Michael Bélafi - The Zeppelin

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Pen & Sword Aviation
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Copyright Michael Belafi 2015

ISBN: 978 1 47382 785 1
EPUB ISBN: 978 1 47385 448 2
PRC ISBN: 978 1 47385 460 4

The right of Michael Belafi to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by
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Contents

The Zeppelin Myth

25 March 1874. On his sick bed, an officer of the cavalry writes in his diary: The vehicle would have to be worked out in the dimensions of a large ship.

T he young woman observes her husband, plagued by shivering fits, with worry. For the umpteenth time she has put new ice wraps around his calves and on his forehead, even applied dozens of cupping glasses and leeches but the fever does not go down.

And yet the serious riding accident already dates back several days. A week ago, in the early morning of 18 March 1874 the horse of the 5th squadron commander of the 15th Uhlan regiment of Schleswig-Holstein tumbled. It buried its rider underneath, who was none other than Ferdinand Count von Zeppelin.

At night his wife dared not to believe her ears: delirious with fever, her husband fantasized about flying ships and passengers who fly through the sky and so arrive at their destination more quickly than by train or by the fastest horses. The next morning she does not confront her husband with this. She would have been ashamed to embarrass him, as these were, of course, the ridiculous delusions of a tortured mind. And so she entirely forgets the strange dreams.

Quite unlike Zeppelin. Friends among the staff officers had previously brought him a tall stack of books and magazines of the most varied genres for his distraction. Among them fresh off the printing press A world postal system and airship travel, a presentation by Heinrich von Stephan, a distantly related ancestor.

A quarter of a century later, Zeppelin who was not an engineer built a type of airship which since then (erroneously) denotes all airships: Zeppelin. Why did he of all people manage this unparalleled achievement? No other invention is so closely linked to the name of its creator as is the case with Zeppelin.

How did it happen that his creation at first became the national symbol of Imperial Germany, then was shamelessly abused by the National-Socialists and finally destroyed? And how has it happened that it still fascinates us today, and that a Zeppelin is not unknown in remote and exotic countries of Asia, South America and Africa, either, although none was ever seen there?

General postmaster Heinrich von Stephan, an ancestor of Count Zeppelin.

What was it that made this giant of the air so much better than its national and international rivals, even though sponsors with more capital or the state itself were in charge of these? And why did the reputed superweapon Zeppelin fail so miserably during the Great War? Did the great era of the peaceful Zeppelins have to end so abruptly in the mid-1930s, as it did?

Finally the question arises if Zeppelins, and airships in general, still have a future and a right to exist today.

Against the backdrop of the fascinating biography of Count Zeppelin, this book attempts to find answers for these questions and to give an understanding of the history and future of airship travel.

Chapter One

Zeppelin

1.1 A Son of the Aristocracy with a Carefree Childhood

2 August 1838, Constance. Parson Partenheimer: On August 2nd, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-eight, at ten-thirty in the morning, a boy was born of this parish in wedlock and baptised on the 2nd of August: Ferdinand Adolph August Heinrich.

N one of the few godparents and legal witnesses on this beautiful 2 August could foresee in the slightest that this little bundle of a person, lying in the arms of his mother, would write a new chapter in the history of technology after having almost completed an entirely different phase of his professional life. Nor that he would link his very name to his invention in a manner quite unlike anyone before him.

Ferdinand and his sister Eugenia, older by two years, in parental embrace. Their younger brother Eberhard was born three years later.

The name Zeppelin originally Zepelin appeared for the first time at the end of the thirteenth century in the region of Mecklenburg. There, the small village Zepelin, near Blow, still commemorates the original homeland of Count Zeppelin. In this region the masters of Zepelin lived for centuries as landlords. Since the Thirty Years War they increasingly served as officers and mercenaries in many European armies. Three descendants of the von Zepelin family entered the service of the Wrttemberg court and held high offices in the administration, diplomacy and military there. Zeppelins father came from this younger line of counts. The Wurttembergians pronunciation differed to that of the Mecklenburgians, and it was they who introduced the double p spelling.

On the maternal side Zeppelins ancestors were characterised by entirely different attributes. The great-grandfather of Count Zeppelin bought the little island by Constance, complete with the now secularised Dominican monastery, from the Austrian imperial dynasty. The only condition: trades and industries had to be set up in the buildings there. So a cotton factory was established in what is now the Hotel Insel. It experienced an astonishingly rapid rise. David Macaire, the son of the company founder, continued the industrial enterprise, and bought further small and medium sized businesses in the area around Constance. His marriage produced Amalia Francisca Paulina, the mother of Count Zeppelin. Twenty-two years after the birth of his mother and in the very same rooms of the refurbished Dominican monastery in which she was born, Count Zeppelin came into the world, on 2 August, 1838.

At that time the parents of the count had already resigned from court life in Wrttemberg and had followed in the footsteps of their Mecklenburg ancestors. They took over the castle estate Girsberg, near Kreuzlingen in the immediate vicinity of Constance. Almost all agricultural and craft activities were studied by the counts father, and they were also studied by the count himself. For most of the time, apart from the harvest, he had only one assistant. Of course little Ferdinand did not stand apart hereby, especially since there were no other distractions on the slightly remote estate.