History of the Zeppelin
It is worth mentioning that the rigid dirigible's pioneer had but one prior experience in air travel and no engineering background whatsoever. Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin was a Prussian military veteran who dreamed of building a fleet of airships to give his homeland an advantage over France in the event of a war. No flying vehicles outside of the balloon existed at this time - Zeppelin's idea, in short, was to add a skeleton to the existing balloon design to make it easily steered. The Count's vision was rather regal - his airships were to be giant and luxurious, looming warbirds to rule the sky. His first test vessel, the LZ 1 (Luftzeppelin), was indeed quite large, 420 feet long and 38 feet in diameter. However, the weight of the ship itself, with its engines and ballast, was a massive 26.4 thousand pounds. This left roughly 600 pounds for cargo, including passengers. Moreover, the craft was only able to fly for 18 minutes. The Count scrambled for more funds to improve his design, but the LZ 2 was not a great step forward. During its test run, both engines failed and the airship crashed into the ground. Count Von Zeppelin's tenacity did not allow him to give up on his design. His 3rd test, the LZ 3, flew for ov
Helium, unlike hydrogen, was nonflammable; its use would eliminate the great risk of fire. Count Zeppelin's dream lived on only as a piece of history, a curious design ultimately too cumbersome for military use and too unstable for commercial application. Indeed, the Graf was much like an ocean liner of the sky. Though the LZ 5 made a phenomenal 38 hour flight over Germany, the Army concluded that the airship was simply too slow for military purposes. To combat this, new airships were developed that could fly above the flight ceiling of all British fighter planes, 11,000 to 13,000 feet at that time. The Hindenburg made ten trips to America, each flight booked full. The success of the R34 sparked American interest in the dirigibles. It was his LZ 3 that finally gained the military attention Zeppelin had desired - if he could perfect his craft to maintain flight for 24 hours, the German War Department would purchase and develop his design. In 1919 the Navy gathered funds to build a single airship and to buy two more airships from Great Britain. Two years later, the Macon was ripped open by a gust of wind and deflated, then fell into the sea and sank. At first the British had little defense against this new threat. Surprisingly absent from these events was Germany, the birthplace of the rigid dirigible. Despite public outcry, the Graf Zeppelin was stripped by the Nazis and used as scrap, and all the Zeppelin construction sheds were reduced to rubble by bombing raids. Only one more dirigible was built, the LZ 130, which was used by the Nazis in the early years of World War II as both a spy craft and a vehicle for propaganda.
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Acceptance Essays
