German aircraft manufacturer and inventor of large and practical rigid aircraft. Born in Constance on July 8, 1838 and died in Berlin on March 8, 1917. Zeppelin graduated from the Naval Academy in Louisburg in 1857 and entered the University of Tübingen in 1858 to study engineering.
He later served as a guard to the King of Wardenburg, the kingdom’s envoy in Berlin, and commander of the cavalry brigade. In 1890, he was discharged as a lieutenant general.
From 1863 to 1864, Qi Bolin went to the United States to investigate the military. During this time, he personally took the hydrogen balloon into the air, which gave him the idea to develop a maneuverable balloon. Since then, Qi Bolin has used his spare time to study airships. He presented the idea of a fully rigid airship against the drawback that the semi-rigid airship was not weight-bearing at the time.
Zeppelin has devoted all of its energy to aircraft development since retiring from the military in 1891. In 1900, it made the first rigid airship with a cigar-shaped hard aluminum casing. The aircraft is 128 meters long and 11.7 meters in diameter, the hydrogen airbag has a total volume of about 11,300 cubic meters, and it is equipped with two 11.8-kilowatt (16-horsepower) marine engines.
He accepted the experience and lessons of his predecessors and divided the large airbag into many smaller airbags to prevent accidents such as hydrogen explosions. The airship took off for the first test flight on July 2, 1900, and crashed on landing due to poor maneuverability. Zeppelin later improved the airframe and installed a 62.5-kilowatt (85-horsepower) engine in the airship.
He built two airplanes in 1906 and successfully made two test flights at a speed of 57.6 kilometers per hour. For this reason, the Dresden Engineering Institute awarded him an honorary doctorate in engineering, and some universities also awarded him an honorary degree.
Zeppelin founded the Zeppelin Airship Company in 1908 to produce military and commercial aircraft. By 1918, this company had manufactured 113 military aircraft, which were widely used in World War I. He also opened “German Air Transport Co., Ltd.” in 1909 to operate domestic routes and the Hamburg-USA route. The Zeppelin rigid airship is the world’s first commercial vehicle used for official passenger air transport.