A century ago tomorrow the first modern airship successfully undertook its maiden flight. LZ1 was 420 feet long and powered by two Daimler engines of only 16 h.p. each. It ascended from a floating hangar on Lake Constance, near Friedrichshafen in the south of Germany, on July 2nd, 1900.
An airship, in its most simple and original form, was merely a propelled and "dirigible', or steerable, balloon. Propulsion was first made easier by giving the balloon the form of an elongated egg, so it offered less resistance to motion through the air.
With no projections of any kind, however, an aircraft of this shape will not travel in a straight line, so they were then provided with a tail to give directional stability. Flaps on the horizontal fins were added so that the ship could be directed up or down, while rudders on the vertical portions of the tail allowed the pilot to achieve directional control.
Earlier versions were of the "blimp" design, their shape being maintained only by the pressure of the gas within. These, however, became unwieldy with increasing size, and giant airships like the later Hindenburg only became a realisable ambition when the concept of housing separate bags of gas inside a light but rigid framework covered with a fabric was developed in the 1890s by Ferdinand, Count Zeppelin.
LZ1 - the LZ being for Luftfahrzeug, , or "air-vehicle" - ushered in the golden era of the airship. LZ2 followed shortly afterwards, and then in 1906, LZ3 captured the imagination of the world by completing a successful flight of 60 miles in slightly under two hours. LZ4 was destroyed in a storm in 1908, but by 1910 the Deutschland LZ5, was undertaking commercial flights from Dusseldorf.
In the four years before the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, it carried 34,000 passengers without a single fatal accident - a remarkable achievement in those early days of aviation. By the late 1920s, the Zeppelins were making regular scheduled passenger flights across the Atlantic to Brazil and the United States, and LZ127, the Graf Zeppelin travelled right around the world. Even the US Navy acquired a Zeppelin as part of its dirigible fleet.
The turning point was LZ129. The tragic destruction of the Hindenburg, when it burst into flames while attempting to dock at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937 with the loss of over 30 lives, began to turn the tide of public opinion against this mode of travel.
Only three more Zeppelins were built, the last being LZ130, Graf Zeppelin II, , which was later restricted to military use and finally dismantled in Germany in the early years of the second World War.