Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  The year 1908 was a pivotal one in powered flight. America (and France) fell in love with the Wrights as much as Germany had with Zeppelin. Both the brothers and the count had amply demonstrated the viability, potential, and popularity of their respective technologies, and they were now so closely identified with their creations that they actually resembled them, as owners are said to resemble their dogs—or perhaps it was the other way around. Zeppelin, for instance, was as rotund as his cloud-shaped airship, while Wilbur Wright’s head (thought the Daily Mail) “suggested that of a bird, and the features, dominated by a long, prominent nose that heightened the birdlike effect, were [as] long and bony” as his airplane’s skeletal construction.12

  Character-wise, they were just as different. Zeppelin liked to come across as ebullient and avuncular, a kind of Santa Claus figure, while Wilbur (and Orville, for that matter) took after Jack Sprat—ascetic and parsimonious.

  Yet they were often spoken of in the same breath, as aerial conquistadors. The New Americanized Encyclopedia, for instance, trumpeted its inclusion of all the latest flights by the Wright brothers and Zeppelin, beginning with its 1909 edition.13 And that Christmas, reproductions of the Wright Flyer began to share shelf space in toy stores alongside the popular Zeppelin airships.14

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  ZEPPELIN AND THE Wrights maintained an outwardly polite relationship, but neither regarded the other as a real competitor. Zeppelin still thought the airplane a faddish contraption; the brothers saw the airship as a clumsy white elephant. They were, instead, rivals jealous for attention, prickly about slights, and eager to subtly one-up the other. Matters would come to a head in Berlin in the late summer of 1909.

  On August 29, 1909, the count arrived in the capital in his newest airship, the LZ-6, a copy of the late LZ-4 quickly built with some of the Echterdingen money. After circling the city and dipping its nose at the Brandenburg Gate, LZ-6 headed for the immense Tempelhof Parade Grounds, where the kaiser and the royal family excitedly waited. As the church bells rang their merry peals and a military band played the national anthem, LZ-6 stopped its engines and gently glided to the ground. When Zeppelin stepped out, the kaiser saluted, shook his hand heartily, and called for three cheers for the count from the enormous crowd.15

  It was then that the kaiser introduced Orville Wright—visiting Germany to perform aerial shows with the Flyer—to Zeppelin for the first time. It was a meeting of the two “kings of the sky,” said one journalist of this great historical moment.16 Orville stiffly congratulated the count on his airships, and Zeppelin awkwardly returned the compliment.

  Orville might well have recalled a widely published interview Zeppelin had given the year before concerning his brother’s flights at Le Mans. The count had commended Wilbur on his feats but slid the knife in by adding that the airship “as a means of conveyance certainly is superior to the airplane” given the latter’s inability to “ascend to any great altitude” and its “limited scope of action.”17

  Now it was Orville’s turn with the stiletto. Interviewed a few days after the meeting, he congratulated Zeppelin on “the graceful ease and apparent accuracy” with which he steered his “balloon”—a little put-down there—yet, he added, “the airship has nearly reached the limit of its capabilities.” More insultingly, Orville then likened the airship to a steam engine and the airplane to an internal combustion one: The airship was the past, the airplane the future.18

  Zeppelin was too well brought up to do much more than bristle silently at the slights, and he only reluctantly allowed Wright to come on a brief, sixty-six-mile voyage aboard the LZ-6 on September 15, though the two exchanged few words.19 His generosity was not repaid. Two weeks later, Wright again needled Zeppelin by insinuating himself into the bosom of the crown prince, one of the count’s key supporters.

  On October 2, Wright brought the prince up with him on a ten-minute flight. At first restricting himself to an altitude of just twenty feet—“I felt a great responsibility in having the future German Emperor as a passenger,” said Orville, piously—but rising to sixty when the prince cried, “Higher, higher,” Wright was rewarded with a signal mark of royal esteem, a crown-shaped diamond and ruby pin. After the ceremony, the aviator took off alone and broke another world airplane record by reaching an altitude of 1,600 feet. According to Wright, he kept climbing “until the field and adjacent country reminded me of the picture I had from Zeppelin’s airship [on September 15], only things seemed smaller.”20

  That offhanded comment, “only things seemed smaller,” deeply rankled Zeppelin. That Wright had ignored the fact that an airship could ascend to nearly triple that height without breaking a sweat came across as remarkably ungracious to the courtly count. Once again, he said nothing publicly, but he privately believed that the Wrights’ machine was nothing more than a sporting toy. Suitable, certainly, for showing off to gawping spectators, but ultimately a footnote in the history of aviation.

  The Wrights, for their part, thought exactly the same about the Zeppelin, with Wilbur writing that the airship “must soon become a thing of the past.” All the money the count was spending on developing them, he predicted, would “be practically wasted” once the airplane came into its own.21

  16. Zeppelin City

  YET IF THERE was something Zeppelin had that the Wrights didn’t in the summer of 1909, it was money to burn. The Wrights may have made a small fortune in 1908 thanks to their successes in America and France, but they were now competing against dozens of rivals as the airplane business exploded. Within three years, in the United States alone, there would be 146 airplane companies and 114 different engines on the market.1 Monoplanes, biplanes, triplanes—all these ate away at the Wrights’ once-commanding lead amid a host of meritless lawsuits and wasteful patent-infringement accusations.

  Orville and Wilbur sensed that their time at the top was running out. Following a spectacular series of flights in 1910 to show the world they were still the greatest aviators of them all, they essentially retired. Wilbur would die two years later of typhoid, and Orville, who lived until 1948, ceased flying in 1918.2

  Unlike the Wrights, Zeppelin had no competitors to speak of, and he enjoyed a global monopoly on technical skill and piloting knowledge. He also benefited immensely from the official backing of the government. In 1908, whereas France spent (in contemporary dollars) $235,000 of public money on aviation, with Austria-Hungary coming in second at $27,000, followed by Britain with $25,000 (the United States probably expended about the same), Germany devoted no less than $660,000, the overwhelming majority of which was directed to airship development. And that stupendous figure did not include Zeppelin’s own windfall after Echterdingen.3

  Zeppelin had dreamed of achieving such success since his forced retirement from the army nearly two decades earlier, but now that he’d finally gotten what he wished for, it seemed more a curse than a blessing. With the Niagara of cash came responsibilities, interference, turf battles, and squabbles as Zeppelin’s relaxed little cooperative transformed into a corporate conglomerate.

  Just a year earlier, Zeppelin’s “company” had essentially comprised just him; Dürr, the designer; Uhland, his lawyer; Eckener, his public-relations man; Hergesell, the meteorologist; and various pals like Baron von Bassus, along with a core group of mechanics and workers (like Schwarz, the hero of LZ-4, and Marx, the tugboat captain). They lived locally, and if not native Württembergers then happy immigrants to Friedrichshafen. All had been with the count for years and had stuck by him through thick and thin. He in turn—as befitted a paternalist noble conservative of the old school—had regarded his faithful retainers, almost feudally, as part of his extended family.

  Every year, no matter how paltry his finances, Zeppelin would take everyone on board a hired steamer and travel to a lovely park for a picnic. It was a tradition that one of the men would give a speech, but when a mechanic once became tongue-tied,
Zeppelin stepped in, telling those gathered in rustic Swabian dialect, “You workmen and officers do not owe me thanks. On the contrary, I am indebted to you. For although this great work was my idea, it was you, my workers and employees, who completed it. Therefore, I thank you from the bottom of my heart, and drink to your health!” He shared coffee with every man who worked for him, courteously inquired after their wives, and marked each child’s birthday with a gift of improving books. On the job, he was a strict disciplinarian, but off-duty he always said “please” and addressed every worker almost as an equal.

  Everybody knew who was the seigneur of this particular demesne, of course, but the bonds of comradeship forged in adversity had wrought a battle-tested, tight-knit, unhesitatingly devoted band of brothers. Even when Zeppelin had to shut down operations (as after LZ-1), he made sure his staff found employment in his friends’ factories and workshops and took them back as soon as he could afford to. Any man who had demonstrated loyalty in the past was granted his consideration. One time, a lanky, gruff blacksmith showed up, and much to the surprise of the other workers, Zeppelin himself showed him around the hangar and allotted him a job. It turned out the man, lately fallen on hard times, was a former dragoon who had been on the count’s famous 1870 patrol ride.4

  This traditional ethos of noblesse oblige eroded faster than Zeppelin ever expected, or wanted, as a more modern form of aggressive industrial capitalism began to intrude upon Friedrichshafen’s green and pleasant land. The agent of these “dark satanic mills” was Alfred Colsman, whom Zeppelin had at first welcomed as someone who could oversee the rivers of cash arriving daily after Echterdingen.5

  Colsman, in his mid-thirties and “an immense fellow, standing six feet two, with a deep chest and broad thick shoulders [with] the tight lips of a self-reliant man, drawn down at the corners in a grim way,” had briefly met Zeppelin in 1899, shortly after he’d married Helene Berg, the daughter of the count’s friend Carl Berg, the aluminum magnifico. Colsman himself was the son of another aluminum manufacturer, and so the marriage, though a happy one, was truly a dynastic alliance. The second time Colsman met Zeppelin was in 1906, on the occasion of Carl Berg’s funeral.

  In the immediate aftermath of Echterdingen, Colsman offered to “serve the greater cause.” Zeppelin quickly took him on staff, and Colsman started work full-time in August of 1908.

  It was Colsman who suggested establishing a formal company to regularize the count’s chaotic financial affairs, and in September Colsman accordingly became the manager of the new Luftschiffbau Zeppelin AG—the Zeppelin Airship Construction Corporation, usually called the Zeppelin Company. Overseeing it was the Zeppelin Foundation, comprising a board of directors, which also funded training programs, research, and charitable work.6

  At first, the relationship between Colsman and Zeppelin flourished. The count was pleased that the bespectacled younger man immediately set to work acquiring the land needed to build a giant new double hangar that could fit two airships side by side.7

  But the relationship went downhill quickly from there, and Eckener was often dragged in to serve as emollient arbiter. During discussions it was important to “be conciliatory and flexible,” he counseled Colsman, and eventually the grand old man would come to see his point of view. Colsman would have none of it, saying, “I will say what I think, as long as I am general manager, whether you like it or not.”8

  Colsman saw quickly that Zeppelin, an aristocratic relic in a new age of profits, mass production, and industrial might, was flummoxed by modern business practices. For instance, during financial negotiations with Herman Sielken, known as the “Millionaire Coffee King” of New York, the lordly Zeppelin instructed him, “Then you will participate in my airship construction, Mr. Sielken.” To which the Coffee King replied, “And what would your part of the bargain be, Your Excellency?” Much to Colsman’s embarrassment, Zeppelin seemed puzzled that someone beneath him in rank would expect a quid pro quo and airily answered, “I? Oh, I will drink a great deal of coffee.” And that was the end of the negotiations.9

  Unaccustomed to dealing with accountants and tax officials, the count also had a liberal attitude toward budgeting when it came to his beloved airships. For Zeppelin, money was something other people worried about, and he treated company and foundation revenue as his own, and his own as a business asset.

  The entrepreneurial Colsman had a hard time convincing the count that airship construction in and of itself did not generate earnings; if anything, it was a potentially bottomless money pit. He complained that “we are not considering the company as a business, but as a duty” to Germany. Yes, exactly so, Zeppelin furiously retorted, and it would stay that way. Colsman did at least succeed in establishing subsidiaries to the Zeppelin Company that would make parts and materials for airships and pass them on at low cost to the holding company. The only reason the count agreed to them was because he believed they were dedicated exclusively to the great god of Zeppelin, but Colsman’s intention was for them to make profits from outside sales to give the company’s finances some semblance of stability.

  At one point, there were ten of these subsidiaries—Eckener later commented that Colsman had an “obsession with founding corporations”—including Maybach-Motorenbau (Maybach Motor Company), which was run by Wilhelm’s son Karl Maybach; Zahnrad-Fabrik (gears and drives); Zeppelin Hallenbau (hangars); Ballon-Hüllen-Gesellschaft (outer skin); and Zeppelin Wasserstoff und Sauerstoff AG (hydrogen and oxygen production).10

  Most were located in or near Friedrichshafen, turning the small resort town into Zeppelin City. Workshops, factories, and laboratories containing mechanical, electrical, telegraphic, and chemical equipment were joined by an aluminum foundry, a large office building, fuel depots, a meteorological station, and a gasometer. New villas, schools, and hotels sprang up along freshly laid out streets.

  Until the formation of the Zeppelin Company, the count had usually employed fewer than ten men, rising to around seventy workers at busy times, not including women, who were hired as secretaries or seamstresses sewing together the cotton airship envelopes. By 1914, the permanent workforce would rise to seven hundred, about 10 percent of the population of Friedrichshafen, and the former backwater became the wealthiest town in Württemberg.11

  Colsman, worrying about the company’s high wages, wanted the burgeoning industrial conglomerate to make spending cuts a priority, but on this point he was forced to back down after a battle with Zeppelin, who insisted on providing his workers with the kinds of lavish benefits—known as Zeppelin Wohlfahrt, or Zeppelin Welfare—that ensured loyalty and the maintenance of social order.

  It was Zeppelin who overruled Colsman by insisting that every employee could take out a company-sponsored life-insurance policy and offering free board and lodging to those who suddenly found themselves in dire straits. The company built an entire workers’ settlement with well-designed, picturesque houses and pretty gardens.

  There was a grocery, bakery, butcher, church, kindergarten, subsidized canteen, pub (with its own winery), day-care center, school, dormitories for unmarried men and women, savings bank, library, hospital, and first-class sports facilities. There was even a Zeppelin Hall for readings, performances, and concerts.12

  Such largesse came at a price, and Colsman sought increasingly exotic ways to raise the money needed to pay for it as the count grew ever more irritated by what he regarded as Colsman’s horribly bourgeois thriftiness. The low-level hostility eventually erupted into open warfare over the issue of creating a new subsidiary: a passenger airline, the world’s first.

  On the face of it, forming the DELAG—an acronym for Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-Aktien-Gesellschaft (German Airship Transportation Company)—was a brilliant, bold, innovative, visionary idea. At a time when airplanes could carry, at most, a single passenger and a few fuel tanks as cargo, an airline was a means of putting airships to profitable good use.

  Zep
pelin didn’t see it that way. He hated the idea. In the boardroom, shedding his usual amiability and charm, the count subjected the hapless Colsman to a flash of anger. “I detest any notion of commercializing my invention!” he protested and refused to listen to any more talk of an airline. Explained Colsman, writing many years later, “He saw his conception profaned if the airships were used to earn money through the DELAG. That enterprise thus remained for him, the feudal aristocrat and old soldier, a tradesman’s venture….In an aristocratic context such as his, a merchant was just not socially acceptable.”13

  Zeppelin had of course dealt before with many “merchants,” though they had tended to be wealthy industrialists, and it had been he who back in the 1890s had first suggested going the civilian route when the army proved indifferent. But there was a distinction in his mind between a civilian enterprise dedicated to enhancing German greatness to force the army’s hand and a commercial one based on tawdry profit.

  On the issue of the DELAG, the board itself was split between the military and civilian factions. Zeppelin, for instance, could number among his backers his nephew, Freiherr von Gemmingen, a traditional career soldier, while Colsman had a quiet ally in Eckener, a man of the modern age like himself.

  Snobbery played a role in the count’s bitter opposition to making money from a passenger airline, but the military-civilian divide drove at the very heart of a fundamental dilemma harking back to the days of the Montgolfiers: Now that working Zeppelins existed, what were they for?

  17. The Wonder Weapons

  T​O UNDERSTAND THE issue facing the board, it helps to turn to a very bad (and now, mercifully, obscure) book by Dr. Rudolf Martin, a minor civil servant in the Imperial Statistical Office. In 1907, his extravagant science fiction novel, Berlin-Baghdad: The German World Empire in the Age of the Airship, 1910–1931, had laid out the shape of things to come.1