Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  Zeppelin said little. He didn’t need to: The crowd was already expressing his inner turmoil. David Lloyd George, the future prime minister of Britain, happened to be visiting nearby and had decided to see the moored airship, only to arrive shortly after its destruction: “Of course we were deeply disappointed, but disappointment was a totally inadequate word for the agony of grief and dismay which swept over the massed Germans who witnessed the catastrophe. There was no loss of life to account for it. Hopes and ambitions far wider than those concerned with a scientific and mechanical success appeared to have shared the wreck of the dirigible. Then the crowd swung into the chanting of Deutschland über Alles with a fantastic fervor of patriotism.”15

  Zeppelin drove back to the Hirsch “amid an indescribable ovation from the crowd which thronged about his car,” after which he returned to a darkened Friedrichshafen.16

  14. The Miracle

  THE NEXT MORNING, Ludwig Marx was disconsolately driving to the hangar and happened to pass the Zeppelin office just as the count emerged on the balcony. He looked for all the world as if nothing had happened. “Good morning, Marx! How are you?” he called down to the perplexed tugboat captain. “Why, Marx, you seem to have been hit hard by yesterday’s occurrence. Come on up here a moment.”

  The count led him to a table groaning under a heap of money, postal orders, and telegrams. “That was sent to me by the German people, and there’s more coming!” he crowed. “So, Marx, now we’ll really begin to build an airship.”1

  Thus began what the press would dub the Miracle of Echterdingen.

  Its genesis lay in an impromptu speech by Manfred Franck, a Stuttgart merchant, who had roused the despairing crowds at the wreck with a plea to send donations to help Zeppelin build his next airship. “Everybody who has a German heart in his body will contribute his bit to bring Zeppelin’s cause to a good end,” he proclaimed. “The balloon body is dead, but the Zeppelin idea lives and will live for all eternity!”2

  The appeal struck a chord. After newspapers mounted collection drives, the donations began rolling in. By the end of the first day, said Eckener, Zeppelin had received several hundred thousand marks—more than enough to build “LZ-5”—and the flood showed no signs of abating.

  The daily press, conservative and liberal alike, led the way. The Schwäbischer Merkur raised 5,359 marks by lunchtime. The Frankfurter Zeitung started its own appeal, with the newspaper and publisher contributing 5,000 marks to get the ball rolling. Within four days, 62,000 marks had arrived. In Cologne, the Kölnische Zeitung received 33,000 marks the first day and another 50,000 by the third.

  The aldermen of the city councils of Berlin and Stuttgart donated tens of thousands of marks, as did the Berlin Stock Exchange. The Mining Association of Essen chipped in no less than 100,000 marks. German expatriate communities as far afield as South Africa, Brazil, Java, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Egypt clubbed together and sent significant amounts.

  Small towns, small social organizations, and small children also played their part in the grassroots campaign. The tiny hamlet of Haigen sent 50 marks, while Osnabrück, with its modest population of sixty thousand, gave 20,000. A bowling club in Baden sacrificed its annual summer outing and donated 150 marks instead. The passengers and crew of the Lake Constance steamer Königin Charlotte passed the hat around and raised 600 marks. A band in Darmstadt threw a special “Zeppelin-Konzert” and donated the proceeds. A little girl in Mainz who’d seen LZ-4 wrote to the count to say that she had broken open her piggy bank and sent every pfennig in it.

  In short order, Zeppelin received—in cash—the astonishing sum of 6,096,555 marks. (The worth of that figure in today’s dollars cannot be easily calculated. A rough range would be $25 million to $35 million.)

  For those who could not afford to send money, there were other options. Over the coming weeks, Zeppelin was snowed under with sausages, hams, woolen socks, poems and songs, and bottles of wine and liqueur. At one point, there was so much incoming mail, the postman gave up trying to sort it and instead merely dumped sacksful of letters, money orders, and packages at the Zeppelin office.3

  But the most important message of all came by official telegram from Berlin informing Zeppelin that as a result of LZ-4’s (near) completion of the endurance challenge the government was pleased to purchase LZ-3 on behalf of the army and offered to buy the next airship built. LZ-3 would soon be renamed Z-1—a military designation—and Zeppelin deployed the lavish funds at his disposal to commission a copy of LZ-4 he initially named LZ-5, which would be acquired by the army as Z-2 the following August. The count had finally made his first sale.4

  Better was still to come when the kaiser himself visited the Reichshalle hangar and inspected LZ-3/Z-1. Much to Zeppelin’s delight, Wilhelm turned to his archenemy Major Hans Gross and said, “You see? That dirigible is quite practical. And now it will be accepted.”5

  The major could only fume in embarrassment as the kaiser then named Zeppelin “Conqueror of the Airways” and awarded him the Order of the Black Eagle, the very highest Prussian order of chivalry. The count, Wilhelm declared before the assembled press, would be numbered among the greatest Germans of the twentieth century.6

  To complete the count’s rehabilitation, he invited Zeppelin to attend the upcoming Kaisermanöver, the war games at which he had been ritually humiliated so long before. Zeppelin would soon be photographed in his finest dress uniform, his accumulated medals and decorations proudly adorning his tunic, helmet plume waving in the wind as he pored over maps alongside the Supreme Warlord and the other paladins of the German military caste.7

  That was just the beginning. The world soon descended into full-blown “Dementia Zeppelina,” as the press liked to call it, similar to the balloonamania that had greeted the early aeronauts.8

  For the sake of dignity, the count refused to endorse Zeppelin perfume, Zeppelin cookies, and Zeppelin beer—not that it stopped entrepreneurs from producing them—but customers could purchase count-approved Zeppelin cigarettes, cheese, dolls, lamps, chocolate, gingerbread, suspenders, tape measures, boot polish, spoons, cigars, detergent, hats, ties, pocket watches, scarves, and firecrackers with his face on the box (rather tasteless, given the nature of LZ-4’s demise) to complement the medallions, stamps, and postcards sold to raise additional funds. There was even an amusement park that built a Zeppelin carousel with airship-shaped rides, and the septuagenarian count became an unlikely fashion icon when upscale stores began selling his customary yacht caps and rubber-soled (to prevent sparks) cloth shoes.9

  The Thermos company, founded four years earlier, advertised its insulated products with references to Zeppelin (allegedly) sipping coffee from them on his long voyages. Enthusiasts could also buy board games, one of them—Conquest of the Air—re-creating the Echterdingen flight and another allowing players to choose from a train, a ship, an automobile, and a Zeppelin to compete in a race around Europe. The hottest toys that Christmas would be, Harper’s Bazaar announced, “the air-ships, air-ships everywhere, and air-ships that work in spite of the wind or weather.” Among the more expensive was a nine-inch-long “miniature reproduction of the Zeppelin Air Ship” equipped with a spring motor and propeller that when attached to a cord would “fly in a circle.” A Berlin department store bested even that by exhibiting a fifteen-yard-long Zeppelin replica to delight and awe shoppers.10

  Schools performed plays and songs based on Zeppelin’s exploits, and almost every day newspapers ran a fond new caricature of the count, his twinkling eyes and huge mustache making him instantly recognizable. Membership of Zeppelin fan clubs exploded from nothing to sixty-five thousand.11 In America, where the many German immigrants were fervently proud of “their” count, Zeppelin was granted honorary membership of the Aero Club for his “distinguished services in the advancement of Aerial Navigation.”12

  Whereas once the press had to specify “Count Zeppelin’s airship” in its reports,
after Echterdingen reporters began referring to it as “the Zeppelin,” as if no other competitor were conceivable. The word Zeppelin itself became an adjective betokening “grand,” “superlative,” and “reliable.” It also became a stock-in-trade of a new and fashionable theory: psychoanalysis. Practitioners noticed that their patients had begun to dream about airships. Sigmund Freud made the obvious connection that “the remarkable characteristic of the male organ which enables it to rise up in defiance of the laws of gravity…leads to its being represented symbolically by balloons, flying machines, and most recently by Zeppelin airships.”13

  Amid this convulsion of Zeppelinitis, the aristocratic count metamorphosed into that most modern of phenomena: a bona fide celebrity.14 Now that he had shed the insulting image of an eccentric in favor of a reputation as a pioneer, his life story was mined for improving moral instruction.15 Herbert Kaufman in the Chicago Daily Tribune uplifted his readers by assuring them that the hoots and jeers that had initially greeted Zeppelin and his fellow geniuses (Columbus, Alexander Graham Bell, Victor Hugo) only spurred them “to [develop] more resource, bred greater power, and aroused a grit that a too-quick recognition of their merit could never have produced.” After all, “if you know you’re right—you are a big enough jury and your own verdict is the only one that counts.”

  Learning to believe in yourself, he counseled, was the lesson everyone should draw from the example of the count.16

  15. Kings of the Sky

  AERONAUTICAL EXPERTS, HOWEVER, were drawing different lessons from the destruction of LZ-4. After several years of evenhanded treatment, they began to choose sides when it came to deciding whether the airplane or the airship held greater potential. Opinion tended to divide along national lines.

  In Germany, Zeppelin contended that Echterdingen was merely an unfortunate, unrepeatable accident on the long path toward perfection. The only reason, he said, that LZ-4 had been destroyed was that a fire had broken out when fuel spilled onto a hot engine fuse. He claimed, rather spuriously, that had the crew been able to restart the engines, “the airship would have sailed safely away.”1

  In truth, it is probable that the crash caused a hydrogen leak, which was detonated by electrostatic sparks set off by the friction of the outer envelope rubbing against tree branches, but Zeppelin’s argument went unquestioned in Germany.2

  Zeppelin was given a pass by his countrymen because he exemplified the quintessential German spirit of work, perseverance in the face of obstacles, and personal sacrifice for the good of the nation. The disaster at Echterdingen was part of a greater heroic story; indeed, the very fact that LZ-4 had been destroyed was the story, for as the writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal explained, “a completely unblemished success could never have crowned the genius of this man [Zeppelin] in the same way as this stranger-than-fiction combination of triumph and catastrophe.”3 It would be this near-universal acceptance of the necessity of sacrifice that would in future compel the German public to maintain its confidence in the airship even in the face of repeated mishaps, crashes, and accidents.

  The deep resonance of Echterdingen helps explain the emotionally overwrought reactions to what was essentially a zero-fatality accident involving a significant degree of property damage to a rich man’s experimental vehicle. Zeppelin’s story hit the nexus of three prototypically German cultural touchstones. Like Goethe’s Faust, Zeppelin yearned for seemingly impossible knowledge; his airship was destroyed by the kind of violent forces exalted by Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) writers and poets; and his hard work, virtue, and sense of duty were eventually rewarded, as in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.4

  Americans paid little heed to these romantic stirrings in the German breast, preferring to focus on the practicalities of flight. They agreed with Zeppelin, rather strangely in hindsight, that fire was a minor risk to airships, even accounting for hydrogen’s known flammability. After all, stray sparks from an engine could, and often had, set an airplane’s thin fabric skin aflame, too, so fire just seemed to be part and parcel of flying.

  Much more worrying, they thought, was the vulnerability of airships to high winds when anchored to the earth.5 Zeppelin high-handedly dismissed such concerns, saying that he had always known that airships had to be stored in hangars to protect them. From now on, he assured them, it was verboten to land an airship in a field or valley in the absence of a dire emergency.6

  American experts were nevertheless swinging around to the competing technology of the airplane as the way forward—but for reasons that had nothing to do with Echterdingen.

  * * *

  —

  ON AUGUST 6, 1908, at the very bottom of a long and detailed article about the Echterdingen crash the day before (“Tragic End for Monarch of Air”), the Boston Daily Globe appended a brief notice from France mentioning that Wilbur Wright would imminently be demonstrating his airplane.7

  Wilbur had been in Europe preparing a new model of the Flyer for a series of exhibition flights intended to sell the brothers’ airplane to a French syndicate. Given the number of charlatans who similarly had claimed to have conquered the air, the French, naturally, wanted proof not only that the Wright product could fly but that it even existed.

  Since the Wrights had not publicly shown off an airplane for two and a half years, there was great skepticism surrounding this rumored Flyer. Ernest Archdeacon, a prominent member of the Aéro-Club, declared the Flyer to be a “phantom machine,” while L’Illustration, a popular paper, published a photo of the purported aircraft and sternly judged the brothers to be frauds peddling a “fabrication.”8

  August 8 was a beautiful, cloudless, blue-skied day with a gentle breeze blowing. Hundreds of curious, or cynical, spectators outfitted for a summer picnic had ventured to the racetrack at Le Mans to watch Wilbur Wright’s inevitable failure. Archdeacon was there, informing everyone around him that this was going to be an entertaining waste of time.

  At 6:30 P.M., Wilbur, wearing his customary gray suit and high starched collar, sniffed the wind and told his assistants, “Gentlemen, I’m going to fly.” With little ado, he took off and headed for a line of poplar trees but banked and circled back. Then he made another graceful revolution at a height of about thirty-five feet and landed fifty feet from where he had launched.

  Wilbur was airborne for nearly two minutes and had covered a distance of some two miles. He enjoyed full control of the craft, and it was obvious that he could have stayed in the air for as long as he wished. At first, the crowd couldn’t believe what had happened, but soon it broke out into wild cheers and rushed the Flyer as Wilbur primly tried to avoid Gallic kisses on the cheeks (he preferred manly American handshakes). Archdeacon graciously conceded that “for too long a time, the Wright brothers have been accused in Europe of bluff….They are today hallowed in France, and I feel an intense pleasure in counting myself among the first to make amends for the flagrant injustice.”

  Over the coming days, Wilbur made more flights to prove the point. On August 10, a quick thirty-two-second ride demonstrated a complete turn in a thirty-yard radius, a feat never before achieved, and followed it later that day with two giant figure eights. From then until the end of 1908, Wilbur continued to amass ever more achievements and amaze ever larger crowds. He broke every airplane record there was—for duration, altitude, speed, number of flights, number of passengers—and won every award, prize, contract, and competition going. And on December 31, for his last spectacular display, Wilbur traveled a distance of seventy-seven miles over the course of no less than 2 hours, 20 minutes, and 23.2 seconds. For France, he was not just man of the year but man of the century.9

  Meanwhile, planning to divide and conquer, Orville had been working at Fort Myer, just west of Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, D.C. As Zeppelin had done during the Echterdingen voyage, he was intent on fulfilling an army offer stipulating that it would contract with any manufacturer that could build a
plane that could fly 40 mph, carry two passengers and sufficient fuel for a 125-mile trip, travel for at least an hour, be reliably controlled, and land at the spot whence it had taken off.

  A tall order by any account. American newspapers predicted that the specifications were so tough as to be impossible. As The New York Globe pointed out, “Nothing in any way approaching such a machine has ever been constructed.” If someone did succeed, said the Globe, then it would mean that person had built “the most epoch-making invention in the history of civilization.”10

  Orville would be that person. On September 9, he circumnavigated the parade ground fifty-seven times in an hour. When rumors spread that the Great Orville would fly again that same day, Washington closed as congressmen, officials, cabinet members, and diplomats rushed to Fort Myer. At 5:15 P.M., Orville took off again and, wrote a Dayton Journal reporter, “presented somewhat the appearance of an automobile racing about an imaginary racecourse in the air” by circling fifty-five times in one hour and three minutes. For the next two days, he repeated the performance but added figure eights to his repertoire. The New York Herald reported that “he dipped down low to earth. He skimmed it at twice a man’s height. He rose steadily and gracefully until 150 feet of space lay between him and the ground….He all but brushed the trees in Arlington Cemetery. He tried every combination of the levers and planes in his run of 58 turns around the field.” By September 12, he was attracting five thousand spectators at a time.11