A Century Turns

By Tabac Iberez

Aleksander van Riebeck is a trader embarking on mercantile adventures across the skies of the late Victorian period. His goods? Anything he can lay his hands on. His vessel? A vast dirigible. In a world not wholly like our own, zeppelins are the craft of choice for a new generation of swashbucklers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sea Lion Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386970460

Book preview

Early Concept Sketch of Aetheric-Rigged Zeppelin, Pencil and Ink on Paper, 1887

Prologue

The far polar regions of the world were always speckled in mystery and wonder. From the days of longship and Viking to the search for the rumored Northern Passage, the lands of ice and snow drew many searching for riches, fame, and glory. It was Hudson who first found anything of real note, when his ships nearly foundered in the Labrador Sea as titanic icebergs began their southward travel for the year. His log reports of the icebergs seeming to shrink in the water as they went further north was dismissed as exaggeration for years, until the Danes started to seriously colonize Greenland. The irony of the naming aside, Hans Egede noted that the further south drifting ice went, the higher it climbed, as if lightened or lifted skyward by some force. In his years there leading the colonization, exploration, and conversion of the natives, he continually noted this phenomena was based on latitude and season.

By this point, the scientific community of Europe was alight with curiosity. The Dutch were finally able to crack the secret, with the brave Ijsship and her crew docking and boarding an iceberg, finding the secret in a crevice at the top. As meltwater poured forth into a pool carved into the top of the iceberg, it rotated ice flows in concentric circles, which by some means produced a lifting force on the iceberg. This knowledge would be kept suppressed, however, as the Thirty Year’s War raged across Europa, and not be brought forth again for a hundred years.

As conflict and war smoldered across Europe, research muddled along with the now-decrepit knowledge that an artificial lift and rebellion from Aristotle's view of the natural place and physics existed. In the echoing wake of the wars of the Austrian succession, philosophers and scientists both toiled away at the conundrum that was presented, yet no solid discoveries or evidence were made. More expeditions were taken, and the latest devices known to the hands of man were brought to the task. Forged iron and steel, blasting powder and pick, and the fruits of every alchemist who could travel north... the search for flight seemed as fruitful as the development of the philosopher's stone, but hope remained.

It was in the light before the shadow of le Révolution that the first steps in flight were taken – without the aid of this natural philosophy. Hot air and hydrogen paved the way for life to take to the sky, with the names of the Montgolfiers, Robert Brothers, and Charles engraved into the history of the art. The race to develop more advanced ways of claiming the skies flew ever onward, pushing those involved mercilessly. The English Channel was the first significant navigational obstacle to fall before the balloon, earning Jean-Pierre Blanchard his place in history for the first time. His second would be less fortunate.

It was on his historic flight in the Americas in 1793 that Blanchard became both the first man to confirmedly discover the Aether, and shortly thereafter the first man to be killed by it. Launching from the yard in a Philadelphia jail, his expected point of landing was to have been Deptford, New Jersey. On his terminal approach, however, he was caught by a strange cross-breeze, thought to be caused by mysterious effects of altitude, and pulled into what some described as a glittering hole in the sky. While this might initially have been dismissed as an airborne accident without survivors, of which there were still frightfully many, witnesses such as the President of the United States and the majority of his cabinet put paid to that story.

As aviation progressed and the skies found dirigibles and airships treading their cloudy paths, exploration into the cause of Blanchard’s death continued. Traversing the mysterious Aether was dangerous and fraught with death, but the promise of prizes from a dozen or more countries drove explorers and adventurers for years. It was in 1826 that a return was finally recorded, with the Russian aeronaut Vladmir Troyechka launching from Saint-Petersburg and landing in a field outside Moscow several hours later. According to the budding man, the secret was to rely on cloth fabric, not the hands of machines, to propel an airship. Emboldened, dirigible pilots across the world began to chart the mysterious paths of the sky, often selling their services as couriers and rush deliverymen.

The fires of conflict had only dimmed, however, and command of the air was still seen as a valuable resource. Artillery became the first to send men up in uniform, with their balloon-based spotters ensuring accurate fire and scouting movements of the enemy. While their achievements were many and daring, this is not a story of war – but one war did catalyse the persecutor to modern flight. In the American Civil War, a young German engineering officer by the name of Ferdinand von Zeppelin, sent as an observer and advisor, was taken on a balloon flight above the Peninsular Campaign. From then on, he was infected with the aviation bug – he had to fly. On returning to Germany and hearing the news of the French developing a fully independent dirigible, von Zeppelin was incensed. While working with the VDI to develop a design in 1865, he ran across a young natural philosopher by the name of Nathaniel Hawkins, therein changing the course of history forever.

Hawkins, a student of natural sciences in Leipzig and engineering in the polytechnic of Wurttemberg, had been entranced by the by-now almost mythological properties inherent in the ice flows on glaciers, and had come to a radical new conclusion. While composition, rotation, and even temperature had been slavishly copied since time immortal to no effect, Hawkins had a revolutionary new hypothesis. Rather than producing lift, as had been long theorized, Hawkins believed the system increased buoyancy by some means – after all, should they produce lift, would not at some point the icebergs start flying once they were light enough?

To test his theory, however, Hawkins needed a platform that could produce both lift and rotational power, and the only group producing a platform powerful enough was Zeppelin. After taking a design from the French balloonist Giffard for a design that could mount a steam engine, the now-firm duo was set to work. To measure the effectiveness of the device, an ascension test was planned – a full balloon under full ballast load, first with the device keyed off to establish a baseline, and then again with the device connected. The first test was unimpressive, the LZ-2 lifting itself to the end of its hundred-meter tether in twenty minutes.

With the device activated, it repeated the trip in three.

Together, Hawkins and Zeppelin were sitting on a gold mine. With the ability to increase the power of the engine, the power of the device were found to be based on the movement of the driving disk, by changing speed or the diameter of the disc in the system. With progress in excess of the wildest dreams of the VDI and other backers, von Zeppelin made ready a series of new craft, the LZ-4, -5, and -6, and prepared his budding fleet for the next world’s faire in Paris,, scheduled for the October of 1867.

When he arrived, von Zeppelin took the Faire by storm. With three ships hauling all matter of German finery, the airborne caravan quickly stole the spotlight away from the