Patent Granted for Zeppelin’s Airship

The first military observation balloon was deployed as early as June 1794 in the Battle of Fleurus, part of the French Revolutionary Wars. It was the experience of ascending in just such a balloon in 1863 that likely inspired German cavalry officer Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s interest in lighter-than-air flight. He was volunteering with the Union Army in the American Civil War. ‘I dared to hope that war, which I have chosen as the main study of my life, might be revealed to me in its bloody truth’, he said of his American adventure. But the two passions overlapped. By the 1880s he was agitating for state investment in aeronautics: ‘Help me to build the airship for Germany’s defence and security’, he urged.

At the turn of the 1890s he began working on designs. A patent was granted on 31 August 1895. It would be years before he won state backing. ‘Jules Verne’, an unimpressed official scribbled on the paperwork.

Zeppelin’s first airship was launched in July 1900. The ‘discharge of projectiles and explosives from balloons’ was prohibited under the 1899 Hague Convention, but no one seemed to doubt the military potential. By 1908 Zeppelin’s fourth model, LZ4, now built with government money, had reached 445 feet in length. In one trial it flew non-stop for over 20 hours, covering 370 miles.

The next week the Daily Mail ran an interview with Rudolph Martin, a German official, under the heading ‘Teutonic Vision’. ‘In a world war’, Martin said, ‘Germany would … transport 350,000 men in half an hour during the night from Calais to Dover.’ Britain panicked. The scale of the airships metastasised the dread: they moved through the sky, elegant, ominous, and unworldly. People reported sightings along the eastern coast. The panic had a name: ‘Zeppelinitis’.

The fear wasn’t unjustified. Within two days of the declaration of war in 1914, a Zeppelin was dropping bombs on Liège.

D.H. Lawrence witnessed a Zeppelin raid in 1915. The sight made him think of Milton’s war in heaven, a battle for the cosmic order. ‘It is the end’, he wrote. ‘Our world is gone.’