Zeppelin was as good as his word. On January 17, 1906, LZ-2 was ready to go. When the early-morning call came, it was a surprise to the crew: Hans Gassau, one of the mechanics, turned up for work wearing slippers. Ludwig Dürr, who had realized he was not cut out for airship flying, stayed ashore, but there was another notable absentee: Wolf the explorer, who had mildly criticized airships in a newspaper after the November accident. As punishment for his lack of faith, the count had banished him permanently.
This time the launch went well, but LZ-2 was too low on ballast and immediately rocketed straight up to 1,500 feet. A southwesterly wind took hold of the airship, but the engines did their job and held it steady against the current. Zeppelin and Captain von Krogh manned the controls, but they were so stiff that the transmission broke and the rudder jammed. LZ-2 began to drift into a lethal crosswind. Its pitching violently up and down flooded, then stalled, the Daimler engines. As the mechanics urgently tried to fix them, a ventilator belt snapped, making a restart impossible without overheating. If a fire were to break out, they were standing directly below nearly 400,000 cubic feet of flammable hydrogen.
LZ-2 drifted as rudderless as a free balloon of old as Gassau began singing an ironic tune from Verdi’s Rigoletto: “Oh, do not speak to your wretched father of his lost love.” (It was a good thing Zeppelin didn’t hear it.)
Minutes later LZ-2 had soared far from Lake Constance as the wind swept it toward the Allgäu, the Bavarian mountain range. Preiss the locksmith, the one who had once challenged Dürr to make a perfect turnbuckle, discreetly remarked to his friends in the rear gondola that “if we did not wish to crash in the mountains, it was time for us to think of landing.” Nobody had ever before grounded such a large and rigid airship on hard earth—soft water was more forgiving—but now the luckless occupants had no choice.
Zeppelin cried, “Lower the drag anchor!” and slid the message along the communications wire to Preiss. As Gauss and another mechanic struggled with the anchor chain and threw it overboard, Zeppelin and Krogh pulled every valve they could to eject gas to bring the bolting LZ-2 to heel at a lower altitude. The anchor plummeted to the frozen ground, bit into it, and dragged LZ-2 down with it. The airship hit the ground hard and bounced up. It was now at a height of 325 feet and heading fast toward two desolate farms. On one of them, a girl was putting out some laundry, and, unfazed by the sight of a ten-ton monster bearing down on her, she angrily shouted, “Let me hang my washing!”
The airship rapidly descended and scraped against two trees, which dented the hull, before settling peacefully into swampy pasture. Some local farmers helped anchor the ship fore and aft with cables weighted down at the ends with boulders. As the crew congratulated one another and thanked the Lord for their preservation, “we considered ourselves very clever, not realizing that we were sealing the fate of our airship,” Preiss recalled.
An airship that is anchored at both ends is vulnerable to crosswinds—later Zeppelins would be secured at the nose alone to turn with the prevailing wind, not struggle against it. That didn’t seem important at the time, just as it didn’t seem relevant when the farmers informed Zeppelin that their tiny hamlet was informally known as “Allwind.” There was a lot Zeppelin still had to learn about the recondite details of handling airships.
The count returned to Friedrichshafen that evening to arrange repair crews, with most of the crew staying at Farmer Mohr’s place (the indomitable laundry lass was his daughter). They were dead tired and slept until 7 A.M.
The next morning they found Zeppelin at the site despondently watching a Friedrichshafen team demolishing the airship, a nightmare of twisted bones and torn skin, with axes and saws. During the night the wind, vengeful at being denied its prey, had repeatedly battered the ship from the side and smashed it to pieces.19
10. The Equestrian
AN INTRIGUED HUGO Eckener took a train to the crash site the following morning. There he saw the count “quietly and calmly standing beside the badly damaged hull and giving orders for it to be dismantled.” Zeppelin was heard to lament, “An airshipman without an airship is like a cavalry officer without horses. And I am both.”1
Eckener’s report for his paper resisted the impulse to ridicule the count and adopted instead a studiously neutral tone: “Like the skeleton of a giant whale, extended over 130 [yards], it lies there before us on the ground, [and] the speedy destruction is undertaken mercilessly. The balloon sleeves lie scattered in great heaps. It is as if somebody has given the order to erase any trace of this airship as quickly as possible.”2
By the end of that ghastly day, LZ-2 had vanished from existence. Even the valuable gondolas and engines were hacked apart, the pieces thrown onto wagons already piled high with horribly deformed aluminum girders, to be carted away for scrap. This must be, surely, the end of the Zeppelin enterprise, thought Eckener.
But a couple of weeks later, as he tended his garden, Eckener’s housemaid rushed out and excitedly told him that a Count von Zeppelin was ringing the doorbell. He found the count in his drawing room dressed in “meticulously correct morning clothes, with silk hat and yellow gloves,” the very picture of a traditional aristocrat making a formal call.
Drawing a copy of the Frankfurter Zeitung from his pocket, Zeppelin inquired whether Eckener was the “Dr. E.” who’d written the articles about LZ-1 and LZ-2. Eckener cautiously (since a crusty noble like Zeppelin might well challenge him to a duel, as he had done with Captain Gross) said yes, whereupon the count thanked him for the courteous tone toward him personally in the piece. It had made a nice change.
At the time, Zeppelin was more accustomed to being mercilessly lampooned. Even the friendlier locals mocked him as der Luftikus am Bodensee (“the aerial dreamer down at the lake”), who tilted, like Don Quixote, at windmills. More uncharitably, a widely circulated article, by some coward pseudonymously writing as “Rudolph von Elphberg”—almost the same name as the ruler of Ruritania in Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894)—had described the count’s “pathetic career” trying “to solve the problem of flying” that had led him to squander “his estates and his fortune, after reducing his wife to destitution and his only daughter to penury.” Given the failures of LZ-1 and LZ-2, surely it was only a matter of time before “he will be compelled to confess that his life of labor has been spent in vain and that his gray hairs will sink into the grave in sorrow over [his] futile sacrifice.”
Eckener, conversely, had restricted himself to observations regarding the airship’s technical issues, and it was these that Zeppelin now wished to discuss. The two had a long conversation about what had gone wrong with LZ-2. Much to Eckener’s surprise, Zeppelin bluntly denounced his own lack of experience, which he felt had contributed to the disaster. To date, he had flown for four trips totaling around three hours. Granted, that made him the most veteran airship captain in history, but three hours’ flying time was nowhere near sufficient to classify him as anything else but a beginner. He was getting better at lifting off and landing, but flying was more than that, just as driving a car amounts to more than knowing how to turn the engine on and off. Zeppelin had realized that successful flight control—that is, maintaining command over the machine as it moved—required the right philosophy, the correct frame of mind, to happen.
An airship, the former cavalryman had concluded, could not simply be inflated and steered in the desired direction (as so many others had blithely assumed). It was in fact not a cloud but a winged horse, and its pilot had to be a skilled equestrian. Without a steady hand at the reins, a horse will take you where it wants to go, but a mighty new breed of man, a true airshipman, would tame a wild mustang into a Lipizzaner stallion obedient to his will.
Successfully maneuvering these colossal vehicles through the air entailed a thorough mastery over dozens of factors, ranging from hydrogen maintenance and wind measurement to precise elevator, engine, and rudder management. Technical
proficiency was as important as natural aptitude. The finest airshipmen would exploit the weather, not be at its mercy, and their seemingly effortless skill at piloting would lend their actions a singular beauty and elegance.
Having heard out the count, Eckener accepted his invitation to dinner a few nights later. He “went there with a vague and not completely comfortable feeling that the visit could lead to a relationship which would greatly influence my future life.”3
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LITTLE DID ZEPPELIN know it, but the Wright brothers had reached the same conclusion—the importance of flight control and the right mental outlook. This intellectual breakthrough was what distinguished the Wrights and the count from their many failed competitors. Despite their differences in class and background, Zeppelin and the brothers were very similar in mental outlook.
Born the sons of a stolid midwestern bishop, Wilbur and his younger brother Orville never, like Zeppelin, completed any formal technical training; they were self-taught and driven by an implacable work ethic.
They, too, thought modularly and understood that each component of an airplane, like those of an airship, was important in its own right. Every piece of the system had to work harmoniously with the others in order to build a machine capable of flight, and each part presented a unique problem requiring an individual solution.
As Zeppelin was learning, by far the hardest nut to crack was control: In order to fly they had first to learn how to fly. The Wrights studied the birds for inspiration. Whereas aeronautical theorists had investigated the physical means by which birds flew, the Wrights were more interested in their behavior. As Wilbur Wright explained, birds’ wings were “undoubtedly very well designed indeed, but it is not any extraordinary efficiency that strikes with astonishment but rather the marvelous skill with which they are used.” He and his brother had set about acquiring that “marvelous skill” for themselves.
For years, before adding an engine, they practiced keeping their full-size gliders under control in strong winds, sudden gusts, and rising currents. They designed mechanisms, such as movable tail rudders and wings that could twist slightly to increase lift on one side while reducing it on the other, to cope with and adapt to unexpected weather changes. Aviators, concluded Wilbur, required “skill, experience, and sound judgment” to keep an otherwise unstable machine stable, for “before trying to rise to any dangerous height a man ought to know that in an emergency his mind and muscles will work by instinct rather than conscious effort. There is no time to think.”
Only once they had accounted themselves adepts of the air had the Wright brothers placed a homemade engine into the glider—now airplane—that they dubbed the Flyer.4
* * *
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DECEMBER 17, 1903, 10:35 A.M.: Another freezing day at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Ice-covered ponds. Bitter wind gusts at 20 to 27 miles per hour rubbing raw the cheeks of everyone present.
Wilbur Wright stood by the Flyer, a hand steadying its lower wing, as his brother Orville lay on his stomach manning the controls. The engine chugged to life and slowly warmed up. Orville cast off the rope anchoring the Flyer, and it started forward. Wilbur ran alongside for a time until the machine rose off the ground, dipped precariously, thrust upward, descended, bounced, and came to a rest after a wingtip scraped the ground.5
Four years of unrelenting work had just resulted in a voyage of 120 feet in twelve seconds.
The Wright brothers were the first to make a powered, sustained, piloted, and controlled flight in an airplane. They had achieved the seemingly impossible. Just a year earlier, the science-fiction novelist and essayist H. G. Wells, no slouch when it came to predicting the future, had confidently forecast that it would be decades (though “very probably before 1950” and certainly by the year 2000) before an airplane “will have soared and come home safe and sound.”6
But few, least of all Zeppelin, cared. Even if he had heard of these Wright characters, he would have regarded their contraption as nothing of consequence.7 A twelve-second flight? A single occupant? A craft that traveled just a third of the length of LZ-1? For heaven’s sake, in July 1900, three and a half years before, and on its first attempt, his own airship had carried five passengers and made a trip of 3.5 miles in eighteen minutes.
The Wrights’ follow-up, Flyer II, first took off from Huffman Prairie (about eight miles east of Dayton, Ohio) in May 1904. Between May 23 and December 9, the brothers made about eighty flights, their time airborne totaling forty-five minutes. Their longest flight, which took place on November 9, lasted five minutes and four seconds.
But the most important had occurred on September 20, when Wilbur completed the first full circle, a milestone in flight control. This one would later go down in history because Amos Root, the wealthy and rather eccentric publisher of a small trade journal, Gleanings in Bee Culture, happened to be on hand that day. His would be the first eyewitness account of a Wright brothers flight.
Root’s article in the January 1, 1905, issue of Gleanings expressed the awe, shock, dread, and sheer wonder of manned flight that would become the hallmark of the Golden Age of Aviation. An evangelical Christian, Root believed explicitly in the winged gospel—the view that modern technology, just as much a gift from God as the natural world, would forge social betterment. Watching the Flyer II circle above him was as astounding, as sublime, and as transcendent as standing atop the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. For Root, the overall effect was akin to that of the first Christians being suffused with the silent power of the Cross.
As he described the scene for his readers, “When it first turned that circle, and came near the starting-point, I was right in front [of] it; and I said then, and I believe still, it was one of the grandest sights, if not the grandest sight, of my life. Imagine a locomotive that has left its track, and is climbing up in the air right toward you—a locomotive without any wheels we will say, but with white wings instead….Well, now imagine this white locomotive, with wings that spread 20 feet each way, coming right toward you with a tremendous flap of its propellers, and you will have something like what I saw. The younger brother bade me move to one side for fear it might come down suddenly; but I tell you, friends, the sensation that one feels in such a crisis is something hard to describe.”8
The Wrights’ Flyer III would be their first practical airplane. On October 5, 1905, as Zeppelin had been putting the finishing touches to LZ-2, it set a record flight time of 38 minutes, 3 seconds, but more important, it demonstrated a succession of impressive feats, such as banking, circling, and figure eights. In a little under two years, after spending a paltry $1,000 (about $28,000 today) to build their first airplane, the Wright brothers had come an alarmingly long way.9
Yet Zeppelin ignored these sharp, punctuated technological leaps. His lack of concern was understandable. First, the brothers’ exploits were scarcely reported, and when they were, coverage was inaccurate and exaggerated (usually both). Many others had made similar claims before being exposed as charlatans or fabulists.10
And second, as of October 16, 1905—after their astounding successes and just three months before Zeppelin had launched LZ-2 on its doomed voyage—the brothers ceased flying to concentrate on research and experimentation.11 Fearful of competitors stealing their ideas, the Wrights would vanish until May 6, 1908—two and a half years later. When Zeppelin met Eckener in early 1906, then, it seemed clear that these Americans could be dismissed as failed also-rans, not that the count regarded airplanes as any competition in the first place.
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WHEN ECKENER CAME to Zeppelin’s house for dinner, it was only because he was more intrigued by the count’s personality than he was interested in his ideas on airship construction. He had experienced no Saul-to-Paul conversion to the cause of airships during their initial meeting—if anything, he later said, he was hoping never to talk about them again—b
ut as they ate he found himself strangely bewitched by Zeppelin’s energetic monologue on his enemies at the PAB and the newspaper conspiracy against him.
As the night wore on and bottles of wine were emptied, Eckener felt “a surge of admiration and respect” for the count and “without forethought” offered to help him in any way he could. When Zeppelin asked how, Eckener replied that “I am a writer….I know how to write to convince people. As I see it, your problem at the moment is not so much to convince the experts about the practical value of your airship, but to convince the public, the man in the street. Once you win over public opinion, the experts and the authorities will have to give way.” If the elites ridiculed and shunned Zeppelin, then the patriotic people of Germany would rush to his defense once they realized the importance of airships to national greatness.
This task had once fallen to Moedebeck, but he was very ill (and would die soon afterward), and Zeppelin needed a replacement. Eckener was perfect for the job. From then on, his reports, Eckener recalled, “were primarily aimed at arousing in the public the necessary understanding of, and interest in, the Zeppelin idea.”12 To that end, in February 1906, about a month after the rotten end of LZ-2, he helped Zeppelin write a pamphlet (“The Truth About My Airship”) aimed at countering his critics.13
It marked the beginning of a lifelong involvement that would witness the rise and fall of the airship.
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IN HIS OWN way, Eckener was as idiosyncratic as the count. With a shock of blond hair, a manicured goatee, and blowtorch-blue eyes, he was the son of a Lutheran tobacco merchant in Flensburg, a small harbor town on the very edge of northern Germany, just four miles from the Danish border and a world away from Zeppelin’s Württemberg. His mother, a master shoemaker’s daughter, gave birth to Hugo in August 1868, the second of what would be five children. At school, Eckener seemed mysteriously unapproachable and had few friends, and he soon acquired the nickname “Zeus,” after the god who atop Mount Olympus remained aloof from the affairs of mere humans. His daughter would later say that “in general he was probably more respected than loved.”
Empires of the Sky Page 11