of a hop than anything.
The oddest thing about it was that Maxim had achieved an astoundingly low weight-to-power ratio of just 4.5—lower than anyone had even thought possible. Put differently, according to the tenets of existing aerodynamics, he should have been able not merely to hop but to actually fly, guardrail or not. After all, had his engines not made manifest Cayley’s Holy Grail of “a first mover, which will generate more power in a given time, in proportion to its weight, than the animal system of muscles”?
There was still something missing, but what was it?
* * *
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AT THIS TIME, the 1890s, there was virtually no contact between the heavier-than-air “aeroplanists” and the lighter-than-air aeronauts. The cloud, as aeronauts like Zeppelin saw it, was distinct from the bird, and each faction regarded its rival as foolishly misguided.
From the count’s perspective, Maxim’s absurdity seemed only to point to the continuing futility of airplanes. It was obvious, he thought, that the only viable aviation technology was the airship.
Lest we think Zeppelin was exceptional in thinking this, his was in fact accepted opinion. Upon being asked to join the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain in 1896, for instance, Lord Kelvin, the mathematical physicist who calculated the temperature of absolute zero, rejected the invitation by replying dismissively, “I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning.”13 Three years later, in December 1899, Scientific American judged that heavier-than-air flight will either “remain a very hazardous and fatal form of recreation” or at best “a wonderfully ingenious toy.”
The magazine believed that the seemingly insuperable obstacle to greater success was that by their very nature airplanes were based “upon the principles which govern the flight of birds.” This meant that any pilot must also possess “that God-given faculty by which the bird is able to preserve its equilibrium, adjusting the position of its weight and the inclination of its wings to the ever-changing velocity and direction of the wind, and the varying speed and direction of its own flight” to have any hope of staying aloft. Until budding aviators could actually think like a bird and react instantaneously to an ever-changing environment, the airplane could never be “a machine of commercial or military utility.”
So that was where Cayley, Maxim, and all the others had gone wrong. Flying an airplane was not merely a matter of getting the technology, ratios, and design right to copy the body of a bird; one had to have a bird’s brain to control its motion. Without that “God-given faculty,” an airplane was merely a lifeless simulacrum of an animal, a replica with no spirit.
The airship, however, was different. Since it was essentially a motorized cloud, “the efforts of the operator[s] may be devoted entirely to steering and propulsion”—which were jobs any half-decent helmsman and a good mechanic could do without much trouble.14 Ultimately, Scientific American voted for the airship as the likeliest to succeed.
Within a few years the conventional wisdom would be proven wrong, not only because Zeppelin would discover that piloting an airship was a lot harder than Scientific American had so blithely imagined, but because of two birdbrained brothers from the American Midwest.
On May 30, 1899, a month before Zeppelin had first proposed launching LZ-1, one of them, a certain Mr. Wilbur Wright, wrote to the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. In his letter, he assured the secretary, who was evidently accustomed to oddballs pestering him, that “I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine,” and politely asked for any information he might supply about heavier-than-air flight.15
8. The Folly
JUST BEFORE LUNCH on the most important day of his life, now nearly sixty-two years long, Count von Zeppelin signed his will and left it propped up on his desk in his modest, cluttered office above a former fish market in Manzell.1 He’d been born nearby, and maybe he would die nearby. An attached note to his wife, Isabella, read: “If it is God’s will that I meet with an accident during the intended air journey, I will take with me the happy certainty of your conviction that I did not undertake this journey recklessly.”2
A taste for recklessness had once been part of Zeppelin’s nature, but age and bitter experience had long since tempered him. In the dangerous world of the aeronauts, one could be old or one could be bold, but nobody
survived being both. Zeppelin was old. The risks were great, but he had thought them through, which was quite a different thing than pitching heedlessly headlong into hazard, as he had done during his ill-fated raid during the Franco-Prussian War. Accordingly, today he betrayed no hint of anxiety as to his prospects. His life was in the hands of the Lord, and the Lord would protect him, as He always did with Zeppelin.
The postponed date scheduled for this, the maiden voyage of LZ-1, was July 2, 1900. He had been working ten-hour days since 1898 (including Sundays and holidays) to build his craft. Every piece of the infrastructure, down to the very rivets, had been fabricated precisely according to his specifications; each segment of the airship had been assembled at the contractors’ factories under his beady eye, then dismantled and each part painstakingly labeled and boxed. After arriving in Manzell by train, his workmen had rebuilt it from scratch.3
Later that afternoon, when Zeppelin arrived at the shore of Lake Constance, he greeted the quintet of military observers dispatched from Berlin to report on that evening’s voyage. There was Captain von Hülsen, a General Staff officer; Major Klussmann, the new head of the Prussian Aeronautical Battalion; two helpful acquaintances of Zeppelin’s, Captains von Tschudi and Bartsch von Sigsfeld; and lastly—but by no means welcomely—his old enemy Captain Hans Gross, also of the PAB.4
To counterbalance the possible hostility of the PAB, Zeppelin had made sure to make the great event public. It would be difficult for Gross to torpedo the project if the press and the people witnessed it with their own eyes. He was gratified to see the swelling crowds who had come out for the occasion.
Local vendors had set up stalls to hawk snacks as children skittered and ducked around their friends and nannies. The Quality—dressed in their Wilhelmian finest and stiffly polite to one another—promenaded along the boardwalk or picked their parasoled way over the pebbly beach. To watch the day’s big event, some of the sightseers had hired boats—ranging from modest fishermen’s rigs to flashy private steam yachts—which bobbed gaily upon the placid water.5
The workingmen, many employed by Zeppelin, had brought their families and humbly kept their place away from their middle-class superiors. They perched on the dockside walls as their wives fetched beer and sausages and the kids clambered up to the rooftops hoping to catch a sight of the mysterious thing their fathers had been working on.
They were to be disappointed. The “thing” was entirely hidden in a huge barnlike hangar—the largest wooden structure in the world—which, weirdly, was floating in the middle of the lake. Weirder still, it slowly revolved on its central axis as the tide and wind shifted. Little did they know, but the 142-yard-long, 23-yard-high building had a draft of only about 2.5 feet and was anchored to the lake bed 20 yards below by means of a chain attached to a concrete block weighing 41 tons.
Zeppelin took a launch out to the hangar and vanished inside.6 For the rest of the afternoon, he supervised the final checks of the hydrogen levels and water ballast and made sure that the engines were running smoothly and that the controls were balanced. At around 6:00 P.M., he reappeared on a small floating platform and the crowd stopped chattering and laughing.
The count was not a young man, but he’d retained a youthful energy. Forty years earlier, when he’d visited America during the Civil War, he’d affected a luxuriant blond beard, long since shaved off. He’d kept the (now white) bushy walrus mustache. He’d lost his hair, apart from a snowy halo up top, and his once-trim cavalryman’s figure had been replaced by a retired general’s paunch, but the twinkling blue eyes hadn’t changed and neither had the air of indomitable perseverance. He no longer wore a uniform unless attending an official ceremony, and for the maiden voyage of LZ-1, a ship of the air ocean, he’d decided upon a natty combination of double-breasted navy blazer and a white yachtsman’s cap.
Joining Zeppelin on the platform were his friend Baron von Bassus (who had some experience flying balloons), the well-known African explorer and journalist Eugen Wolf; engineer Fritz Burr; and a mechanic named Gross.7
The count led them in a short prayer before signaling for the great doors of the hangar to be opened to reveal the marvel hidden within.
* * *
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THE VAST HANGAR emptied its womb. Gasps of astonishment greeted the birth of the first Zeppelin airship as it hesitantly emerged from the darkness.
At 420 feet, nothing larger had ever been built in the history of aviation. Cylindrical with bullet-shaped ends, the Brobdingnagian baby had skin that was pale, smooth, and taut, made of Pegamoid, a specially impregnated waterproof cotton designed to reduce air resistance more efficiently than (expensive) silk. At the front, for turning, were two vertical rudders made of stretched cotton; at the stern, two of the same. A hand-operated crank could move them simultaneously, but in opposite directions, so if the front pair turned to the left, the rear ones moved to the right.
There were twin twenty-foot-long, boatlike aluminum gondolas connected to the airframe undercarriage by tubular struts and wires. Each gondola was located 105 feet from either end and nine feet below the hull. Cleverly, they could float on water in case of emergency, and in each there was one of Daimler’s newest products—a four-cylinder, 850-pound water-cooled engine developing 14.7 horsepower. Personally installed by Wilhelm Maybach, the engines transmitted power to two propellers four feet in diameter turning at 1,200 rpm.
Zeppelin had connected the gondolas with a wire that suspended a sliding, 220-pound lead weight. To adjust the pitch (nudging the airship’s nose up or down for climbing or descending), the crew would winch the weight forward or backward. There was also a rudimentary, and rather precarious, gangway between the gondolas so that passengers could transfer between them, if necessary.
What the crowds couldn’t see, or appreciate, was the skeleton within. Alone weighing 4.5 tons—the outer skin added another two—it contained nearly six and a half miles of Carl Berg’s finest aluminum, in addition to several more of wire. Its rib cage consisted of sixteen transverse (cross-sectional) rings, each a twenty-four-sided polygon braced with a weavework of chord and radial wires. Connecting the rings were longitudinal girders between thirteen and twenty-six feet long. Within this rib cage were the organs: seventeen drum-shaped gasbags containing a total of 399,000 cubic feet of hydrogen.8
The bare-bones controls in the lead gondola were designed solely for function: some pulleys and toggles to valve gas and drop ballast and a small map table with a spirit level, a barometer, a barograph, and a homemade pendulum to mark the ship’s banking angle. Communication between the two gondolas was effected by a rudimentary telegraph, megaphones, and two bells.
Zeppelin beamed, basking in the congratulations of those around him. Handshakes done, he got down to the real work of the day.
At 6:50 P.M., Zeppelin and his passengers gingerly stepped aboard LZ-1 and took their assigned positions. The count, his friend Bassus, and Burr the engineer entered the front gondola; explorer Wolf and mechanic Gross, the rear.
There was supposed to have been one more: the project manager, Hugo Kübler. But at the last minute he had refused to go after Zeppelin told him that he had not purchased life insurance—which the count alleged would have been a weakling’s admission of defeat—for the intrepid aeronauts. At this unforgivable act of treachery, not only to him but to the airship, Zeppelin had lost his grandfatherly demeanor and stared at the hapless Kübler with icy disdain. Kübler soon emigrated to Argentina.9
Kübler’s reluctance to trust his life to LZ-1 was understandable, for no one had any idea whether the airship would actually take off. LZ-1 was the same size as an ocean liner of the time, and suspending a body so huge was no simple matter. For all anyone knew, LZ-1 might immediately spiral uncontrollably upward, explode, crash-land, or crumple when a breath of air hit it. Ludwig Dürr, Zeppelin’s chief engineer and designer, had loyally assured him that LZ-1 was airworthy, though
he based those assurances on nothing more than theoretical calculations worked out laboriously on paper, making the airship’s maiden voyage an open-air, full-size experiment in extreme aerodynamics.
Around 7:30 P.M., the raft securing the airship with ropes was towed out deeper into the lake by a motorboat, the Württemberg, captained by Max von Gemmingen, Zeppelin’s thirty-eight-year-old nephew.10 Windspeed was a moderate 17 miles per hour, but the lake surface remained mirror smooth. The airship was turned in the exact direction of the wind. At 7:56, Zeppelin ordered the ground crew—volunteers from the Friedrichshafen fire brigade and a local gymnastics club—to ease their grip on the mooring ropes, colorfully striped to mark each meter, and let the airship rise slowly.11 At a height of seventeen yards above sea level, LZ-1 stayed steady. So far, so good.
At 8:03 P.M., Zeppelin barked, “Cast off!” At this signal, the handlers were supposed to let go of the ropes at exactly the same time, but the rear team held on a fraction of a second longer and LZ-1’s nose lurched sharply upward. Zeppelin urgently worked the sliding weight and the craft soon righted to an even keel. Not many people noticed the slip since “thousands of hoorays sounded from the shore,” recalled Wolf, and “all eyes followed the flight of the balloon.”12
But the military observers stayed silent, their lips pursed. Notwithstanding Zeppelin’s rosy prediction that the airship would hare along at 20 mph, it was clear that it was moving just a touch faster than the wind. Their disapproval only deepened as they watched Zeppelin struggle with the sliding weight. Its winch had broken, stuck in the forward position. LZ-1’s nose was now headed down and came fatally close to dipping into the water moments before the count dumped hundreds of pounds of ballast to bring it up. Thankfully, the airship regained its trim, but the close call had been noted.
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