Death of Ferdinand von Zeppelin

On 8 March 1917 Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a retired general of the Württemberg army and designer of the rigid airships that the whole world called zeppelins after him, died in Berlin. He was 78. According to some biographies the cause of death was pneumonia, and some sources specify that he died in Charlottenburg, then still a separate town near Berlin. He was buried on 12 March in Stuttgart. He died at a moment when his invention, for years the pride of Germany and the terror of the English, was already losing out to aeroplanes.

Cavalryman and balloonist

He was born on 8 July 1838 in Konstanz on Lake Constance, into a family connected with the court of the Kingdom of Württemberg. He became an officer in the Württemberg army. In 1863 he observed the American Civil War with the Army of the Potomac, and afterwards in Saint Paul, Minnesota, he went up in the air for the first time in a tethered balloon. He himself later linked his interest in aeronautics to that flight. In July 1870, at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, he became famous in Germany for a daring cavalry reconnaissance raid behind the French lines in Alsace. He rose to command a regiment of uhlans and was also Württemberg’s envoy in Berlin. He left the army at the beginning of the 1890s and devoted the rest of his life to building an airship.

From “the fool of Lake Constance” to national hero

His idea – a rigid aluminium frame containing separate hydrogen cells, with engine gondolas attached to the hull – long failed to convince either the experts or the state. He had to put up part of the capital of the company building the first ship from his own fortune. On 2 July 1900 LZ 1 took off from Lake Constance near Friedrichshafen and stayed in the air for about 20 minutes, but it was damaged on landing and the money ran out. He built further ships thanks to a lottery and the remains of the family fortune. Only LZ 3 made successful flights in 1906 and 1907, and the army bought it in 1908 as Z I.

The breakthrough came with a disaster. On 5 August 1908 LZ 4, after landing at Echterdingen near Stuttgart, was torn from its moorings by a storm and burnt. Instead of the end there came a wave of sympathy: a nationwide collection raised more than five million marks. With this money the count founded the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin company and a foundation bearing his name. From 1910 the airships of the DELAG company carried passengers over Germany. By the outbreak of war they had carried more than 30,000 of them without a single fatality. Zeppelin, decorated with the highest orders, became one of the most popular men in the country.

Airships at war

In 1914 Germany had an advantage that no one else had: airships capable of flying hundreds of kilometres at night and dropping bombs. The army and navy ordered dozens of new, ever larger ships. Contrary to hopes, their use as bombers proved costly. The army’s airships suffered heavy losses from the first weeks of the war, and from January 1915 the navy’s airships bombed England, and from May London as well. They spread fear and killed several hundred people, but had no effect on the course of the war. From the autumn of 1916 British airmen with incendiary ammunition began shooting them down one after another, beginning with SL 11 at Cuffley. According to the German Historical Museum in Berlin, the effectiveness of the zeppelins remained far behind the expectations of the military and of the count himself.

Zeppelin did not, however, confine himself to airships. He supported firms building engines and aircraft, and in 1914, together with Robert Bosch, he founded an experimental works that built huge multi-engined aircraft, the so-called Riesenflugzeuge. They were later produced at Staaken near Berlin. In 1917 it was the Gotha bombers, and from the autumn also the Zeppelin-Staaken giants, that took over from the airships the main burden of the raids on England. After the war the count’s work was continued by his associate Hugo Eckener, who brought zeppelins back into passenger service.