What I Am Reading: "Dr. Eckener's Dream Machine" by Douglas Botting

Zeppelins! They are a potent symbol. As an obsolete technology, they are often found in science fiction or alternate history stories, to communicate that the world of the story is a different one from the world we live in. There was a brief time, however, when zeppelins were cutting edge. The first commercial flights were of zeppelins, and a zeppelin held the record for the fastest circumnavigation of the world for a little while. This book was the story of the zeppelin company and its driving force for many years, Dr. Hugo Eckener.  This man was instrumental in bringing the zeppelin concept to fruition under Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin in the yearly years before World War One, and became the brains of the operation in the post-war years. The centerpiece of the story is the Graf Zeppelin’s circumnavigation of the world in 1929, an important demonstration of the zeppelin’s capabilities.

To make sure our definitions are in order: a zeppelin is a rigid airship, with its gas bags contained within an outer frame. It is different from a blimp, which has a single gasbag that is deflated when not in use. The rigid airship was invented by Count von Zeppelin in 1900. The Count was essentially an eccentric garage inventor, but his project captured the public imagination (and would continue to do so for its entire lifespan). After a few educational failures, he brought gentleman scholar Hugo Eckener aboard the project to handle PR. Eckener did not have any piloting or engineering experience, but he became invaluable to the project, and mastered the craft to an extent that he was put in charge of training the German Navy’s zeppelin corps in the First World War.

WW1 would be the test of Count von Zeppelin’s original vision for his rigid airship, which was intended as a weapon of war. Zeppelins showed some promise as long-range scouts, but most of their bombing missions inflicted little damage upon the British (to be fair, they did have to invent aerial bombardment from scratch). After the war, Eckener took over the Zeppelin company (the Count had died in 1917) and moved heaven and earth to keep the company solvent. Eventually, he pulled things out of a dive, and was rewarded with a contract to make a reparations zeppelin, which Eckener flew personally across the Atlantic to the United States. Eckener knew that the future of the Zeppelin was tied to the US market, as Britain and France were highly hostile (Britain had its own airship program that went down in flames). After the reparations zeppelin, the Graf Zeppelin was cobbled together from public and private funds, and commenced tours of Germany and other parts of Europe with Eckener at the helm. The airships were always entrancing to the public, and their flight over any city usually brought major fanfare.

Eckener took the Graf on his circumnavigation in 1929, with considerable publicity and some funding from William Randolph Hearst. Once again, the Zeppelin excited crowds in every city it flew over, from Tokyo to San Francisco and Los Angeles. The effort was intended to prove the zeppelin’s capabilities, Eckener’s attempt to rope in investors to start a commercial service. Unfortunately, shortly after the flight concluded, the stock market crashed.

Eckener spent the early Depression on proving flights to South America, trying (successfully) to establish a regular route between Brazil and Europe. He also made some exploratory flights over the Arctic, which brought a cameo from Umberto Nobile, the Italian airship captain who crashed his semirigid airship in the Arctic in 1928 and had to be located and rescued. I read a book about this grim misadventure last summer; it was in an attempt to rescue Nobile that polar explorer Roald Amundsen disappeared. This book also had an appearance from another alumnus of this blog, Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, as there was an attempt to resupply his German East Africa troops by zeppelin during World War One.

Anyway, for most of its lifespan, the Graf Zeppelin was the only rigid airship operating in the world. It was joined by the Hindenburg in 1936, but this came of course to an abrupt end in 1937, at the beginning of the Hindenburg’s second season of work. Botting says that the end of the zeppelin was not a result of bad PR from the Hindenburg disaster, but was because the only industrial source of helium in the world, the United States, refused to send any to Nazi Germany. There were a couple of schemes after WW2 to put zeppelins to some use, but none came to anything. However, there always seems to be a scheme in the works somewhere, as the zeppelin does fill a specific transportation niche (heavy cargo over long distances, and can land with minimal infrastructure).

I learned a lot from this book, other than basic chronology. I learned that the zeppelin pioneers always knew that they would be overtaken by airplanes, and saw themselves as a transition period. When the Graf was operative, airplanes were only suitable for short hopes, and their feats of endurance could not yet be replicated for useful commercial purposes. However, they were rapidly catching up. Even though the zeppelin was very German, it was also very American, with every voyage being highly publicized and sensationalized. In our world of easy air travel, it is striking to imagine the revolution that resulted from being able to travel across Asia in only a few days, instead of six weeks on a train or a month at sea.

I’d be interested to read something (and I wish this book had had a bit more) on the semiotics of the zeppelin, a symbol of progress and even majesty to many people. Botting repeats the title many times, calling it the “dream machine.” The Graf Zeppelin received a much chillier reception after the Nazis took over the country, and mandated that it have a swastika painted on its tail fin. This certainly lends the symbolism a sinister cast, although it should be noted that Eckener was a strident anti-Nazi, even when it would have done his company better if he had hewed more closely to the party line. In light of this, it would be a good read to learn about what the zeppelin symbolized to Germans, to Americans, and to the South Americans it serviced as well, and what cultural products resulted.

Finally, the book was also striking in describing the physicality of a zeppelin flight. Apparently the process of flying a zeppelin was much more akin to sailing a ship than it is to flying a plane, with a greater focus on the wind and the weather. Due to the way that they moved through the air, passengers were able to open the windows, and would not have felt airflow. I had never pictured myself flying on an airship before, but Botting did a good job of describing how the lift was accomplished without much sensation at all, and only when the ship had achieved height did the engines (softly) kick in. It was apparently a very smooth ride.