Ferdinand Zeppelin

Military career: Zeppelin attended the 'war school' in Ludwigsburg and became a lieutenant in 1858. The following year, 1859, he got enlisted in the engineer corps and participated as an observer in the American Civil War (from 1863), the Austro-Prussian War (1866) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). He acted as commander of the Ulanen regiment in Ulm from 1882-1885 and afterwards was Württemberg's envoy in Berlin. In 1906 he was promoted to general of cavalry.

Airships: Since the 80s of the 19th century, Zeppelin was pre-occupied with the problem of guidable balloons and in 1899 he started constructing the first guidable rigid airship which he used for 3 ascents over the Bodensee. The results got more and more successful and this ignited a public euphoria which allowed the Count to pursue the development of his vehicle. In fact the second version of his airship was entirely financed through donations and some sort of lottery! The final financial breakthrough only came, ironically, after the Zeppelin LZ4 crashed in 1908 at Echterdingen which sparked a wave of helpfulness. A subsequent collection campagne raised over 6 million german mark and the money was used to create the 'Luftschiffbau-Zeppelin GmbH' and a Zeppelin foundation.

The same year the military administration bought the fully functional airship LZ 3 and used it as Z1. From 1909 on, zeppelins also were used in civilian aviation. Up until 1914 the german aviation association (Deutsche Luftschifffahrtsgesellschaft, DELAG) transported nearly 35000 people on over 1500 flights without an incident.

Count von Zeppelin died in 1917, before the end of World War I. He therefore didn't experience neither the provisional shutdown of the Zeppelin project due to the Treaty of Versailles nor the second bloom of the zeppelins under his successor Hugo Eckener.

But the crash of the LZ129 "Hindenburg" 20 years later, on May 6th, 1937 at Lakehurst closed the chapter of these enormous rigid airships once and for all.

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