Airships. In the early years of War, these beasts were known for their majestic
presence in the sky and were icons of a country's power and prestige. They
reigned mostly as reconnaissance and transport utility aircraft but there was
something about this "lighter-than-air" ship that made it far more than a mere
utility workhorse. In this essay, I will discuss the ever-popular and ever-
living king of the sky; the Airship.

Airships, or dirigibles, were developed from the free balloon. Three classes of
airships are recognized: the non-rigid, commonly called blimp, in which the form
of the bag is maintained by pressure of the gas; the semi-rigid airship, in
which, to maintain the form, gas pressure acts in conjunction with a
longitudinal keel; and the rigid airship, or zeppelin, in which the form is
determined by a rigid structure. Technically all three classes may be called
dirigible (Latin dirigere, "to direct, to steer") balloons. Equipped with a bag
containing a gas such as helium or hydrogen which is elongated or streamlined to
enable easy passage through the air, these Airships could reach speeds up to
10mph with a 5hp steam engine propeller.

The first successful airship was that of the French engineer and inventor Henri
Giffard, who constructed in 1852 a cigar-shaped, non-rigid gas bag 44 m (143 ft)
long, driven by a screw propeller rotated by a 2.2-kw (3-hp) steam engine. He
flew over Paris at a speed of about 10 km/hr (about 6 mph). Giffard's airship
could be steered only in calm or nearly calm weather. The first airship to
demonstrate its ability to return to its starting place in a light wind was the
La France, developed in 1884 by the French inventors Charles Renard and Arthur
Krebs. It was driven by an electrically rotated propeller. The Brazilian
aeronaut Alberto Santos-Dumont developed a series of 14 airships in France. In
his No. 6, in 1901, he circled the Eiffel Tower.

Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the German inventor, completed his first airship
in 1900; this ship had a rigid frame and served as the prototype of many
subsequent models. The first zeppelin airship consisted of a row of 17 gas cells
individually covered in rubberized cloth; the whole was confined in a
cylindrical framework covered with smooth-surfaced cotton cloth. It was about
128 m (about 420 ft) long and 12 m (38 ft) in diameter; the hydrogen-gas
capacity totaled 1,129,842 liters (399,000 cu ft). The ship was steered by
forward and aft rudders and was driven by two 11-kw (15-hp) Daimler internal-
combustion engines, each rotating two propellers. Passengers, crew, and engine
were carried in two aluminum gondolas suspended forward and aft. At its first
trial, on July 2, 1900, the airship carried five persons; it attained an
altitude of 396 m (1300 ft) and flew a distance of 6 km (3.75 mi) in 17 min.

The first commercial means of regular passenger air travel was supplied by the
zeppelin airships Deutschland in 1910 and Sachsen in 1913. At the beginning of
World War I, 10 zeppelins were in service in Germany, ...