On that day’s trip, LZ-3 flew for 220 miles and reached a speed of 33.5 mph. It was a remarkable achievement, but Zeppelin had realized that LZ-3 was incapable of embarking on an endurance flight. It was too jerry-rigged together, its bones and organs too weakened by the strains of its own efforts, to be risked on seizing the glittering prize. It was clear that the count would need more political support—from which flowed monetary support—to build LZ-4, his supership.
To gain political support, one first needed social respectability, and there was nothing more effective at making one’s cause popular or fashionable than the merest nod of royal approval. Once gained, politicians fell into line and the papers sung your praises. To that end, Zeppelin arranged a special flight for October 8.
Under Zeppelin’s beady eye, the rickety, rattling LZ-3 was checked, then double-checked, then triple-checked for loose fittings, leaking valves, worn rudders, frayed ropes, and ripped gas cells; its dulled outer skin was given a good spit-and-polish cleaning to bring out its shine, as were the aluminum gondolas, and the cabin controls were tightened up and oiled down for optimal response.
Finally, it was ready. Aboard a steamship, the king of Württemberg and the Austrian archduke Leopold Salvator flanked the emperor’s eldest son and heir, the soccer-mad, tennis-playing, women-loving (in the very plural) Crown Prince Wilhelm as they watched LZ-3 lift off, rise to five hundred feet, describe a circle, and return to Manzell. As it passed Friedrichshafen, the town’s guns were fired, and thousands of onlookers vociferously cheered Zeppelin’s name.5 The flight itself was not a long one—just two hours—but it achieved its intention. The crown prince and his father had a troubled relationship (partly owing to the soccer and the tennis, though mostly to the women), but the younger Wilhelm exerted a powerful influence in Berlin, and his support made Zeppelin difficult to sideline.
Within weeks, the financial floodgates opened. The government agreed to provide 400,000 marks to build LZ-4 and sweetened the deal by offering no less than 2,150,000 marks to purchase both LZ-3 and LZ-4 for the army. Better still, that sum included a 500,000-mark bonus to reimburse Zeppelin for some of the costs he had personally incurred over the years. There remained one catch: In order to trigger the release of the purchase money, LZ-4 had to complete the nonstop, 435-mile, twenty-four-hour flight.6
While LZ-3 had been a rush job, Zeppelin could now take time to redesign LZ-4 from scratch, but that didn’t mean he had time to waste. In November 1907, he began work on what would become the greatest pre–World War I airship of them all. LZ-4 wouldn’t be completed until the middle of June the following year, but in the meantime his LZ-3 successes made news around the world.
The coverage amounted to a complete reversal of Zeppelin’s fortunes. Henceforth, there were few of the sneers and jibes that had greeted his earlier efforts; no more “crazy old count by the lake” stories as foreign newspapers became interested in Zeppelin’s background. Britain’s Daily Mail delivered a scoop, supplied by Eckener, when it discovered that the count—a “wonderful old man who has sacrificed fortunes for airships”—had been “engaged as a volunteer in the American war, having a very narrow escape in the battle of Fredericksburg. His interest in the military airship dates from that time, when he made his first ascent in a captive balloon belonging to the Southern Army.”7 (The reporter at least had the spirit, if not the letter, of the facts correct.)
Meanwhile, The Washington Post promoted his noble pedigree to prove that the unquestionably Teutonic Zeppelin was actually a quasi-American. The writer made a hopeless hash of the genealogy, yet he was not completely off the mark: Zeppelin did have an American connection, though even by the standards of convoluted aristocratic lineages, it was a tenuous one. Put as simply as possible, decades earlier Zeppelin’s late aunt had married a widowered French noble whose first wife had been Ellen Sears—daughter of the antebellum Massachusetts senator David Sears. It wasn’t quite a direct connection to the Mayflower, but it was good enough for the Post, which took to calling the count a patriotic “Union Veteran.”8
Other papers focused more on Zeppelin’s achievements than on his past. A Cincinnati Enquirer article announced that “Germany is jubilant. Great Britain may be ‘monarch of the sea,’ but the Fatherland has conquered the air. Count Zeppelin is the hero of the hour. He is the arch-wizard of the air. His monster airship answers his helm like an ocean greyhound. It rises and sinks perpendicularly like an elevator in a skyscraper…and turns this way and that, and cavorts like a well-trained circus horse put through its paces by the hand of its proficient trainer.” LZ-3, the paper claimed, “is so far in advance of all [air craft] as the Lusitania outclasses the ancient side wheeler of Robert Fulton.”9
With this heady comparison to the world’s newest, largest, fastest ocean liner, Zeppelin was inaugurated into the pantheon of twentieth-century masters of technology. Just before Christmas, the Chicago Daily Tribune catalogued the “Seven Great Wonders of Science and Industry Perfected in 1907”: The Lusitania was there, of course, and so was the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Singer Building in New York, as well as railroad electrification, transatlantic wireless communications, “Edison’s concrete house for the working man,” and the transmission of images of checks, signatures, and photographs by telegraphy, but heading the list was Zeppelin’s marvelous airship.10
In Germany, a burst of Zeppelin enthusiasm erupted. Amateur aeronauts in Berlin announced that they were forming a club that would “afford its members opportunity to enjoy pleasure trips through the clouds in steerable craft.” They were convinced they would make airshipping as popular as motoring, bicycling, or sailing.11
For the upper crust, there were balls galore dedicated to an aerial theme. In Berlin (“where even the women take to ballooning,” gasped the St. Louis Post-Dispatch), there was talk of “a grand ball” to be held “a thousand feet in the air,” where guests would be ferried “up into the empyrean” by balloon. The highlight of the evening would be the count arriving in his airship to hover overhead and toast the lords and ladies dancing gaily below. Sadly, this elaborate Mischianza never came to fruition.12
If Zeppelin was having the time of his life, the same could not be said of the Wright brothers, who finally emerged from their self-imposed exile in May 1908. Neither hide nor hair had been seen of them since October 1905, but they had not been hibernating; in fact, they had been beavering away in North Carolina. On May 14, they took to the air again, Orville for the first time taking up a passenger (Charley Furnas, a mechanic). The day did not end well when Wilbur, unaccustomed to the new controls, mistakenly moved the elevator the wrong way and (in the somewhat overzealous words of The New York Times) was “hurled to the ground with terrific force…with the speed of a lightning express.” He escaped with cuts and scratches, but the Flyer was wrecked.13
Considering how far and how quickly Zeppelin had advanced in the same period, the fact that the Wrights had, it seemed to the count, wasted nearly three years building a crash-prone toy only confirmed his suspicion that the airplane was not the future; the airship was.
* * *
—
THE WONDER OF Zeppelins was not just their sheer size. It was that owing to their immensity it required only small changes to make them exponentially larger. Referring to LZ-3, the count (or rather, his amanuensis, Eckener) explained in Scientific American that all he needed to do was to enlarge the diameter of the framework by about one yard and increase its length correspondingly, and voilà, thanks to higher gas volume and greater lift, an instant gain of 6,600 pounds in potential payload would abracadabracally appear.14
He did much more than that for LZ-4. Whereas LZ-3’s length was 420 feet and its diameter 38 feet, LZ-4’s dimensions were, respectively, 446 feet and 43 feet. Not so much of a difference to a casual observer, but together the increases raised LZ-4’s gas volume to 530,000 cubic feet, up fully a third from LZ-3’s 399,000 cubic feet, with
only a relatively small increase in weight. (Theoretically, you could make an airship any length and breadth you wanted, but in the real world you were limited by hangar size, wages, materials costs, gas supply, and construction time.)
Thanks to the added buoyancy, Zeppelin could at last add a comfortable, windowed cabin located midway between the two gondolas. The bare-bones crew of seven that had manned LZ-3 could now be expanded to eleven crewmen and fourteen passengers.
LZ-4’s first test flight was on June 20, 1908, five weeks after the Wrights had most assuredly dropped out for good. Zeppelin flew for around one and a half hours, but maneuvering proved unexpectedly treacherous. The thirty minutes of cavorting Zeppelin executed impressed the crowds, but while LZ-4 made 31 mph on the straights Zeppelin struggled hard to keep the airship under control during turns.15
Back on the ground, Zeppelin ordered major changes to the steering controls. Dürr, who had been in the rear gondola with three mechanics, understood immediately what had gone wrong. It was the rudders, bow and stern: They were now too small for the big airship. After larger ones were fitted, the airship’s directional stability vastly improved.16
LZ-4’s second flight, on June 23, and its third, on June 29, were short but flawless. Finally, Zeppelin had his dream airship. But he needed one final run to prepare for the endurance flight that would determine his, and his creation’s, future. On July 1, Zeppelin would fly to Switzerland—whose vertiginous peaks, winding passes, and unpredictable winds would test and tax his airship to the utmost.
Major Gross in the meantime made a last-minute effort to steal Zeppelin’s thunder by scheduling his own first non-trial flight of the Gross-Basenach semi-rigid (renamed M1, the M standing for “Military”) for June 30, a day earlier. The M1 was tiny compared to the Zeppelin, but Gross was no fool. He had copied LZ-3’s Venetian-blind-style elevation planes as well as some other Dürr innovations, which made the M1 just the kind of dark horse that might snatch Zeppelin’s promised army contract right out from under him.
In Zeppelin’s favor was that because the M1, like the Parseval balloon, was an army project, it was necessarily kept secret for fear of giving anything away to the French and the British. The June 30 flight, during which the M1 crash-landed shortly after taking off, was barely reported in the press, though in September Major Gross succeeded in staying aloft for thirteen hours—not that anyone noticed. The dark horse had turned into a damp squib, much to Zeppelin’s glee.17
By then it was too late to matter, in any case: Zeppelin was already the most famous man in the world.
12. Conquerors of the Celestial Ocean
ZEPPELIN LATER DESCRIBED the Schweizerfahrt—the Swiss Voyage—as “the nicest trip I ever made in my life.”1
His day began just after breakfast on July 1, 1908. Zeppelin, Professor Hergesell, Baron von Bassus, a Dr. Stalberg, the count’s longtime lawyer Ernst Uhland, Dürr, and a well-known science-fiction author named Emil Sandt—his novel Cavete!, which predicted an era of peace delivered (and enforced) by German airships, had recently come out—arrived at the Reichshalle, where two steersmen and six mechanics were waiting.
Eckener hovered in the background. The previous year, beset by financial problems and with two more children, the Eckeners had been forced to move to a cramped apartment in Hamburg so that Hugo could take up a low-paid position as economics editor at the modest Hamburg Foreigners’ Paper. Any spare time he had there was devoted to writing a book that he expected would catapult him to intellectual stardom and a lucrative career as a culture critic.
But when his interminable tome, ponderously titled Lack of Workers or Scarcity of Money? A New Answer to the Old Question and Viewpoints About a Stabilization of Conditions in the Economy and Financial Market, was published, few bought it and fewer still read it.2
It may not have gained him the high-status job at the Frankfurter Zeitung he once had craved, but it didn’t matter. No longer did he want to be a journalist commenting on great events; he wanted to be part of them. Excited by the ambition and grandeur of the great Zeppelin project, Eckener spent increasing amounts of time moonlighting as the count’s publicist.
But that still wasn’t enough. Here he was, aged forty, and missing out. So in that balmy summer of 1908, he later said, he finally made the connection that had been eluding him when he linked “his moral-political ideals with the purely technical ones.”3
He had been wandering and lost, but the airship was his North Star, the object whose technical perfection and grand purpose symbolized his own long-held desire to make anew a world striving to overcome its problems rationally and scientifically. He quit his job at the newspaper, moved his family back to Friedrichshafen, and devoted himself uncompromisingly to rendering the Zeppelin airship the salvation of mankind.
While now Eckener chatted with the crew, Zeppelin, as usual, claimed the front gondola, accompanied by Dürr, Hergesell, the steersmen, and three of the mechanics. The others clambered into the rear. Only Sandt, who had been invited as part of Eckener’s media campaign, took a place in the newly installed cabin, which he described in a picturesque account published in major papers worldwide as a “room flooded with the yellow light that filters through the translucent balloon fabric of which the walls, the floor, and the ceiling are constituted. Comfortable seats…provide a seating capacity for a dozen passengers. For a greater portion of their length the walls are provided with celluloid panes. The floor is also transparent wherever it is not used as a footway.”
At 8:30 A.M., Zeppelin gave the order to up ship and Ludwig Marx quickly towed LZ-4 from the hangar. It took just twenty minutes to cross the Bodensee and hover above the ancient city of Konstanz, on the German side of the Swiss border, which also happily happened to be Zeppelin’s birthplace. Sandt looked down and saw, to his amazement, “the green earth, water, people, cities, and castles far below. I could also see birds circling around and fluttering anxiously, evidently frightened by the strange giant of the air.”
The count didn’t tarry long. He had to keep to a schedule, and Hergesell was eager to conduct his meteorological experiments as the airship wound through a series of mountain valleys. “As we swung round one mountain,” wrote the professor, “we had our first experience of a vertical ascending current, which pushed the airship strongly upwards, and would necessarily bring our journey to an end if its force could not be resisted. By means of our…rudders we were able, in spite of the disturbing force, to keep the ship at its right level.”
LZ-4 bore west and made for Schaffhausen, a Swiss medieval town. From their high gabled houses, said Hergesell, “men and women rush out to look up at us, gradually massing together in crowds. The roofs of the houses become black with people. Handkerchiefs and flags appear everywhere, and shouts reach our ears even through the rattle of motors.”
After that, LZ-4 headed for the spectacular Rhine Falls, Europe’s largest waterfall. Zeppelin took the airship down as low as he could safely go to ascertain whether the wind eddies would have any effect on the airship. The crew was pleased to discover that, in Hergesell’s words, this otherwise “impassable and unchangeable obstacle to navigation present[ed] no difficulty to us. Problems of transit on the surface of the earth have ceased to exist for us in the air.”
Meanwhile, Sandt decided to leave the cabin and take his chances walking along the narrow gangway—which lacked handrails—to the rear gondola. Below him writhed the Rhine, and to the north he saw the Hohentwiel, an extinct volcano on the summit of which was a ruined castle, while on the southeastern horizon rose the Säntis mountain, broad and jagged and capped with snow and ice. On a clear day, like this one, an alpinist could see Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, France, and Italy from its peak. Imagine what the airshipmen could see.
Zeppelin himself, congenitally unromantic, had little inclination for gawping. Instead, he ordered full speed ahead. The airship trembled as its engines strained to drive t
he propellers, which to Sandt “seemed like disks, revolving with furious speed and yet as transparent as a locust’s wings. They gave out a note like that of a deep organ, so loud that the human voice, even when lifted to a shriek, could hardly be heard.” The writer was unsettled at first by the sensation but was relieved when “the giant ship obediently sank and rose [and] moved to the right or to the left, slavishly following the slightest pressure of the human hand….At times the forward car lay below us; at times we had to look up at it.”
LZ-4 turned south for Lucerne, “a jewel among cities. The lake [Lake Lucerne] itself shimmered brightly where it was struck by the sun; its darker portions lay like an emerald, held in a setting of heliotrope. It was like a melody in colors.” Once over Lucerne, continued Sandt, “there was a hubbub and a great jubilation [as] Zeppelin guided his airship down and allowed it to glide at full speed over the city at the height of the church steeples.” According to a reporter on the ground, “thousands of astonished tourists from all parts of the world, including hundreds of Americans, greeted her with loud cheering as she sailed quickly over the waters of the lake.” Over open water, Zeppelin embarked upon an impressive series of evolutions, including “complicated figures, circles, the figure 8, sharp turns, descents and ascents.”
Afterward, LZ-4 headed northeast across the Zugersee toward the town of Zug, where its most difficult task awaited. The airship would have to pass through, according to Sandt, “a narrow gorge where it would be caught in a veritable cyclone.” Once inside, the “motors groaned and rattled. The propellers howled a deep droning song. The airship did all that it could. The wind was dead against us, traveling with a velocity of nearly 31 miles an hour. The Count could easily have arisen and escaped the fury of the blast, but it was his purpose not to avoid obstacles, but to court them. Whenever the great airship showed signs of swerving, it was brought back into its course. Far below us in the valley the sharply marked shadow of the airship, crawling slowly from tree to tree, showed us how hard it was struggling. There were minutes when it seemed as if we stood stock still despite the infernal music of the propellers. Gradually the nose of the craft was thrust forward; once more the airship mastered the wind. We had forced our way through the pass, and were dashing on at full speed. The vast shadow below us traveled with the velocity of a bird over mountains, valleys, cliffs, and rocky points, over railway embankments and roads, over water and land.”
Empires of the Sky Page 13