Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin (1838–1917)

Ferdinand von Zeppelin developed and manufactured the most successful rigid airships of all time and created the world’s first air-transportation business. His original ‘Zeppelin’ was launched in 1900 and his airships were used commercially from 1910.

He was born to an influential German family at Bützov in Mecklenburg. His childhood was spent in his father’s home region of Württemberg on the banks Lake Constance, where he was educated by private tutors before attending the polytechnic at Stuttgart. After beginning his career in the army of Württemberg he was released to study science, engineering and chemistry at Tübingen in 1858. He was called back to the corps of engineers.

His introduction to flight came after he went as an observer to the American Civil War. In Minnesota he met the German-born balloonist John Steiner and made an aerial ascent in a tethered hot-air balloon. Having taking part in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, he was struck by the military significance of the first controlled flight made by ‘La France’, the French army airship of 1884. When he retired in 1890 with the rank of General he began his own designs and worked with engineers to test materials and engines. In 1898 he started a joint-stock company Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Luftschiffahrt. This launched the Luftschiff Zeppelin LZ1 in 1900 from Friedrichshafen over Lake Constance. Like all his later airships it had a framework of triangular girders covered with fabric containing separate gas cells. Tails enabled control and stability. Engines to drive propellers were housed in gondolas. Payloads or passengers were held in further gondolas.

Failures and accidents prompted further development, which Zeppelin funded by donations, using up his own resources and mortgaging his wife’s estates. Problems were solved gradually until he obtained help from the German state. His passenger carrying service, Deutsche Luftschiffahrts – the world’s first airline – began in 1910 and by 1914 it had carried nearly 40,000 people on 1,600 flights. In the First World War around 100 Zeppelins were used in aerial bombing. Ferdinand von Zeppelin died in 1917 before war ended. Afterwards, the civilian use of airship travel reached its peak in the late 1920s and 1930s with regular European and transatlantic services. It ended with the Hindenburg disaster in 1937 and the growing popularity of fixed-wing aircraft.