Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  He was an indifferent student, preferring instead to read and think alone.14 Yet one of his teachers, Herr Maass, noticed that the young man (he was twenty when he graduated, having had to repeat a year or two) was an independent thinker with an interest in the arts. Through his influence, Eckener was able to enter the University of Leipzig as a doctoral candidate under the tutelage of the renowned Wilhelm Wundt, who had established a laboratory to conduct psychological research. Eckener’s thesis on the “fluctuations of perception of minimal sensory stimuli” was passed in 1892, leaving him at a crossroads. Should he become a professor or work as a private tutor?

  In the event, he did neither and joined a local regiment, the 86th Fusiliers, for a two-year stint to give him time to make up his mind. He spent his off-duty hours indulging his love of sailing. Eckener became expert at observing and judging the wind and the weather. During even the roughest squalls, he would man the tiller with, as a fellow sailor put it, “marvelous calmness and circumspection,” issuing quiet rebukes to the crew when they were too slow or clumsy.15

  After leaving the army as a sergeant, Eckener still could not decide what to do and so drifted into journalism as an employee of the Flensburg News, a local paper. He turned out all manner of arts criticism, music and theater reviews, as well as social commentary, much of it distinguished by a clever but unformed young man’s archness. He wrote on everything under the sun, but what he was truly searching for, as he wrote to a friend, was “a fixed pole [for my] thoughts.” Most people “simply go whichever way the wind blows instead of thinking for themselves.” He wanted to set a steady course for a known destination, but he had not, so far, found the right vehicle to take him.16

  He at least took the first step toward settling down by getting married—to the newspaper owner’s daughter, Johanna, in October 1897. If the twenty-nine-year-old Hugo, tireless and restless, was a tornado, then Johanna, smart and quiet, was a rock. She preferred to stay at home and was rarely seen in public. For Eckener, she provided a welcome refuge; their marriage was described as one of “unvarying harmony.”17 In private he wrote her excited love letters: “My Johanna, my love and my life, my longing and aspiration; you, my virtue and my vice, my prettiest idea and my craziest thought, my thought to go crazy and my inspiration to feel divine, I’m fond of you! Fond? No, you’re my love, my desire, my loving and rejoicing and luck, you’re the air that I breathe, the prerequisite of my existence!”18

  Their first daughter, Hannelise, was born two years later, signaling to Eckener that he urgently needed to find a more reliable source of income. In 1900, the family moved to Friedrichshafen, partly for the sake of Eckener’s health and partly because the Frankfurter Zeitung, a big step up from the Flensburg News, had a spot open for a correspondent. Perform well there, Eckener thought, and he would have a shot at joining the staff in Frankfurt. He enjoyed Friedrichshafen in the meantime, having set up a pleasant little house near the lake, where he sailed, and not so far from the mountains, where he hiked.

  It was a delightful middle-class existence, even if money was tight, but with Eckener still waters ran deeper than most suspected. Eckener may have appeared the very representation of bourgeois rectitude, but within him there burned the spirit of a natural rebel, or perhaps a “fighting rooster,” as Johanna used to say.

  “I’ll hardly ever lift a finger to participate in today’s so-called politics,” claimed Eckener, “to the point that I probably won’t ever make use of my right to vote—unless it’s to choose a candidate to be overthrown.” His “own political system” was a belief in scientific, rational solutions to social problems.19 He lacked any faith in God (his wedding was the first time he’d been in a church since childhood), argued that the state should run such institutions as the railways and the post office in order to regulate the effect of competition, and felt that government should be in the hands of sensible men (he was not an advocate of female suffrage) of higher learning, such as himself, as normal people were too concerned “for their grossly materialistic interests” to be capable of making wise decisions for themselves.20

  As he matured, Eckener dispensed with much of this snobbish juvenilia, but there would always remain a core conception of himself, the solutions-oriented supreme rationalist, as He Who Knows Best—especially when it came to airships.

  When he met Zeppelin, he’d finally found the “fixed pole” he’d sought for so long.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER THE MODEST performance of LZ-1 and the destruction of LZ-2, it was obvious to critics that Zeppelin’s airships were not fit for any purpose. The old man’s reach had exceeded his grasp, and while everyone agreed his ambition was laudable, his achievements were laughable.

  Zeppelin himself seemed to realize that it might be too late to save his airships. A few days after the demise of LZ-2, he discovered that he had but mere pfennigs in the bank. Tired and downcast, he divulged to Eckener one night that “I shall not go on building any more. The world shall never know how good my airship is!”21 But as usual his despondency did not last long. The ineffable Zeppelin luck soon rushed to his aid: The army, long after Zeppelin had given up ever trying to interest it in his airships, again was back in the picture.

  On January 1, 1906, little more than a fortnight before the LZ-2 debacle, the kaiser had appointed one of his favorite former aides-de-camp, Helmuth von Moltke, as chief of the General Staff. The arrival of the new broom, in combination with the looming threat of a Franco-Russian-British axis, led to a broad reappraisal of German military needs. One of the first changes occurred on January 29, when a committee concluded that “it is time to approach the construction of motorized airships.”22

  The trouble was, which type of airship should Berlin back? The Zeppelin was a rigid model, meaning that the shape of its gas envelope was maintained by an internal structure. As Zeppelin was painfully aware, rigid airships had not, as yet, distinguished themselves in service.

  More promising, at least to military observers, was a new generation of semi-rigid and non-rigid types. The French army’s Lebaudy airship program that had so alarmed the kaiser, for instance, was based on semi-rigids, in which a stiff keel ran under a soft envelope. There was also the simple non-rigid version, which we would call a blimp and which was directly descended from the good old balloon.

  Inspired by the French, Zeppelin’s old antagonist Hans Gross, now a major and at last slated to head the PAB, had recently combined with the balloonist Nikolaus Basenach to work on a 214-foot-long, 177,000-cubic-foot, semi-rigid copy of the Lebaudy they called a “Gross-Basenach.” To shorten the odds that the army would rally behind it, Major Gross made sure to put the boot into his rival Zeppelin whenever he could. Upon being asked by the kaiser to “speak the plain truth” about what he thought of Zeppelin’s airship, Gross replied, “Majesty, [it’s] a load of rubbish!”23

  The trouble was, the Gross-Basenach existed only on paper for the time being (mind you, so did Zeppelins). To speed up development, Gross tried to woo Ludwig Dürr into working for him—yet another swipe at Zeppelin—but the ever-loyal engineer refused him out of hand.24 Nevertheless, Gross still benefited from a heavy thumb on the scale: His airship, intended exclusively for the army, was being developed by one of the army’s own, and Gross could count on strong support from within the General Staff owing to its in-house pedigree.25

  For the time being, though, the most immediately attractive prospect to fulfill the army’s needs was the basic Parseval blimp, built by August von Parseval. Like the Gross-Basenach, the cigar-shaped balloon was designed expressly for military reconnaissance operations, but it was much smaller (88,000-cubic-foot capacity and 157 feet long). Unlike Zeppelins, the single-engine Parseval could be quickly inflated and deflated and was easily packed and transported so that it could travel with the army. It was cheap to run, used proven technology, and required just a few men and several canisters of gas to operate
. The blimp’s great advantage was that it was virtually ready; Parseval needed only a few more months before he could begin trials.26

  On the other hand, the Zeppelin had already attracted the kaiser’s eye, Eckener was stoking favorable public opinion, and the count was a force of nature. The choice was obvious, thought Zeppelin with his habitual confidence. The minutes taken of a meeting he had with Moltke give a flavor of his attitude: “He [Zeppelin] must still declare that he was the only expert in Germany who was also an inventor. Moreover, he was not just an ordinary inventor, but a German general, and as such he must stress that it was the height of official irresponsibility not to utilize his airship.”

  The Gross-Basenach and the Parseval, Zeppelin grandly pointed out in the meeting, were no doubt satisfactory in their limited uses, but the former was merely an unambitious knockoff of the Lebaudy ship, and the latter just an updated balloon. Only the Zeppelin was built on the most technologically advanced lines using entirely homegrown German knowhow; only the Zeppelin truly represented German greatness; and only the Zeppelin could ever be a Wonder of the World.27

  Confronted by this dilemma, the Ministry of War came up with an admirably Solomonic solution: a competition. There was no set deadline, but the best airship would win a lavish contract and the eternal thanks of a grateful nation. Zeppelin was at both an advantage and a disadvantage in this regard. His airships took a long time to build, but Gross’s semi-rigid was still on the drawing board, which gave him some breathing space. More worryingly, Parseval had already announced that he was planning an experimental flight that May.

  Zeppelin needed to build an airship fast and cheap to stay in the game. He lacked the time and resources to make it exponentially better than the LZ-2; it only had to be better than Parseval’s blimp to knock him out of contention. A victory in that round would so solidify his lead that by the time Gross’s airship was ready, it would be too late for his hated rival to catch up.

  It was Dürr who came to the rescue. Why not, he suggested, simply rebuild the LZ-2 with just a few incremental changes to improve control and stability? By not having to design everything from scratch, Zeppelin would save many valuable months and a huge amount of money.28

  In April 1906, having secured a special dispensation from the kaiser (100,000 marks), a loan of 125,000 marks from Carl Berg, and a promise from the king of Württemberg to hold a lottery, Zeppelin began construction of LZ-3.29

  By the end of September, LZ-3 was finished. And not a moment too soon, either: On May 26, Parseval had held his first trial as promised, and his blimp had stayed aloft for one and a half hours and traveled at a top speed of 30 mph—more than fulfilling the army’s needs for a mobile observatory.30 But the Parseval tests were scheduled to continue until October 27, meaning that Zeppelin could still steal the show if he could get LZ-3 up in the air before that month was out.

  On October 10, launch day, just after Ludwig Marx had towed LZ-3 into the open, an unexpected crosswind caught the airship and threatened to bash it against the side of the lakeside hangar. Zeppelin, increasingly confident at flight control, ordered all ballast dropped, and LZ-3 rose quickly to two hundred feet and freely sailed over the roof. Once the engines chugged to life, the airship soon obeyed his will and embarked on a sixty-nine-mile-long voyage of two hours and seventeen minutes at a top speed of 32 mph.31

  Without deigning to mention his connection to Zeppelin, Eckener wrote a long article extolling the “victory” of the “rigid system” (Zeppelin’s) over those of the Parseval and the Gross-Basenach (which was favored by “the [dismissive] gentlemen who belong to our airship department in Berlin”). Granted, it was not as cheap as its rivals, but then again, it cost just 1 percent of the price of a battleship—and nobody was complaining about building lots of those. (Germany, then in a naval arms race against Britain, commissioned no fewer than fifteen battleships between 1899 and 1908.)32

  There were still problems to iron out, but the LZ-3 had done what it was intended to do: show up the Parseval as unambitious and backward-looking to knock it out of the running. Interest in the Parseval quickly faded, but the army then claimed that the Zeppelin was too ambitious, too forward-looking.33

  The Gross-Basenach remained the favorite, and no decision would be made at least until after its preliminary launch, scheduled for the following March. If that was successful, then there would be yet more trials and so on and on until the army got the result it really wanted: a Gross-Basenach fleet.

  As it was, the latest round of flights had brought Zeppelin again to the end of his financial tether, and he was anxious that he wouldn’t be able to afford to send LZ-3 up again without additional support.34

  As always with Zeppelin, he was lucky. This time, the kaiser and the imperial chancellor, Prince Bernhard von Bülow, saw in his airship a possible salvation from the slow-motion collapse of the government. In the closing months of 1906, Wilhelm II was rocked by a succession of scandals caused by nudge, nudge, wink, wink hints in the press that Count Philipp zu Eulenburg, his closest friend and adviser, was an active homosexual who had repeatedly been blackmailed by several disreputable young blades.

  Worse still, reporters were now delving into the secretive activities of what was known as the “Liebenberg Round Table,” rumored to be a gay coterie of high-ranking and high-born officers surrounding the kaiser. It surely wouldn’t be too long before they uncovered Bülow’s own intimate relationship with Eulenberg many years before or noticed that he had recently appointed his current lover, Max Scheef, as his private secretary in the Reich Chancellery.35

  The kaiser and his chancellor urgently needed to divert attention away from this mess, and what could be better than highlighting Germany’s astonishing technological and military prowess in the air? General von Moltke was discreetly informed that the emperor would find it most useful for the army to give Zeppelin a boost.

  Thus encouraged, on December 19, 1906, the Ministry of War proposed a budget of 500,000 marks to build a new, state-owned hangar for Zeppelin airships called the Reichshalle. It would still be left to Zeppelin to find the money to build an airship to fill it, but the warm aura of official imperial favor was unmistakable.36

  In early March 1907, Major Gross conducted a successful small-scale test of his prototype semi-rigid as scheduled, but the limelight shifted back to the count when in April the government announced its conditions for further funding of the Zeppelin model. If the count could make a nonstop twenty-four-hour flight of at least 435 miles (say, from Friedrichshafen to Mainz and back), rise to an altitude of 3,900 feet, and return to base safely, the Gross-Basenbach would be relegated to the back burner.37

  It was a very tall order, indeed perhaps an impossible one, but it was the golden opportunity Zeppelin had been fighting for.

  11. Up into the Empyrean

  B​Y SOME STRANGE and inexplicable miracle of state planning, the new Reichshalle hangar at Manzell was completed precisely on schedule and under budget on September 23, 1907.

  While the Reichshalle was being built, Dürr had been busy in the existing hangar modifying LZ-3 for superior handling. The major changes centered on the Venetian-blind-style elevators on each side, fore and aft; what had been three louvers now became four. Between the rear horizontal stabilizing fins, he also added three vertical, rotatable rudders.1 These small changes would pay off significantly in terms of flight control.

  On September 24, LZ-3 embarked on its first post-modification trip. In a flawless voyage of four hours and seventeen minutes—the longest a Zeppelin had ever flown—the airship “executed the most diverse evolutions with the greatest ease. It paraded back and forth before the windows of the royal castle of Friedrichshafen, making the turns on a very small radius, and on the homeward stretch it ascended and descended at the will of the pilot, at times almost dipping into the water and then rising to a height of 600 feet,” according to a reporter.2 Two days later, Zeppel
in was confident enough of LZ-3’s safety that he took his only child, the twenty-eight-year-old Hella, on a flight, incidentally making her the first woman to ride in a powered airship. (His wife, Isabella, owing to a heart condition that required her to “avoid any type of excitement,” was never able to fly in one of her husband’s creations.)3

  If Zeppelin were to have any hope of winning the twenty-four-hour endurance competition, though, LZ-3 would need to demonstrate its airworthiness over land, where mountains, unpredictable winds, and valleys were constant dangers. Critics liked to point out that aside from the unfortunate incident with the late LZ-2, Zeppelin had never taken off or landed anywhere but from open water; neither had he ever flown for a prolonged period too far away from the safety of Lake Constance.

  Zeppelin was determined that the flight of September 30 would put paid to these long-standing concerns. During this record-setting voyage of seven hours and fifty-four minutes, LZ-3 was intentionally sailed over land toward Ravensburg, twelve miles away. The airship maintained a steady course at an altitude of five hundred feet, and Dürr, entrusted with manning the elevators, was surprised to discover that the air over fields was hotter than that over forests, which meant contending with unexpected up- and downdrafts.4 There was always something new to learn about airship driving, and the information was added to the ever-growing manuals of instruction that would one day be used to teach Zeppelin captains the art and science of flying.