Epic of Flight: The Giant Airships

The air, said Sir George Cayley in 1816, is 'an uninterrupted navigable ocean that comes to the threshold of everyman's door.' The eminent aeronautical pioneer was depicting a tantalising vision of future flight; the 'ocean' however, needed a practical ship of the air to ply it, and as Cayley's century ended, non existed. The airplane had not yet been invented, and balloons - more than 100 years after their introduction - still could not get to anyone's door unless the wind was exactly right. The challenge was to build a dirigible that was streamlined enough to move easily through the air, large enough to lift a practical payload of men and machinery, yet sturdy enough not to buckle in mid-flight. The French in 1902 solved the problem in part by adding a rigid keel to an elongated envelope and distributing the weight of the payload over its entire length. Theirs was the first of a series of semirigid airships of increasing size, speed and endurance that - sometimes at least - could be counted on to reach a specified destination. These early craft had a distressing tendency to rip, to run into things, to be carried away by high winds and, on tragic occasion, to catch fire. Yet optimism in their future persisted - nowhere more than in the south heart of German nobleman, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. Zeppelin was past middle age when he made the creative leap that revolutionised dirigibles: away from the balloon-like envelope shaped primarily by the pressure of the gas that filled it, to a permanent, rigid hull of vast size, and thus vast lifting power. With Count von Zeppelin's experiments began the age of the giant air ship, and an adventure that was unique in the history of flight. His mammoths of the sky would bring the miracle of long-distance air travel - and the destructive missiles of war - virtually 'to the threshold of everyman's door.'

About the Author :
Douglas Botting's romance with lighter-than-air flight began with a baloon safari across Africa. Since then he has focused on the airship, producing several film histories for the British Broadcasting Corporation and participating in an abortive airship expedition over Greenland. He has met many of the luminaries of the airship era whose stories appear in this book. The Giant Airships is his sixth Time-Life book.