Volume 14 , Issue 22

History of the Graf Zeppelin

It was in 1929, the first time in history a Graf Zeppelin circumnavigated the globe. It was a 21-day voyage, among them the young journalist Lady Grace Drummond-Hay, reporting for the Hearst media empire. The BBC Four website has a documentary about this "Around the World by Zeppelin" that documents the Graf Zeppelin airship.

Besides the Hindenburg, there were other zeppelin's. The most successful zeppelin ever built was the LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin airship that flew more than a million miles on 590 flights, carrying over 34,000 passengers without a single injury.

Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin began construction of his first airship (LZ-1) in 1898, June in a floating wooden hangar on the Lake Constance (Bodensee) at Manzell (Friedrichshafen) in Southern Germany, not far froth Swiss border. It was the movable, floating shed that allowed the ship to be positioned into the wind to enter or leave its hangar. It was competed in the winter of 1899, but it was the summer of 1900 before they attempted to fly zeppelin's invention. It was inflated with hydrogen gas in June and made it maiden flight on 2 July 1900. The flight lasted about 18 minutes and covered about three and a half miles over the lake.

The Luftschiff Zeppelin 1 was 420 feet long, 38-½ feet in diameter, containing approximately 399,000 cubic feet of hydrogen in 17 gas cells made of rubberized cotton fabric. Two metal gondolas were suspended below the ship (aft and forward) and each gondola housed a 4-cylinder water-cooled Daimler gasoline engine, which put out 14 horsepower.   |  View or Add Comments (0 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

---