The Zeppelin Era (1900-1937)
The Zeppelin Era was the age of the rigid airship, the giant hydrogen-filled aircraft whose lighter-than-air lift promised luxury travel across continents and oceans before heavier-than-air aviation could match them. From Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin's first flight over Lake Constance in 1900 through the world's first airline, the bombing raids of the First World War, the Graf Zeppelin's round-the-world flight, and the Hindenburg's transatlantic service, the airship dominated aviation's imagination for a generation. The era ended on May 6, 1937, when the Hindenburg burned at Lakehurst, New Jersey, and fixed-wing flight took the future with it.
Events
Count Zeppelin's First Rigid Airship Flies
On July 2, 1900, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin's LZ 1 lifted off from a floating hangar on Lake Constance, the first flight of a rigid airship, a craft whose aluminum framework of rings and girders held internal gas cells rather than relying on a pressurized envelope. Zeppelin had first sketched the concept in 1874 and patented it in Germany in 1895; his design became the template for the airship named after him. The 128-meter craft was fragile and underpowered, but its principle, a hull larger and stronger than any balloon, pointed toward aircraft that could carry people and cargo across oceans. Public fascination and future support for the program grew from this first uncertain flight.
Location: Lake Constance (Bodensee), Germany
DELAG Opens the World's First Airline
In 1910 the Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-AG (DELAG) began commercial Zeppelin flights, becoming the world's first airline in revenue service, a full decade before the first scheduled heavier-than-air airline operations. Flying from purpose-built hangars in cities including Frankfurt, Baden-Baden, Dusseldorf, and Hamburg, DELAG airships carried sightseers and mail in luxury; by mid-1914 the company had flown more than 10,000 paying passengers on over 1,500 flights without a passenger fatality. The service demonstrated that paying public could fly regularly and safely on schedule, a concept aviation only later realized with airplanes. DELAG's success made the Zeppelin a national symbol and gave its founder's company commercial credibility.
Location: Frankfurt, Germany
Zeppelins Bomb Britain
On January 19, 1915, German naval Zeppelins bombed Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn, the first strategic bombing of Britain from the air, opening a campaign that brought the First World War to civilians' homes. Over the next years airship raids on London and provincial cities killed more than 500 British civilians, and the sight of searchlights and bombers over the capital became a defining image of the war's home front. British defenses improved, incendiary ammunition set hydrogen-filled raiders afire, and losses mounted until the German navy turned largely to aeroplanes in 1917. The raids killed more people per raid than any bombing until the Second World War, and the terror they spread entered both nations' collective memory.
Location: Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn, United Kingdom
Versailles Cripples the Airship Industry
The Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to surrender its large airships and prohibited the construction of new ones, gutting the Zeppelin company's core business at a stroke. DELAG's postwar scheduled daily service between Berlin, Munich, and Friedrichshafen, opened in 1919, was shut down and its airships surrendered to the Allies as reparations. Only an exception permitting one airship for the United States Navy kept the company alive. The ban froze German leadership in airship design through the early 1920s while British and American programs, hampered by their own helium politics and accidents, failed to replace it.
Location: Paris, France
The USS Los Angeles Saves the Company
Built as reparations and delivered to the United States Navy in October 1924, the LZ 126, commissioned as USS Los Angeles (ZR-3), was the most successful American airship and the order that kept Luftschiffbau Zeppelin alive. The US Navy flew her for eight years, developing the mooring techniques that made large airships practical, and her 1927 experiment docking to a mast atop a ship demonstrated airship-at-sea refueling concepts. The German-American partnership it represented also reopened German airship construction when the Versailles restrictions were lifted in 1926. The Los Angeles stands as the hinge between the punitive peace and the interwar airship revival.
Location: Friedrichshafen, Germany; Lakehurst, New Jersey, United States
The Graf Zeppelin Circles the Globe
From August 8 to September 4, 1929, the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin flew around the world, covering about 33,200 kilometers in 21 days 5 hours elapsed time with journalists including Lady Drummond-Hay aboard, the first circumnavigation by airship and a global media sensation. Funded partly by public donations and the American press magnate William Randolph Hearst, the flight stopped at Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Lakehurst, proving that a hydrogen airship could traverse the planet's weather systems in scheduled comfort. The Graf had already survived a near-disastrous Atlantic crossing on her maiden flight to the US in 1928. The round-the-world flight made the Graf Zeppelin the most famous aircraft of its age and confirmed Germany's renewed dominance in airship engineering.
Location: Lakehurst, New Jersey, United States; Friedrichshafen, Germany
Regular Transatlantic Airlift: The Hindenburg Enters Service
In 1936 the LZ 129 Hindenburg, then the largest aircraft ever built at 245 meters long, inaugurated scheduled passenger service between Frankfurt and Lakehurst, New Jersey, and Rio de Janeiro, crossing the Atlantic in two to three days with up to 72 passengers in luxuriously appointed cabins, a dining salon, a lounge, and the only pressurized smoking room in the sky. The Empire State Building's spire had been designed as an airship mooring mast, though winds and turbulence made the idea impractical. The Hindenburg made ten safe Atlantic round trips in 1936, carrying the Nazi regime's swastika-finned silhouette as a symbol of German engineering. Airships now offered the fastest way across the Atlantic, and their commercial future seemed secure.
Location: Frankfurt, Germany
The Hindenburg Disaster
On May 6, 1937, while mooring at Lakehurst after a crossing from Frankfurt, the Hindenburg burst into flames and was destroyed in about 32 seconds; 35 of the 97 people aboard died along with one member of the ground crew. Herbert Morrison's anguished radio report, "Oh, the humanity!", made the disaster the most famous in aviation history, replayed with newsreel film for generations. The consensus attributes the fire to the ship's hydrogen lifting gas, ignited by static discharge or a leak after the ship's mooring lines grounded her; the alternative theory blaming the ship's doped fabric covering has supporters but is disputed. Whatever the ignition source, the disaster destroyed public confidence in hydrogen airships overnight.
Location: Lakehurst, New Jersey, United States
The Era Ends and Fixed-Wing Aviation Takes Over
The Hindenburg's destruction ended scheduled passenger airship service; the Graf Zeppelin was withdrawn and, with the unfinished LZ 130, broken up in 1940, while the Zeppelin company's aluminum went to German war production. The American rigid airship program had already collapsed after the crashes of USS Akron and USS Macon in 1935, which killed 74 of 76 crewmen aboard the Akron and convinced the US Navy to abandon rigid airships. The combination of hydrogen's danger, helium's scarcity and American export controls, high cost, and vulnerability to weather left the future to the fixed-wing airliner, which was faster, safer, and unfazed by storms. Within a few years the giants of the sky existed only in photographs and memory, though airship technology survives in non-rigid blimps and advertising craft.