And then in World War One, the Zeppelin – intended by its inventor as a harbinger of international peace – was pressed into service with the Imperial German Army and Navy. Soon, the name Zeppelin became one to be feared as these seemingly impregnable machines rained down bombs on cities stretching from St Petersburg to London. A new terror had been born: death and destruction of civilian populations and their cities from the air. The development of explosive bullets, fitted to Allied fighters from 1916, however, led to the destruction of what Winston Churchill had mocked as “enormous bladders of combustible and explosive gas”. Of the 84 Zeppelins built during the war, 60 were lost to accidents and enemy action.
Between the wars, Britain attempted to develop its own ‘Zeppelins’. Sponsored by the Ministry of Aviation, two giant rigid airships – the government’s own R100 and the R101 developed by a subsidiary of the aircraft manufacturer Vickers and designed by Barnes Wallis of ‘bouncing bomb’ fame – were to have commanded the imperial airwaves. But the R101 crashed in France in October 1930 on its maiden overseas flight, killing 48 out the 50 people on board, including most of her design team and Lord Thomson, the Air Minister responsible for the project. The R100 was broken up soon afterwards.
With Zeppelin back in action, although now with Nazi government support and swastikas on the tails of its aircraft, German airships ruled the skies. And then the Hindenburg went up in flames, and with the end of World War Two, the Zeppelin company folded in 1945. Since then, new airships have come and gone, and may yet come again, especially for the distribution of freight, machinery and emergency supplies in terrains around the world challenging for conventional aircraft.
And, yet the dark legend as well as the sorcery of the Zeppelin lives on. When, in 1968, the guitarist Jimmy Page announced the formation of a new band, Keith Moon, drummer with The Who, said it would sink like a “lead zeppelin”. Dropping the “a”, so no-one could mispronounce the word, Led Zeppelin burst onto the rock scene with a best-selling first album, its sleeve depicting the Hindenburg bursting into flames. Led Zeppelin soared into the rock firmament, yet the rigid airship, despite a number of half-promising new starts, including the Aeroscraft and those by a reformed Zeppelin company, has yet to make its promised comeback. Despite the odds, many of us hope it will.