Many towns in the part of Germany in which I live have names that end in heim, or "home". Mannheim, of course, is quite well known, but there are literally hundreds of smaller places such as Bensheim, Seeheim, Jugenheim and Heppenheim. And some 40 km down the road near Frankfurt Airport is a little town called Zeppelinheim, named after the famous pioneer of the dirigible airship.
Ferdinand, Count von Zeppelin, was a relatively undistinguished German soldier. He fought on the Union side in the American Civil War, and also took part in the Franco-Prussian altercation of 1870-71.
But it was only in his 50s and thereafter, when he had retired from active service with the rank of general, that Zeppelin found his real niche in life: he devoted his remaining years to aeronautics, and designed the famous aircraft that were to make his name a household word.
Airships in their simplest form are merely propelled and "dirigible", or steerable, balloons. But the earlier and smaller airships were "non-rigid", their shape being maintained only by the pressure of the gas within.
These non-rigid airships became unwieldy as their size increased, and Zeppelin was convinced that the answer to this problem was to house separate bags of gas inside a light but rigid framework covered with a fabric. In 1906 his LZ3, designed in conformance with this concept, captured the imagination of the world by completing a successful flight of 60 miles in slightly under two hours.
Very soon airships were being used for civil aviation. Zeppelin's Deutschland began commercial flights from Dusseldorf in June 1910, and in the four years before the outbreak of hostilities it carried 34,000 passengers without a single fatal accident, a remarkable achievement in those early days of aviation.
The airships were also used for bombing raids in the first World War, although their success as a military tool was limited.
Count Zeppelin died in 1917, a decade before the era of his airships reached its peak. For a brief period during the late 1920s and the 1930s these great aircraft provided those who could afford it with the ultimate in flying comfort. They could cross the Atlantic in a little over two days with a silent smoothness and a dependable stability that were quite unknown before that time.
That brief golden era could be said to have begun 70 years ago today, when the aptly named Graf Zeppelin, then the largest airship in the world, completed its maiden flight across the North Atlantic and docked at lakehurst, New Jersey, on October 15th, 1928, after a voyage of 111 hours from Friedrichshafen, Germany.