Zeppelin: A Biography

By Margaret L. Goldsmith

IN his fiery, adventurous youth he joined the Union Army in our Civil War, and became vitally interested in aeronautics

AS a man he was known as the most fearless and audacious officer the Württemberg Army

AT fifty-two he retired and began the great adventure of his life—the conquest of the air

THEN, with magnificent courage, he rode over obstacle and failure to an achievement immortal in the history of flying

Originally published in 1931, this is a biography of Count von Zeppelin, the German general turned aircraft manufacturer who founded the Zeppelin airship company.

Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin (8 July 1838 - 8 March 1917), the scion of a noble family, was born in Konstanz, Grand Duchy of Baden (now part of Baden-Württemberg) in Germany. His father was Württemberg Minister and Hofmarschall Friedrich Jerôme Wilhelm Karl Graf von Zeppelin (1807-1886).

Count Zeppelin’s military career spanned more than three decades, beginning as an army officer in the army of Württemberg in 1855, seeing active service in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, and rising through the ranks to commander of the 19th Uhlans in Ulm and envoy of Württemberg in Berlin from 1882-1885. He retired from the army with the rank of Generalleutnant in 1891 at age 52. He was awarded the Ritterkreuz (Knight’s Cross) of the Order of Distinguished Service of Württemberg.

His service as an official observer with the Union Army during the American Peninsular War led him to travel to St. Paul, Minnesota, where the German-born former Army balloonist John Steiner offered tethered flights; it was his first ascent in a balloon during this visit that is said to have been the inspiration of Count Zeppelin’s later interest in aeronautics.

He passed away in 1917 at the age of 78, before the end of World War I. The unfinished World War II German aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin and two rigid airships were named after him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Jul 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787207653

Margaret L. Goldsmith

Margaret Leland Goldsmith (1894-1971) was an American journalist, historical novelist and translator who lived and worked primarily in England. One of her best known translations is popular German writer Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives for the first UK edition in 1931. Goldsmith spent some of her childhood in Germany, where she attended school and learned to speak German fluently. She then studied at Illinois Woman’s College in Jacksonville, Illinois and gained an MA from the University of Illinois. During World War I she was on the staff of the war trade board under Bernard Baruch. She then worked for the national chamber of commerce in Washington and the international chamber of commerce in Paris, helping Wesley Clair Mitchell with his 1919 report on international price comparisons. Returning to Berlin as a research assistant in the office of the commercial attaché of the American Embassy, she became one of the first women to be appointed an assistant trade commissioner from 1923-1925. In 1926 she married Frederick Voigt, the Manchester Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930, although the couple divorced in 1935. While living in Berlin she worked as an agent representing English-speaking authors. She was a friend of author Katharine Burdekin (pseudonym Murray Constantine), with whom she co-authored the historical novel based on Marie-Antoinette, Venus in Scorpio: A Romance in Versailles, 1770-1793 (1940). Goldsmith’s other novels were Karin’s Mother (1928); Belated Adventure (1929); and the German language novel Patience geht Vorüber: ein Roman (1931). Her non-fiction publications included Frederick the Great (1929); Hindenburg: The Man and the Legend (with Frederick Voigt, 1930); (1933); Franz Anton Mesmer: The History of an Idea (1934); John the Baptist: A Modern Interpretation (1935); and Florence Nightingale: The Woman and the Legend (1937). Goldsmith died in 1971.

Book preview

This edition is published by BORODINO BOOKS – www.pp-publishing.com

To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – [e-mail]

Or on Facebook

Text originally published in 1931 under the same title.

© Borodino Books 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

ZEPPELIN

A Biography

by

MARGARET GOLDSMITH

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 5

ILLUSTRATIONS 6

CHAPTER ONE—1838-1857 7

CHAPTER TWO—1857-1863 19

CHAPTER THREE—1864-1867 28

CHAPTER FOUR—1867-1872 33

CHAPTER FIVE—1872-1899 38

CHAPTER SIX—1899-1902 45

CHAPTER SEVEN—1902-1907 51

CHAPTER EIGHT—1908 58

CHAPTER NINE—1908 (continued) 63

CHAPTER TEN—1908-1913 69

CHAPTER ELEVEN—1914-1917 76

CHAPTER TWELVE—1917 85

APPENDIX 87

BIBLIOGRAPHY 98

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 99

DEDICATION

FOR

KATHERINE ANTHONY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The author is deeply indebted for invaluable assistance and material to Herr Ernst Uhland, who was Count Zeppelin’s General Manager and Private Executive from the time when the first airship was constructed in 1899 until Count Zeppelin’s death in 1917.

ILLUSTRATIONS

ZEPPELIN (1907)

ZEPPELIN’S FATHER

ZEPPELIN AS A BOY OF FIFTEEN

A SKETCH MADE OF ZEPPELIN DURING THE CIVIL WAR

TRYING OUT PROPELLERS BEFORE FIRST FLIGHT

AN EARLY TYPE OF ZEPPELIN

THE FIRST HISTORIC FLIGHT OVER BERLIN

THE KAISER AND ZEPPELIN AT FRIEDRICHSHAFEN

ZEPPELIN AT THE IMPERIAL MANEUVERS (1912)

ZEPPELIN (1909)

CHAPTER ONE—1838-1857

NOWADAYS we like to think of our inventors as self-made men. It is romantic to study our hero-inventor’s rise from the poverty of his youth. We eagerly follow his early struggles to acquire an education against all odds. Finally we sit back with deep satisfaction when we read that he has been successful, that his efforts have been ultimately rewarded by the acknowledgment of his inventions as a lasting contribution to the progress of humanity. It stimulates our imagination to think of Thomas Edison, at the age of twelve, bravely selling newspapers on the Detroit railways; we like to remember the poverty which surrounded Robert Fulton in his youth; their ultimate success seems all the more thrilling.

Perhaps we over-emphasize the importance of self-education and the rise from poverty to prominence. Perhaps there are indeed other odds which are quite as difficult to overcome as poverty. The successful struggle for an idea which all the world at first thinks of as madness, may in itself be romantic, whether the inventor himself was born the son of a poor man or a millionaire.

Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s parents were not millionaires, but they were very well-to-do people to whom money, as far as their home life or the education of their children was concerned, was never an object and much less a problem. He was, in fact, born into a family which for centuries had expected and attained distinction and achievement. Dieu défend le droit (God defends the right) is the family motto of the Zeppelins and, as a whole, their aims have apparently been defended and promoted by some higher Power. The Zeppelins have usually been successful and they have always been sure of themselves.

The village of Zepelin in Mecklenburg, North Germany, the family’s original home where, even today, their ancestral manor house can be seen, was first mentioned by chroniclers in 1246; but Zeppelin’s ancestors do not appear in the old records until 1286. By this time the name was spelt with two p’s as it is today.

In the eighteenth century two members of the family migrated to South Germany. This is important, for it means that Ferdinand Zeppelin was not a Prussian in any sense of the word. His grandfather and his great-uncle, Ferdinand Ludwig and Johann Karl von Zeppelin, were summoned to South Germany by King Frederick of Württemberg who was eager to attract men of their type for the civil and diplomatic services of his country.

Ferdinand Ludwig, Zeppelin’s grandfather, did well in his new environment. He became the Württemberg Minister of Foreign Affairs. As such, after the Napoleonic Wars, he was sent to Paris to carry on negotiations with Napoleon. Later he went to Vienna to confer with Metternich and to Russia to confer with the Czar. He was considered one of the most experienced diplomats of his day. The King of Württemberg once wrote to him: In this miserable situation we expect that you will do whatever is in your power to protect your King and your country against future ill-treatment. Ferdinand Ludwig did as he was told; his one aim in life was to serve his King and his country conscientiously and well.

His son, Count Friedrich von Zeppelin, Ferdinand Ludwig had been made a Count, Zeppelin’s father, followed faithfully in his footsteps. For some years he acted as a. high court official to Prince Hohenzollern Sigmaringen. But Count Friedrich was a very shy man who shrank from the formalities of court life. Later, when he became the owner of the Girsberg Estates near Constance, he devoted his energies to agriculture and to the development of his land.

Count Friedrich was not typical of his class. His interests were beyond those usual in a German nobleman of his generation. He loved the violin and played it well. He was a poet and his verse, according to his son Ferdinand, was delicate and beautiful. Count Friedrich was the friend of some of the greatest poets of his day, including Nikolaus Lenau and Gustav Schwab. Many of his contemporaries who were busy making a career in the army or in the diplomatic service thought him odd or even soft," but their criticism did not bother him. He lived his own quiet life and brought up his family the way he thought best.

He married in 1834. His wife, Ferdinand Zeppelin’s mother, was a woman of quite unusual charm and intelligence. Her name was Amélie Macaire, and she belonged to a wealthy family of French émigrés living in Constance. She herself, in a letter to a relative, describes Friedrich, her husband, as follows: …He loves flowers and he is a poet (and please understand that I do not mean simply a verse-maker but a genuine poet, when I say this). I shall not try to tell you how kind and good he is for I should never finish telling you if I once began.

Amélie Zeppelin was practically an invalid until her death which occurred in 1852, when her son Ferdinand was fourteen years old. Little is known of the nature of her illness. My childhood and early youth, she once wrote, would have been very happy had I not been ill so much of the time. My life was embittered by constant powders and medicines, and by medicinal baths and cures consisting chiefly of goat’s milk. When I was fifteen years old, just as I seemed to be getting better, I suddenly went half blind.

She was always delicate but never the type of fainting lady, forever taking out her smelling salts, who was so common in the first half of the last century. She never complained and was always more than cheerful. Even in his old age Zeppelin never forgot his mother’s ever ready humor, her wit and her charm.

Naturally any one as delicate as she preferred the quiet life on a peaceful estate to the social whirl of court life. After her husband’s retirement to the country she wrote: During all the ceremonies [at the court] my husband wore a diplomatic uniform with gold epaulettes. In his hand he carried a black staff with a silver button at the top….I cannot really tell you how it came about that suddenly one day, we were bored with all this pomp. The change in our life was quite unhoped for, but one day Fritz discarded the black staff and came to live with me in a Dominican monastery [her parents’ home had once been a monastery]. Later, unfortunately, he became ill, as the damp air on Lake Constance did not agree with him, so we moved to Girsberg to escape the dampness.

Despite the fact that Zeppelin’s mother was an invalid for so long the atmosphere of the home was never a nervous or an excitable one. One of Zeppelin’s tutors later wrote about the harmony which reigned in this household: The entire household was permeated with an atmosphere of peace and harmony which was most salubrious and which was a most healthy influence in the children’s development. There was never any quarreling or scolding in the family and much less any swearing or cursing or storming about. On the contrary peace reigned everywhere in this home. If anyone was ever reproved it was done in a loving spirit and with great gentleness. In such an atmosphere it was only natural that I, too, used only kindness and consideration in the education of my pupils. The incredible gentleness and repose which characterized Count Ferdinand until his death, were chiefly due to the exemplary spirit which prevailed in his parents’ home.

Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was born on July 8th, 1838, in his grandparents’ house on the Island in the Lake of Constance. He was always very proud of the fact that he was born right in the lake over which he later made his famous flights in his airship and on which, at Friedrichshafen, the famous Zeppelin air-harbor is now situated. Ferdinand was the second of three children, who were always extremely devoted to one another. His sister Eugenie was two and a half years older than he was and his brother Eberhard was four years younger.

Zeppelin’s mother once described her parents’ house, where Zeppelin was born, and where she herself had been born only twenty-two years before, in a letter: "A small island is situated at that point in Lake Constance where the Rhine leaves the lake. This little island lies close to the city of Constance, and is connected with the city by a covered wooden bridge. The Romans built a fortified castle on this island so that they could defend Constance, which they had recently captured, from near-by enemies.

Centuries passed, the Roman fortifications disappeared, and in its stead a pleasure house owned by the Bishops of Constance was built on the island. Later, this pleasure house, too, disappeared, and then the famous Dominican Monastery in which John Huss lay imprisoned until his death, was built in its place. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the poor monks were driven out and Emperor Josef gave the island, and all the buildings on it, to Monsieur J. Louis Macaire, my grandfather, who established himself comfortably in some of the monks’ cells with two sons and a housekeeper. The large cellars, kitchens and refectories, which had once belonged to the monks, were turned into an unromantic calico factory.

Ferdinand Zeppelin was born in these remodeled cells, and his earliest memories were connected with the sight of Lake Constance, the Swabian Sea, which was visible from most of the windows of his grandparents’ house. Girsberg, where his parents moved when he was two years old, is also very near the lake. Lake Constance is the most extensive body of water in the Alps, with the exception of Lake Geneva. The northern end of the lake belonged to the grand duchy of Baden, but bits of the eastern shore are a part of the kingdom of Württemberg.

It is only natural that, in these surroundings, water and wind were among the first things which penetrated young Zeppelin’s consciousness. His early impressions of the power of the wind were significant. Later, when he realized that moving air is the most important of all weather elements in the navigation of an airship, he often remembered his childhood observations.

Even at the time of Zeppelin’s birth, and long before the great air harbor was thought of, Lake Constance was considered a modern lake. The first steamer had been launched on it in 1824 and by the time Ferdinand Zeppelin was old enough to notice the world about him, many steamers plowed their way through the lake. Zeppelin never forgot how much he learned from this early environment. In 1908, when Constance gave him the Freedom of the City in honor of his seventieth birthday, he said: I am a child of my time and of the city of my birth to which I am so closely connected. Here in Constance I learned so many things which were important in my future work. As a child I watched the ducks and the geese swimming in the canal, I observed the movements of the ships on the lake and I watched the wind sweeping away the smoke which came from their smokestacks.

Zeppelin was a healthy, attractive boy. He himself writes that he was somewhat spoiled and a little vain as a child, for he quite obviously charmed all the grown-ups with whom he came in contact. I was considered to be a pretty child, Zeppelin notes in a brief sketch of his youth published in Germany shortly before the War. My special characteristic was a tight curl which looked like a rose and which no efforts with a brush would straighten out.

Dr. Robert