A flight with destiny

Nothing characterises the wish to leave the earth behind and to defy the laws of nature more than the desire to fly. The Roman poet Ovid expressed this wish in his retelling of the story of Daedalus and Icarus who built wings of feathers and wax in order to escape imprisonment at the hand of King Minos.

The German count Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin oversaw the first trial of a dirigible, a steerable or directable airship, over Lake Constance on 2 July 1900 and so began a new era: that of the zeppelin. The frame of the airship was made of the then still practically unknown light metal aluminium. A new electrolytic process introduced shortly before this date had made the metal cheaper and generally affordable for the first time.

In around 1910, Alfred Wilm invented a strong alloy of aluminium mixed with copper and magnesium. It was given the trade name duralumin and was to become the stuff of dreams with regard to lighter-than-air vehicles. Commercial air travel began with the Zeppelin airships in around 1910 and the 1930s even saw regular flights over the Atlantic.

Only a little later, the age of the airship came to a tragic end with the greatest catastrophe of its time: the explosion of the world's largest ever dirigible, the "Hindenburg", on 6 May 1937. While the actual cause of the fire is still not clear today, it does have a very political background. The Hindenburg had originally been designed to be filled with helium, a gas which does not burn. However, at the time helium was manufactured only in the USA and, fearing the use of the gas for military purposes by the National Socialists under Hitler in Germany, the US refused to sell helium to Germany any more. The Zeppelin company had to redesign the Hindenburg to take highly inflammable hydrogen – the first step on the way to tragedy.

Airships are only used to a very limited extent today, mainly as blimps for advertising purposes. The Zeppelin company, incidentally, still profits from the use of aluminium: the airships were replaced by the production and sale of construction equipment, power systems and silos and vessels.


Overview