Wonders of the World
Rough draft (first 25,000 words.)
Questions: 909-593-1018 collectormagazine@gmail.com
By Frank!
Liberty Island- New York City – May 17th, 1927
ON THE BALCONY ENCIRCLING the torch of the Statue of Liberty, fourteen pairs of eyes are imprisoned by the cloudy tangerine dawn peeling from New York City’s bustling harbor.
The eyes are suddenly liberated! At first by a playful meteorological force. It distracts attention from the sunrise’s visual fruit—only for a moment. A second later their curiosity is cemented to an object—slightly more physical, which hints at the tragic consequences of redemption— unrequited.
Using the spikes from the statue’s crown as a trapeze, a blade of swashbuckling wind, recklessly somersaults through the goddess’ rays of copper light. Eventually it smashes itself against the tourists’ backs—whacking off a gentleman’s top hat—mussing a lady’s coiffed hair—discombobulating a baby’s bonnet and knocking a flimsy book out of the hands of twenty-six-year-old Hatch Johns.
The pages flutter like a panicking dove, but they manage—precariously, to land on the railing’s narrow edge. While its leaves flap against the mischievous wind, it’s apparent that it’s really not quite a book. It’s more of a crudely pruned, dog-eared codex, and its margins—cut within a hair of its typographical life.
Bound by a pair of sweat tarnished brass butterfly nuts, only seventy of its original 277 pages survive. It’s grown into an odd mélange of cryptic notes, and pasted-on clippings, randomly illustrated in a pastiche of cartoonish burlesques, garish charcoal caricatures, and a disturbing array of grotesque doodles, spiced with ironic whimsy.
This compendium chronicles a fantastic, although sometimes nightmarish odyssey, looking more like Dante honeymooning the devil in his inferno, than Ulysses reuniting with Penelope in Ithaca.
Some of its characters are reminiscent of that Homerian expedition, but like a melting house of mirrors, the reflection is eschewed. One of Hatch’s heroes, and there are but a few, is an actual Cyclops.
Although not born that way, he left his right eye from whence he began. Unlike the cave dwelling mono-ocular Polyphemus, the monstrous son of Poseidon, Hatch’s one-eyed titan is more of a Proteus, the sea god’s prophetic son, who could shift his shape. The physical appearance of this modern Cyclops neither changes, nor can he tell the future, but he spins such splendid blarney and assumes such compelling roles, that he can conjures dreams so captivating that his audience remains permanently in his spell.
Another titan is a tragic emperor. On the brink of lunar anarchy, with insurrection fomenting in all quarters, he attempts a diplomatic solution by using an anti-gravity propulsion equipped lunar bat to fly to the capital of the moon, but fate intervened. An untimely birth: Hatch’s—interrupts the mission.
Every page—smudged and smeared by his unconscious fingering.
Hatch’s mishap quickly arouses the attention of one of the sightseers, and her outburst intrigues the rest. She’s a spunky lady with a bad eye, but it operates well enough for her to see this young man’s flaw.
Her exhausted crème evening gown is as successful at containing her buxom body, as her mind is at reigning in her unsolicited opinion. Like her bad eye, they are both bulging.
“Never,” she says, gawking ostentatiously, “have I seen a book, if you can still call it that, treated with such—disrespect!” He acknowledges her outrage by pitching her a gnarly grin while derailing the wind’s threatened coup de gras, buy snatching the codex off the rail, as it’s just about to plunge a hundred and forty-seven feet to the statue’s stared pedestal.
Loudly enough to be heard by this red-eyed woman, or any concealed balcony critic, Hatch summarizes in eight words not only his view on his codex, but any item he owns. “It exists to serve me; not I—it!” With dexterity rarely possessed by even the most agile of magicians, he slips the codex into his inner coat pocket. “Witness how it fits,” he intonates like a sideshow gizmo hawker, “It’s thin enough to slip in— snug enough not to fall out. These butterflies allow me to the add pages I need, and subtract those I don’t. With these modifications, the ‘disrespect,’ I can keep it with me—at all times.”
Gingerly patting the cyst on her the lower eyelid, using last night’s hanky, she contritely asks, “This book—it’s important to you?”
Inching his gaze back to the tangerine harbor, where squat tugs pull smoking freighters, and hungry seagulls skim the scrappy Atlantic, Hatch broods as if—just now, for the first time, he is contemplating the question. His dark, searching eyes, glower at the simmering ocean, as if the answer to that question is chiseled on the breaking whitecaps. He leans to her ear and whispers, “It’s my redemption. Important enough?”
Seven months ago, as Hatch languished in the nadir of his guilt-induced depression, inflamed by addiction to opium and absinthe, the book landed on his copy desk. That gloomy morning it materialized, not as an avenging, but as an exonerating angel. It was the platonic ideal of book. Its cover: hard. Its binding: perfect. Its pages: edged in metallic red. It’s title: The Torch—Redemption through personal mythology. Its author: the notorious Alsace psychiatrist, Dr. Natalie Kohl, advocate of the most controversial views on the development of prodigies.
Anticipating Kohl’s arrival like an embryo atoning for a new life, Hatch vigils every day on his filigree perch.
At any moment, Kohl along with seven other female geniuses in her charge, will emerge from the sky.
Unlike the emperor’s moon bat, her cloudbusting chariot is not Hatch’s fantasy, existing only as a smudge on paper. This flying machine, according the page one report published in today’s New York World, is not only the apogee of aviation technology but its secret design will make it the most astonishing airship ever to take flight.
Zeppelin Headquarters- Germany, Friedrichshafen- May 17th, 1927 4:30 a.m.
A CLATTERTRAP METAL STAIRCASE, exuding the aesthetics of a dilapidated fire escape, leads to the “Crow’s Nest,” the seventh floor office of the president of the Zeppelin Company—Hugo Eckener.
“Just walking by,” and “While I was here,” are the ironic entrees used by his engineers who fail to secure an appointment, but need to “chat.”
This morning, the day of the first airship launch in over seven years: No appointments! No pretexts. Engineers, officers and crew who need to speak to “Herr Doktor,” are clanging up those stairs, hammering their fist on his thick steel door, and succinctly—stating their business. In less than two hours, assuming weather conditions allow, Eckener, a specially trained crew of twenty-eight, Dr. Kohl and seven female prodigies are scheduled to begin a voyage that will cross the Atlantic Ocean. This is the first dirigible to do so since 1919, eight years ago, when the British flew the R33 to America—and back.
The mind of Europe’s greatest aeronautical engineer has been struggling with every conceivable detail of the flight for seven arduous months.
One mechanical problem has yet to be conquered.
Pulling at his freshly-trimmed goatee, the frustrated—59-year-old president snarls “It’s dangerously out of control!”
Nonchalantly, chief design engineer Ludwig Durr confirms the gravity of Eckener’s complaint, “This instrument—can’t be trusted.”
“It’s perjury!” chimes in Eckener.
Since his return from Paris, where he negotiated the final details of the airship’s construction and delivery, Eckener’s hand-cranked, traveling Victrola plays “perceptively slower,” than the testimony provided by the glass-encased needle. It makes the false case, claiming that the disk rotates at a constant 78 revolutions per minute.
“What does it take me for?” demands Eckener. “A fool can hear it grinding at seventy-seven—at best.”
Durr relishes this luxury. Tinkering with a machine as elementary as a record player, and obsessing over inconsequential details is a pleasant charade he and Eckener enjoy playing, now that they’ve done everything within their power to insure the success of the first phase of their re-entry into the airship business.
An unexpected problem looms. Jeopardizing the success of the voyage is a complication far more serious than what can be solved by an adjusting screw. In a moment, the harbinger of this development will forcefully bring this problem to Eckener’s attention.
Pounding rattles Eckener’s door, breaking into Mozart’s recorded symphony. “Herr Doktor!” booms a steel penetrating voice.
“Come in!” shouts Eckener, while motioning to Durr to continue adjusting the Victrola.
Captain Ernst Lehmann, Zeppelin’s second in command, bulldozes the door open. Unleashing a volley of pent up fury, he roars. “It’s worse than I had suspected! It demands your attention—immediately!”
Leisurely re-lighting his half smoked cigar, Eckener aggravates the tightly wound officer by facetiously saying, “I’ve hidden the gas! They’ll never find it while we’re gone.”
Infuriated by Eckener’s cavalier demeanor and response, Lehmann barks, “This is urgent!”
“Hydrogen canister repossession for a company that intends to send behemoths into the air, is a matter of concern,” Eckener says directing Lehmann to sit on the straight-backed wooden chair, crowded against a battered weather chart cabinet.
“That woman—”Lehmann growls.
Derailing Lehmann’s inevitable fury, Eckener interrupts Durr’s concentration on the record player. “Listen for just a moment, this should interest you,” he says. Neither the body nor head of the design engineer moves, but Durr yields by shifting his begrudging eyes up to peer over his spectacles.
“The captain presents us with a fascinating design problem—of linguistics,” Eckener says, as if delivering a lecture to a laboratory of invisible interns, and Lehmann is a bacteria pressed between glass slides to be examined under a high-powered microscope. “See if I am correct.” Durr nods to Eckener, and his eyes roll a sympathetic look to Lehmann. “When the captain says ‘That woman’ I deduce, from several months of empirical experience, he means the president of the Burning Glass Foundation. Ever since he encountered her seven months ago he has never actually said her name.”
Durr critiques Eckener’s analysis of Lehmann’s linguistic idiosyncrasy with an indifferent shrug. Eckener puffs victoriously, as Durr’s eyes, now dismissed, tentatively crawl out the Petri dish, back to the comfort of adjusting the music.
Lehmann retaliates against Eckener’s cloaked brutality with an excoriating stare with his flame-throwing blue eyes. “Quite amusing!” he lashes. The vengeance incomplete. The brilliant engineer, once again, cowardly allows himself to be used as the pawn at Lehmann’s expense. He tilts his retinal weapon and singes Durr for his passive complicity.
But there’s something even more profoundly upsetting to him than Eckener’s verbal joust and Durr’s cowardice.
The suffocating stench of smug perfectionism congests the room like thick gas in collapsing mine shaft. “Our generals feast on peacock tongue, while Hannibal is at the gates!” Lehmann says with the disgust of a vomiting glutton.
Durr’s eyes await for Lehmann’s follow-up, while Eckener blows another puff of cigar smoke.
“We are preparing for our first transatlantic flight—using a craft— that most charitably can be called— experimental,” he says, pointing toward the window. “Three hundred witnesses, prosecutors, judges out there—wait for our failure! Had I the luxury of time the two of you must have, I’d invite a circus of merrymakers and baggypantsers to join your orgy. We’d all listen to music boxes and we’d all puff fat cigars,” he says, throwing his head in his hands. “Neither of you,” he starts to say, through his parting fingers, in desperate tone, “know what I have gone through. Despite all of the warnings I have supplied to ‘that woman’ and her surrogate— letters, telegrams and seven telephone calls! I honor, we honor, contractual obligations to suppliers who grow angry and harsh at me, angry at Zeppelin, for the foundation’s unrealistic demands—for her unrealistic demands. And yet, as impossible as it was to build an airship with those specifications and that design—I did it! We did it! Today, this morning, our labor and our honor—consolidated into a single structure—that structure in its hanger, awaits our courage to fly it across the Atlantic. For her arrogance, the same can be said. It too, today, the morning of the launch, is consolidated into a single act. At this late hour—that woman—fails to materialize! I not only speak, but by the gods in the heavens and devils in Hell, I damn the name—Dr. Natalie Kohl!”
Unmoved. Seemingly unaffected by Lehmann’s grievance, Eckener blows a contemptuous puff of smoke, clasps his hands behind his neck and leisurely leans back.
The chair’s unoiled springs creak a cruel roster of sniggering defamations—galling Lehmenn beyond his control. His eyes sling a serrated bolt of lighting into the smoke’s heart, and his tongue hurls a pointed demand at his tormentor, sitting across the desk, luxuriating in his victim’s humiliation. “You have never even met her! How can you? Why you defend?”
Sneering pontifically like an owl digesting a diseased rat, Eckener placates Lehmann by cogitating on his question. Endlessly— drifting over the folders on the desk, the smoke cloud assiduously holds its form, as the accusatory springs creak their scornful litany.
A draft from a crack in the window clears the air, and the springs become still. “Had I met her in person,” so begins Eckener’s papal proclamation from his basilica behind the desk, “would that have increased the revenue that her foundation has already brought and will bring to the Zeppelin Company, to Zeppelin workers, to Zeppelin families, or to their tables—hungry for sausage and bread! In Paris when I negotiated the order, it was not in a day of desire—when I could have picked from a sumptuous feast of contracts, nor was it in an hour of need— like in the aftermath of the Versailles savages when I was forced to transform proud builders of airships into meek molders of pots and pans. The pact, the loadstone in my safe, was not signed on a day desire or hour of need—it was a moment of abject desperation? The doors of our sheds: not locked—unhinged! Ready for scrap! The worst! Not the Shylocks calling in our notes. Not the millers, starving us for grain. The unkindest cut, our worst betrayer, our Brutus—lunging and twisting the dull knife in our hearts, was our dream—the unrealized splendor of the Graf Zeppelin, she —no longer our muse, but—our mock!”
Having received no quarter from Eckener, Lehmann gives none. He simply responds by asking, “And that woman?”
“I only know of her vaguely—from the newspaper clippings the Foundation sends,” says Eckener. “This disappearance will probably force me to say something about her at the launch. This is what I know. Correct me if I am wrong.”
“I’m her victim,” snaps Lehmann. “Not biographer!”
“She’s an Alsace psychiatrist: gaining world-wide attention for her controversial theories on the problems of genius and the development of prodigies. Her book: ‘The Torch.’ A manual on redemption. She calls it ‘personal mythology.’ So far? Correct?” he asks Leymann.
“Controversial? Dangerously absurd—choose your words for her madness. This I will say. Only the most abject of fools or the most wretched of souls, craving relief from horrible guilt, would be so desperate as to believe in such—ludicrousness!”
“‘Personal mythology?’” asks Eckener. “What do you make of that?”
“Fairy tales! Guilty men fight demons by fabricating stories. The more wild the better.”
“And then? What are they to do?” asks Eckener.
“Like puppets on their imaginary stage, her foolish believers act out these little dramas.”
“Exactly what do they do,” asks Eckener.
“They build things, take journeys—resurrect the dead,” says Lehmann.
“She raises the devil in you,” says Eckener.
“Maybe worse.”
“These little fables,” postulates Eckener, “are they to stir a dramatic catharsis?”
“That may follow, but everything is meant to build to what she calls the ‘Armageddon.’ It’s the final battleground of the reader’s good and evil— collision of the past and present. The mind’s monsters are flushed out—revealed and slain, and burnt in cleansing smoke,” says Lehmann.
“I wonder what dangers she presents to her followers?”
“There is something even— worse!” ominously says Lehmann.
“Than Armageddon?”
“When she arrives in America, she unleashes her new book. Already on the new ship there is a crate of them—locked! Two locks! Our crew is so interested she needs two locks? All she needs to do to discourage any peepers is to write on the box: Dr. Kohl’s New Book,” says Lehmann.
“Do you know what it’s about?” asks Eckener.
“Like everything with her—it’s secret,” says Leymann.
“I seem to remember—she speaks several hundred languages. Impressive—wouldn’t you say?”
“She spoke only in the language of coughs and sneezes when they trucked in the crate of the books. Her assistant said Kohl had laryngitis or some such malady. I think it was brain-ingitis. It seemed she didn’t understand, or want to understand anything I said,” says Leymann.
“Geniuses—” says Eckener. “Sometimes they are peculiar.”
“Peculiar—yes!” Leymann derisively shrugs, “Genius, huh!”
Further exasperating Lehmann’s “urgent” call for action, Eckener rhapsodizes about Dr. Kohl in his mocking faux poetic tone, injecting what he has just learned about her book. “She is to take a gaggle of girls across the mighty sea on a recruiting tour—a modern Homeric Odyssey. Yet! As my attentive captain, so forcefully brings to my attention, our feminine Odysseus can’t even get to the launch in time—the first day of her historic voyage. What are we to think? What is the world to think of ‘that’ woman? And yet, it is up to ‘that woman’ to select the next generation of geniuses? Is the future of the world safe in her hands?”
Ignoring Eckener’s poetic indulgence, Lehmann rhetorically asks, “What about the girls? Their disappointment—their humiliation if the trip is cancelled. Their families—all here. Some for a week! Their leader, and I choke calling her that—is not!”
“At worse—delay. No matter what—no cancellation,” says Eckener walking over to his huge barred window covering half of his office. Puffing on his cigar stub, he studies the crowd. “It’s looking like an American barnstorming show. Hundreds are arriving— cars, wagons, and buses. We haven’t had this kind of interest since the Bodense. No matter what happens today, we will act like professionals.”
“And that woman?” asks Lehmann.
“I have a feeling,” he says walking into his back office, “Nothing more tangible.”
“Herr Doktor, that feeling says…” Lehmann shouts back to him.
He extinguishes his cigar into an ash heap barely contained by his twenty-eight-sided wire ashtray, which is sculpted to resemble an airship frame. Picking up the black telephone, he yells to Lehmann, “She is not what she appears to you—now.”
Zeppelin has adequate administrative offices. But Eckener works out of the cramped “crow’s nest” in factory hanger One, ever since the start of the construction of the Graf Zeppelin. Noise and welding and petrol fumes seem to collect outside of his door, but nothing, with the aid of his powerful binoculars, from this vantage point, escapes his attention. Outside the spectators find their way to the “pavilion,” which is just a dot of 47,777 acres of craggy flat land used by Zeppelin along the glistening shore of Lake Constance in the village of Friedrichshafen, in southwestern Baden-Württemberg.
From the sky the sheds look like sharply contoured hills more than man-made structures. Two are old style aviation barns with gently sloping roofs, constructed from corrugated steel panels on an iron skeleton. The North Shed, the smaller of the two, survived the battering of the war a decade earlier with only a few scattered blemishes. The South Shed is only seven month old and is an unintended monument to a post war victory. It was created to be the workshop and testing hanger of one of the world’s most curious international joint-ventures between a victor and the vanquished. In a crafty maneuver, Hugo Eckener struck a deal with the German government, and the American Navy. He promised to deliver to them a flying machine of unimaginable size and strength, while at the same time helping the post war German government work off some of its reparations required in the Treaty of Versailles. This agreement allowed Zeppelin to keep its doors open least a while longer, but Eckener’s company would soon hunger again. Its next venture, if possible, would be even more bizarre and less popular.
The third hanger, known simply by the workers as the “Red Shed,” resulted from that arrangement. Located 700 feet to the right of the South Shed, it was something alien to aviation; sporting geometry unlike anything ever seen on that scale. At 275 feet, it stood nearly as tall, as the Statue of Liberty on her pedestal, making it twice the height, but only half the length of the other two sheds. However, it was not only its dimensions that made the shed remarkable. It was made from more than a million yards of what appeared to be crimson silk, supposedly salvaged from a sunken British freighter off Hummingbird Island. As fabulous as the material was, there was something else making it the most extraordinary airship hanger. Unlike the shed built for the Los Angeles, which might silhouette against the night sky for decades, this hanger would be gone before this morning would be over.
Rendezvous in Stuttgart
Map room: 4:53 a.m.
“Strasburg! She’s in Strasburg!” Eckener shouts triumphantly marching back into the main room.
“Why there—not here?” Lehmann demands.
“Asking her is risky. Remember she speaks two hundred languages, writes articles for prestigious trade journals and continuously lectures.”
“Offending her! Under these conditions? Not a consideration!” pounds Lehmann .
“Offending her? That’s not my fear.”
“Then what?” Lehmann asks.
“If I were to ask her to explain: she would. There would be no detail, so inconsequential, from which I would be spared. At 4:57 a.m. have we suddenly become so wealthy with time—with music boxes still to adjust and big fat cigars still to puff—that we can afford to squander so much for so little consequence to our immediate mission?” Eckener asks.
“How many hours will it take her to get here?” asks Lehmann.
“We’re not waiting for her. There’s a better way.”
“Which is, Herr Doktor?” Lehmann asks.
“After we launch, a few miles over the lake, I’ll dispatch the plane to the Strasburg airport to pick her up. Over Stuttart we’ll retrieve the plane.”
“That wo—” Lehmann starts to say but catches himself, fending off more ridicule. “Dr. Kohl—Natalie—is putting us through needless effort, expense, and I must say—risk!”
“Risk?” exclaims Eckener. “Don’t confuse that word with opportunity. You aren’t anxious to be the first commander of a Zeppelin to dispatch and retrieve a plane?”
“I know works!”
“Test conditions—only!” says Eckener. “Just for a few more days will we have access to this airship. After that, never will we know—first hand—the fruits of such high-flown aspiration untethered by constraints of commercial or martial utility, and yet nourished from the vitality of both.”
“For you: true. My contract, not your contract, saddles me with this ship for months—long months, while the destiny of the Graf shines only under your stars. My curiosity is not —” Lehmann starts but is interrupted by knocking outside door.
“Richner, come!” Eckener calls out, “We’re in the map room. Come in!”
The navigator enters the office with a folder under his arm containing German maps.
“Lieutenant Richner,” says Eckener pulling the maps out. “Please explain the logistics of picking up ‘that woman,’ as Lehmann calls her.”
“Strasburg!” Richner says a little louder than necessary, trying to capture the attention of his senior officers, before he constructs the tedious series of times and locations. “One hundred fourteen miles from here,” he says and pauses while he draws a line from Friedricshaven to Strasburg. Lehmann breaks from his anger to look at the map and Eckener’s eyes follow. Richner continues, “Once dispatched, the plane, traveling at an average speed of ninety-three knots arrives in Strasburg in an hour and a quarter. With no airport delays, the refueled plane, with its passenger, is back in the air—half-hour. Strasburg to Stuttgart—sixty-five miles; forty-five minutes. The airship will travel straight to Stuttgart: seventy-nine miles. Traveling at the much slower speed: forty knots, which is our plan—until we cross the channel, we will arrive in three hours.”
“Lieutenant!” asks Lehmann, his eyes bulging with rage. “Are you implying, it is she who waits for us?”
“Richner makes no implications,” Eckener, says. “He’s provided the facts! Infer what you choose.”
Studiously unaware of the embroilment between Eckener and Lehmann, chief designer Durr blurts like an ebullient child, “It’s calibrated!” Punctuating the finality of their discussion, he hands the folded record player to Eckener, quipping, “Mozart’s flute, once again, is magic.”
Calibrated, but voyage vitality— has yet to be calculated. Eckener places the seven pound Victrola on his flat palm, and slowly elevates the machine to his chin. His eyes knock back and forth like a clock’s pendulum, while he appraises how it is going to figure and fares. Unlike the many airship voyages he has taken in the past this is more complicated. On this trip, what he takes with him stays on the ship or he has to bring it back—using public transportation. The equation starts with the hanger at the Lakehurst, New Jersey. His luggage will be bused to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. From there Washington D.C. And ultimately it ends with the train after an infinite number of hurtles to be surmounted when sailing back on the commercial ocean liner.
“On the voyage back, I will miss it,” Eckener justifys his personal sacrifice on the basis of his ever-present foe, “I’m not going to risk the extra weight.” He hands the player back to Durr, “After the ceremony I’ll hoist it down to the ground-commander. Have Richner put it in the bridge.”
“Weight, or confidence in ‘that’ ship?” asks Lehmann.
“‘That’ ship?” pounces Eckener, raising the word ‘that,’ to the same level with his voice as he elevated the phonograph with his hand. “Should ‘Natalie,’” he says honeying Dr. Kohl first name to wrap she and Lehmann into a intimate lover’s cocoon, “learn that her sobriquet is shared with a mechanical object, she may get jealous, or worse.” Standing up, brushing over his closely-cropped hair, he says, “My head, I value more than my music!”
The Zeppelin president turns his back to Lehmann and Durr to check the progress of spectators’ assembling in the airfield. In the glass’ reflection, smeared from years of cigar smoke, absently Eckener straightens his tie while peering down at the shadowy hurly-burly. The headlights of the automobile and open back trucks crisscrosses like friendly warriors, but never clash. The shifting light from the dozens of torches’ knocked around by the breeze, flicker and bob like diamond buoys in a moon lit black river.
“As they leave here, I wonder,” ruminates Eckener. “What will they think? Will it be something—transcendental, or will they dismiss the morning as peculiar, but unimportant?”
“Each will,” Durr says, stretching his arms, “interpret today’s events in his own way, and even then it is subject to change with each experience they have.”
Bolting from his chair Lehmann says ruefully, “As fascinating as these philosophical musings can be, I have launch duties. At the risk of missing your next lecture, I must depart.”
“Captain Lehmann’s right,” Durr says, grapping the Victrola. “We can all busy ourselves.” He manages to pop out the office a second before Lehmann.
Following Durr’s egress, Lehmann steps outside. The tense officer, waiting for a private word with Eckener, expels some of his muscular tension by leaning perilously backwards against the cold railing using his feet as clamps, as Durr, carrying the Victrola, cautiously climbs down the seven flights of metal stairs.
Eckener wrenches his eyes off the welter of automobile lights and torches. Nostalgically he surveys the clutter of weather charts, mechanical diagrams and airship drawings filling his desk, pouring out of his cabinets and plastering his walls. Until he returns from America, this is the last time he will have the comfort of the “Crow’s Nest.” Crossing the Atlantic, although the most spectacular, will be the shortest part of the voyage. It will only take three or four days.
Once the airship docks at the huge Air Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey, Eckener is to relinquish total command to Lehmann, who has agreed, although reluctantly, to captain the vessel for up to one year. Serving him is an American crew of experienced seamen and aviators crew, supplemented by a few Brits. They are all on sabbatical from Goodyear in Akron, Ohio.
The bulk of the month, Eckener will be consumed with other airship business and returning to Germany. To eventually acquire helium for his own airship, Eckener will plant seeds by lobbying Washington.
The war has been over for almost ten years. International air travel can do more to foster peaceful relations than helium, as a potential weapon, can do harm. This is the argument Eckener will pose when he pigeonholes his congressional contacts, and possibly the President of the United States, himself. Also, before he leaves the States, he will give several lectures to German/American groups to raise funds for the completion of the new airship.
He flips a single switch. All of the lights in his office turn off. Behind him, Eckener slams the door to the “Crow’s Nest”—shut! The metallic echo, like a leviathan’s wind chime, fractures into a thousand pieces against the hanger’s corrugated ceiling. Jingling, jangling notes rain over the of duralumin girders and beams, which belong to the unfinished airship, with the alpha numeric designation of LZ-127—but to those who cling to its lofty dream, they know, one resplendent day, in honor of the company’s founder, it shall be christened: the Graf Zeppelin. It’s seventy lateral frames, like a giant’s ribcage, is as evocative of Ahab’s revenge as Zeppelin’s redemption. At 777 feet, the Graf is ten times the length of Melville’s monstrous sperm whale. If the largest of all mammals, Moby Dick’s bigger brother, the blue whale, were laid end to end within a single frame, there would still be enough space for the creature to be encircled by a parade of floppy eared African elephants, escorted by a team of frenzied zebras. Securing both locks, Eckener smiles at Lehmenn, untangling his long legs from the bottom rail.
Clip-clopping down the stairs, already three flights ahead is the elderly Durr.
Suddenly starting to descend the stairs, Eckener and Lehmann are paralyzed.
Something commonplace is chillingly exalted.
Although the Graf’s skeleton is far from finished, near its nose there is already some of flesh covering the bones. The heavy cotton sheets of ship’s skin is stretched, laced onto the frame, and lacquered with seven coats of plasticised doping compound, turning textile to crust. The veneer gives the ship’s exterior the simplicity of a silver cigar.
The Graf, in construction looks like a wire frame Rorschach test, revealing as much about the viewer as the viewed. Unlike the Swiss psychiatrist’s arbitrary black and gray inkblots, the explosion of intersecting metal planes and spider web cables, are calculated with gem cutter’s precision. The mathematician may conceive that the equilateral triangle is the ship’s fundamental atomic structure, but for the romantic, the triangles may not exist as separate entities, but as fused pairs—diamonds: embraced by miles of trusses, like adventurous slender bridges.
It is neither math nor love arresting Eckener and Lehmann’s attention. It’s an oddly ecclesiastic image for an industrial for this setting. Theology in the Zeppelin hanger: is not just strong—but double-jointed. The shed itself, reeks not only of petrol fumes and grease, but is perfumed with the stench of holiness. On cloudless Sunday mornings, when it is bright and clear, the presence of an almighty is most acutely pronounced. The glaring overheads are shut off. Two parallel skylights, wider on the east, narrower on the west, running the hanger’s entire length are the factory’s only source of light. On these mornings at about eleven o’clock, through the eastern glass portal, from ninety-three million miles away, the deity’s solar sickle, scintillating with brilliant dust particles, slices the factory floor into jagged slabs of black and white.
For those Germans who have yet to visit the Cathedral of Cologne, the Zeppelin hanger is probably largest edifice they’ll have ever witnessed. This cavernous industrial tableau is surprisingly is even more metaphysical than the five hundred foot spires of that house of worship. The intricate girders and wire bracing that will eventually hold the airship’s seventeen gas cells resemble gothic tracery. The framework, in this embryonic stage, snuggly housed in its metal womb, has the mystifying aura of not only a cathedral but a birthing chamber, as well.
The flame from a lone worker’s torch, welding a rivet to a bean, is the focus of the senior officer’s attention. Seventy-feet above the cement floor, the welder’s left foot is perched on the top rung of an extended aluminum ladder, ratcheted to its third tier, while his right leg kneels in the center of the ship’s nose. Framed by metal high arches, shrouded in his shiny black facemask, wielding the blue acetylene flame he looks like a high priest performing an industrial sacrament.
Defying his otherwise efficient management, Eckener insists on a practice his critics call superstitious. While the company works on projects to earn immediate cash, Eckener requires at least one man, chosen by lot, at half pay, to soldier the lonely burden of carrying the Graf’s torch. Yesterday Lehmann stood in front of the “Crow’s Nest,” noticing that day’s victim hauling a girder towards the infrastructure. He summarized his contempt for the futile practice, by commenting that the worker looks like a “crippled ant dragging a kernel of corn to an empty cob.”
This morning, while contemplating crossing the Atlantic on an airship built to fulfill someone else’s purpose, Eckener and Lehmann look at the sole welder, not with the usual commiseration, condolence or pity— but envy.
International air taxis
Twenty-seven years ago, July 2, 1900, at seven in the morning, the dream began—but Eckener didn’t know it. He raised anchor and allowed his rented sailboat to drift the Baltic Sea. Drifting was not foreign to young Hugo. The annuity from his father’s cigar fortune afforded him that privilege and the curse. As a dilettante scholar, he lived modestly in the Shangri-La kingdom of Friedrichshafen, known for it mountain washed air. Health was his original purpose for moving there a year earlier with his wife, Johanna and two daughters, Lotte and baby Hanneliese. While on a seven-month tour of Egypt, he contracted a lung infection. He feared might have been the respiratory disease, which killed his father—tuberculosis. In college he tossed his mind at a wide palette of subjects, including pure philosophy, experimental psychology but editors shunned everything on these topics and only published his articles on economics.
On that same morning, a stocky man with a pugnacious Alpine nose wearing a walrus mustache, old enough to be Hugo’s father, was also on the water. Unlike Hugo, he was not drifting, but about to fly. His given name: Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich von Zeppelin. In Friedrichshafen he was known by his legitimate title: The Count. However, those who knew of his passion had another title for him: the “Crazy Count.” Using Lake Constance as his airfield he was testing his first dirigible, coded LZ-1. "L" stood for "luft", German for air, and "Z" for Zeppelin. For two years the Count and seven zealot engineers constructed the ship under grueling conditions. To save money for aluminum and to test the wind, they built their factory and hanger on ninety-seven floats and kept it docked on the lake.
Hundreds of boisterous curiosity seekers, drinking steaming coffee and warm beer, watched the Count chug his little steamboat to the floating shed. Using a hemp towline he pulled the four-hundred-foot silver sausage out of the hanger. The spectators had heard the rumors that it was supposed to fly, but guffawed and sniggered when the engines, supported by two shoes, coughed to life. The laughter stopped. The contraption was pushed into the air by its two fourteen-horsepower Daimler engines. In a few seconds it whizzed over the calm waters at a boneshaking speed of fifteen-miles an hour, twice as fast as a man runs. But when it reached an altitude surpassing the Eiffel Tower engine trouble doomed the short flight. The front sputtered, and the back died.
The stabilizer, which kept the ship horizontal, was by jolted the loss of power. Its seventy-pound free weight, which swung on a 200-foot string, broke loose. The LZ-1 cart wheeled into the lake and was kicked by a gust of sadistic wind, causing the ship to ignominiously tumble until its skin was ripped off. The temperamental engines broke free from the shoes and sank to the bottom of the lake, and the center of the frame crumbled. No one was killed or seriously injured. The wreckage was towed, pushed and pulled back to its shed. The audience, in that short time, had sobered up and came to appreciate what they had witnessed. After docking the destroyed ship, the Count reappeared on the deck, stooped, and soaked. The lake water puddling beneath his feet, the audience reverently applauded the walrus face man who now owned a floating shed of aluminum splinters and an uplifting dream. Total flight time: seventeen minutes, fifty-seven seconds. This was three years before the Wright Brothers’ twelve second flight at Kitty Hawk.
On October sixth, of that year, the science reporter for the Frankfurter Zeitung quit. His uncle got him a job at a dime diorama at the Panama Exposition in Buffalo, New York. This required the distressed editor to draw upon the dubious talents of a freelance stringer to report on the second flight of the Count’s flying machine.
On the chilly fall morning of October seventh at seven, the reluctant local stringer earned a little more than just his fee. Innocent of aeronautical engineering, through his telescope, he watched Count Zeppelin direct his crew. In almost every way it was an identical reenactment of the July experiment. Like a raggedy clodhopper, the steamboat puffed and gasped to the floating hanger. Stage managed by the frenetic little Count, wearing his jaunty yachting cap, looking like silhouettes of jittery puppets, the crew scurried around the deck like frightened bug. Hooked and ready, the tiny puffer yanked the big sausage out of the barn. The engines, first the front, then the back, coughed to life and lurched. The dirigible skimmed the lake’s surface several hundred feet and then majestically it rose, and then rumbled towards the lake’s center. The was crowd bigger, and a little drunker, not just from the warm beer but the infection of the Count’s dream. This time the repaired LZ-1 stayed aloft for seventy-nine minutes, forty-seven seconds.
Several weeks later, a fire in a small girdle factory forced the owner to cancel his ad in the Frankfurter Zeitung, on the night before the paper was to be printed. There were no stories left to fill the space. Any news of any importance, and even the most inconsequential matters, were already in that edition—except for one story.
The next morning, Hugo Eckener was surprise to see his first aviation story in print. He was pleased. Count Zeppelin also saw the article that morning. He was not.
Socrates, the Golden Age Athenian philosopher, in Plato’s “Apology” describes himself as a gadfly: god’s instrument who prods and pokes his subject into self analyses, with the aim of perfection. The city’s patricians neither hired the sage for the job, nor did they encourage his zealotry. After exhausting their patience, they hauled to the acropolis for trial. Eckener, no less tenacious than his Athenian counterpart, also pointed out every flaw he saw in Zeppelin’s airships. The frustrated Count after seven years of harassment, summoned his antagonist to a conclave at the Deutsches Haus. The Grecian judges after weighing the evidence found Socrates guilty. He was sentenced to an agonizing death, forced drink hemlock. Count Zeppelin, over a stein of Schwarzbier, made his decision: Eckener was hired to publicize the Zeppelin Company. That night after they toasted, Eckener never drifted again, but never stopped dreaming.
On November 16, 1909, a couple years after the Deutsches Haus summit, the dream materialize into the founding of the world’s first airline: DELAG, the acronym for Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-Aktiengesellschaft or the German Airship Transport Corporation. Businessman Alfred Colsman served as it general director, and with his municipal connections he wangled government assistance. Frankfurt, the largest and most strategic city along the Main River was selected at its hub.
Colsman’s first official act was to hire Dr. Hugo Eckener, but it wouldn’t be until the middle of the following year before DELAG’s airship LZ-7, christened the “Deutschland” had its first paying customer. He was an American hotel, amusement and now art entrepreneur, expecting to exploit the maiden voyage to impress several art dealers, with whom he was negotiating on behalf of a New York artist. To insure that his party would have the entire airship to themselves, the entrepreneur bought for all twenty-four seats.
When Colsman received the telegram from the Hamboug-Amerika Steamship Co., his booking agency, announcing that the first trip sold out, he was delighted. Eckener wasn’t. This short-circuited his plan to exploit the voyage’s publicity value.
For months Eckener had been cultivating a grade “A” list of candidates for the inaugural flight. Among them was the young automotive magnate, Charles Stewart Rolls, who just three weeks earlier, he had flown his plane across the English Channel and back without stopping. “He’s the kind of ‘doublecrosser’ I like,” Eckener told Colsman.
Disappointment degenerated into anger on the morning of the inaugural flight. Making the best of the situation Eckener invited a dozen reporters to cover the launch. This failed badly. Flanked by two granite-faced security men, an officious French secretary kept the press outside of the waiting room. The reception got chillier. Eckener himself, hoping to salvage something, tried to interview the American and his entourage while they sipped vintage champagne and noshed on Russian caviar off of triangular crackers.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” This apocryphal quotation is usually attributed to P.T. Barnum. Getting publicity for the new airline would soon not be Eckener’s problem. In the following days, the four hundred eighty-seven foot airship was on the front pages of not only most European newspapers but miraculously, the most excruciatingly account appeared first in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. But it was not the kind of publicity DELAG or any enterprise wants.
An hour into the maiden flight the “Deutschland” was dropkicked thirty-five hundred feet into the atmosphere by a venomous thunderstorm. The sudden altitude gain forced the automatic valves to squeeze thousands of cubic feet of lifting gas out of the seven gas cells. The sudden forced stuck three of the valves wide open! Rashly, the wind, bending to the east, released the ship from its cyclonic hook, inducing a whirligiging free-fall, throwing off a forward engine. In ten seconds, the dirigible trundled a thousand feet and a thousand feet more, lobbing the twenty-one passengers and their wicker chairs against the mahogany veneered bulkheads. Captain Kahlenberg, trained by the Prussian Airship Battalion, was ill-prepared for such an emergency. All he knew to do was jettison the water ballast from the fourteen rubber bladders. It wasn’t enough to stop plummeting towards the fast approaching Teutoburger forest. Seconds later, the ship, yanked backwards, depleted of half of its hydrogen, crashed into a low clump of pine tree stumps, thrashing the skin and the crumbling fourteen frames. First to escape was the young blond navigator who jumped off the gondola into the mud. Jacket wrapped around his head, he yelled “Fire! Fire!” over and over again as he dragged his broken and bleeding leg behind him. “Abandon the ship!” repeatedly screamed the Captain, as the passengers, dazed and terrified, pulled each other out of the collapsing wreckage.
The ship didn’t catch on fire.
The all passengers and crew survived, mostly unhurt.
Loggers from a sawmill, who witnessed the crash from their cabins, came to the rescue with three trunks, an open car and seven bicycles. Ironically, it was the American entrepreneur, in his new white suit covered in mud, not the captain, who, from the logging office called Eckener at DELAG’s headquarters. He suggested a plan to get the crew and passengers onto their destinations and to salvage from the airship the only asset he considered reusable: the emptied gas cells. Eckener agreed to everything. He thanked him for his help and promised to find a way to repay him.
Although the airship was destroyed, for DELAG this disaster was just a temporary set back. Another airship, the LZ-6, fitted with the salvaged gas cells, was readied within just a couple of weeks. However, it never made it out of the hanger. A careless worker, while cleaning an engine gondola with petrol started a fire, consuming the airship in seconds. Nothing was salvageable.
Recovery from this tragedy did not come so quickly.
A year later DELAG roared back with an improved airship. Equipped with more powerful engines and more responsive steering. The “Deutschland II” was perceived to be the most capable machine to ever take flight. There were non-mechanical changes, as well. Captain Kahlenberg was fired. In the subsequent “Deutschland Debacle” investigation, Eckener learned that had Kahlenberg ignored the morning meteorological report. Had he examined the report it would have been obvious he was taking the Deutschland and its twenty-one passengers to a disastrous end.
Under the tutelage of the ailing Count himself, Eckener was elevated from amateur yachtsman to professional airship aviator, earning the tenth German license from the International Aeronautical Airship Pilot’s Federation.
Eckener was paid a monthly salary of one thousand marks, was appointed captain. His role expanded to included all airship personnel training, and the supervision of building of new airships. With this new footing, both Eckener’s and DELAG’s future appeared bright. It was not. At least in the short term.
If possible, DELAG’s re-entry into commercial passenger service, with Eckener in command, was even more dismal than Kahlenberg’s disastrous foray. It would have been slightly worse had the American entrepreneur been available to collect his debt from DELAG. Fortunately that week he was steaming to New York to attend the reopening of his own revamped enterprises.
On the breezy spring morning of May 16, 1911, twenty-four thrill seeking passengers settled into their wicker chairs inside the “Deutschland II” as the airship was walked out of the Düsseldorf hanger by three hundred exuberant ground handlers, and serenaded by a boisterous brass marching band. Seconds later the atmosphere changed: from breeze to bluster; exuberance to terror. The wind, like the talons of a hulking vulture, ripped the airship from the surprised hands of the ground crew. Somersaulting 700 feet to and fro, the ship smashed on to the hanger’s roof. One of the engines broke free and crashed through roof, landing on the tool crib. Using fire ladders and every inch of rope in the air station, Eckener, from the roof, directed the emergency operations to safely hoist the passengers to the ground. There were no serious injuries to the passengers, but the airship, with the exception of the gas cells, had to be scrapped.
The next morning change was in the wind.
A galactic tornado stormed the two flights of marble stairs past the sixteen-foot statue of Zeus and into the front polished doors of Colsman’s office.
Its ferocity: greater than the gust of wind upending the Deutschland II. Its eyes: righteous as Moses’ carrying the tablets down from Mount Sinai. Its passion: mighty as Thomas Jefferson declaring the self-evident truths. Its specificity: exacting as the Hammurabi’s Code. What pushed through that door was neither the wandering Jew in search of the Promised Land, nor the preeminent American patriot breaking from tyranny, or the Babylonian King establishing rational justice. That human storm jumping marble was the overwrought, keyed up Hugo Eckener brandishing his single sheet Magna Carta.
A solitary ideal born of his “Rooftop epiphany,” incubated in his sleepless night, crystallized into philosophy of airship management. “DELAG can not succeed,” Eckener said, pounding on Colman’s thick glass desk, “if its only objective is to advance its aviation technology. There is something better for the success of this enterprise than the fastest, lightest, biggest, and strongest airship. With it we will make history—without it we make rubble. That which resides in man’s soul is more valuable to this enterprise than the gas in the cells, the coating on the skin, and the fuel in the cylinders. A tough captain is more important than tough hardware. A canoe in the hands of an able commander is more lethal to its enemies than a battleship in the hands of a fool. Our battle cry should be: Safety—through strength of character! To have confidence, passengers of DELAG, and DELAG itself needs to know its captains have a code, and to that code they are welded. I violated what should be the first tenet of that code yesterday. It should read: ‘The captain refuses to fly under conditions—any conditions he considers unsafe.’ Our captains must be high-walled moral continents—not the last link of a sprawling archipelago of saturnalian islands. He cannot be a weak—hedonist who craves immediate pleasure or fears the pain of humiliation. Yet he takes risks. But, never the safety of the ship or his passengers. He courageously risks allegations of being called inefficient and even a coward, because he chooses the longer route, circumventing storms and hazardous weather. ‘He yields not to a schedule nor bows to financial pressure when safety is compromised’. He must be as Friedrich Nietzsche describes in Thus Spake Zarathustra, as having ‘the will to power,’ and the safe operation of his airship is the expression of that will. A DELAG captain needs to be a Superman!”
Colsman accepted the wisdom of Eckener’s “hanger-top epiphany.” With it came a never-ending list, starting with rigorous air and ground training, and the creation of their own weather forecasting service; first at their headquarters and later at every hanger. To reduce the size and cost of the large ground crew and to prevent a reoccurrence of “Deutschland II Airlift,” as it sardonically called it, DELAG installed a 30-ton, diesel powered trolley the size of two flat automobiles attached at the bumpers. Its purpose was tow the airship in and out using a couple thousand feet of rail terminating in the airfield. The startup cost for “Eckener’s railroad” forced Colsman to find additional investors and age prematurely, but the savings in labor quickly made up for it.
The reign of tyranny against Colman’s financial resources, powered by Eckener’s “Rooftop epiphany,” climaxed in May of 1911.
The assault was disguised as a friendly gesture. Eckener lured Colman to dinner at the Deutsches Haus, the same battlefield where he and the Count had dueled three years earlier. When Colsman arrived, he was greeted by Eckener, a heaping platter of hot parsleyed potato balls, and two unexpected guests. If anyone had seen him talking to them, he could be in the frying pan. They were: Wilhelm Maybach, and his son, Karl, pariahs of the German automotive community. Last year they exiled themselves from Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft (DMG), the manufacturers of Zeppelin’s engines. Earlier that year, father and son, along with a small army of other malcontents, had set up Maybach-Motorenbau, a small aircraft manufacturing plant in Friedrichshafen. Wilhelm had been a founding partner of Daimler, as its chief designer. When the news first broke, Count Zeppelin, disturbed over the possible disruption of his engine supply, said it was as if “Ludwig Durr were to found his own airship company and competed against Zeppelin.”
Partisan newspapers, loyal to Daimler called the Wilhelm’s decampment the “Carburetor Coup,” since he practically invented the gas and air mixing device. With no provocation, Wilhelm defended his departure from Daimler. “My purpose for living—stolen from me by a gang of conniving jackals. Reduced to the inventor’s office! There is no star so distant that it is less remote,” he said in a tone too cool for his words.
“An aircraft engine with remarkable properties,” Eckener told Colsman, “has been produced by Herr Maybach.”
“May I presume this ‘remarkable aircraft engine’ has an application for powering the Zeppelin?” Colsman asked Eckener then set his stare on Wilhelm.
“More power—less weight—less fuel,” said Eckener.
“One more horse, an once lighter, a whiff less petrol?” challenged Colsman.
“No! Fifty!Fifty!Fifty!” barked son Karl.
“Horsepower: fifty per cent more! Weight: fifty percent less! Fuel consumption: half!” said Eckener.
“The price?” asked Colsman.
Suspiciously, Eckener laughed and said, “The same!”
Colsman clarified. “The same price as we are paying for the Damlier engines,”
“No! The same as the horsepower increase. Fifty percent more! These are engineers, not quacksalvers. You didn’t really expect to get something for nothing?” Eckener asked rhetorically.
The waiter brought out four small plates of freshly baked lebkuchen cake, topped with a swirling mound of Swiss chocolate frosting. Colsman grabbed Wilhelm’s crumbled linen napkin, flatten it out, and dipped his finger into his chocolate frosting. Smirking at the three men sitting across from him at the table, using the frosting as his contractual ink he signed the initial “c” for Colsman on the napkin. Sucking the frosting off his finger, he said, “to a sweet relationship.” Colsman pushed the linen cloth back to Wilhelm. Examining the napkin as if it were a technical blueprint, the design engineer said, “everything looks in order, but just to make sure, I’ll have my baker take a look at it.”
For DELAG, and the LZ-10, the first airship to benefit from, things finally were in order.
Wilhelm Maybach’s concentrated genius, undiluted by bureaucratic forces helped DELAG build an intra-German flying network, spanning Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Baden-Oos, Berlin-Johannisthal, Gotha, Hamburg, Dresden and Leipzig.
War
Seven months into the year 1914, the dream appeared to be well under way. DELAG's airships had successfully transported thirty-four thousand passengers on fifteen hundred flights on a 107,000 mile air highway.
But Eckener’s was not the only dream on brittle triangular chessboard of Europe. Three years earlier on the moonless night of May 27th, 1911, the “Black Hand” a cult of Serbian spies and saboteurs, pledged a murderous blood oath, lighting a torch of outrageous scorn against the Austrian aristocracy. That vicious flame on June 28th, 1914 was carried to the streets of Sarajevo by destiny’s pawn, a nineteen-year-old tubercular with a loaf of stale bread in his hand and two bites of unwrapped cheese in his dirty pocket. Coughing with death, Gavrilo Princip, twice fired his stolen thirty-two-caliber pistol at the juggler of Europe’s fragile peace—the august Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his bewitching consort, Sophie, as they drove to the hospital to comfort their dying friend from the Black Hand’s morning attack. Dipped in the gooey venom of Serbian fury, the angry pair of bullets, like crazed crusaders, stormed from the gun’s barrel.
Sheathed in Chinese silk, Sophie’s stomach was pierced by the first slug of hot lead. The second projectile lacerated the Archduke’s naked neck.
Rambling over Sarajevo’s cracked and broken roads, the chauffeur futilely rushed the open-top touring car for help, as the two corpses grew frigid. The royal blood dripped onto the soft leather seats and steamed down to the wooden floorboards, where in little coagulating puddles, for the last time—it kissed.
In the coming days it became more clear that Europe’s chessboard was not really a triangle. It was diamond shaped and its infinite of facets shifted with the coming political storms.
The Archduke’s assassination required response. It came. That response, too, required response. It also came. Within several months, pent up hostilities, unrealized plans and ambitions of all kinds came to full flower, that summer the world—was at war.
What had been a dream was about to turn into a nightmare of proportions that had once been considered unimaginable. DELAG’s airships, Viktoria Luise, LZ-11, and Hansa, LZ-13 were nationalized and pressed into military service.
Both the Navy and the German Army got into the airship business. Although they had a few Zeppelins, the Army veered toward the dirigibles produced by Schütte-Lanz Luftschiffbau. They were a five-year-old upstart who made their frames from laminated, plywood, instead of duralumin, the aluminum alloy containing small quantities of copper, manganese and silicon. “Of course they use wood,” Eckener once commented, “Schütte’s backer, Karl Lanz, is a wood baron. Be grateful he owns a forest not a dairy. Their ships would be made from limburger.”
Eckener was summoned to report to the Admiralty in Berlin. His reception: less enthusiastic than expected. After waiting in a smoky line for seven hours, a lieutenant, half his age, sitting behind a drawerless desk, and a foot-tall stack of papers, informed him that “forty-five is too old to command an airship.” Half serious, he added, “tending goats” on the home front, would greater service to his country.
Unsettling news for the man who logged more hours in air than any human on earth. Eckener appealed. The most definitive answer he got from the lieutenant: “It may take some time.” He was ordered to wait in an assembly hall with half of the seats removed so some could sleep on the floor next to their bundles. Three days and nights, Eckener and seven hundred depressed countrymen and scattered chickens, waited to discover their role in Germany’s military machine.
“Eckener, Herr Hugo Eckener!” called out an attractive uninformed blonde woman, with a notched earlobe. Rubbing the sleep from his gray eyes, the exhausted former director of DELAG, looking twenty-years older than he had seventy-two hours earlier, answered with more dignity than his shabbiness warranted, “Fräulein! I am Hugo Eckener!”
Smiling with her gold canine tooth, she led him through a labyrinth stairs and aging marble corridors, overflowing with haggards, unshaven, unbathed.
On the third floor, she ushered Eckener into a dingy wood paneled office guarded by an imposing portrait of the helmeted Kaiser in full regalia in a broken gilded frame.
“Sit,” she said, pointing at the straight backed chair in front of a carved wooden desk.
Eckener blinked off a ray of morning light falling on his face pulsating through a crack in the heavy curtains.
“Guten morgen, Herr Eckener,” briskly said a uniformed man sliding behind the desk. “Your file—impressive.” He said glancing though papers.
“Not impressive enough to take command of an airship,” said Eckener blinking at the light.
Noticing how the light bothered Eckener, he said. “Excuse me,” drawing the curtains closed. “I am Colonel Wagner. I heard what happened.”
“Good you caught me, I was about to tend to my goats,” said Eckener.
“Goat herding?” he said quizzically. “I have something more demanding.”
“Sheep shearing, as well?” Eckener asked.
“Your assignment is compatible with the work you’ve done for DELAG,” said Wagner.
The blonde woman returned carrying a brown packet. She handed it to Eckener, then signaled to Wagner another recruit was waiting.
“Inside: tickets and instruction. Report to Captain Peter Strasser,” said Wagner as he stood to shake Eckener’s hand.
“Where am I going,” asked Eckener.
Although it could’ve be answered in a single word, neither Wagner nor the blonde chose to reduce Eckener’s destination to those eight letters.
Seven minutes after his train left the crowded Berlin depot, Eckener was sleeping, and remained so until the conductor awoke him with the answer to the question: Nordholz.
An officer met him outside of the waiting room.
“Dr. Eckener?” inquired the ensign.
“You are from the air base,” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” he said motioning for Eckener to follow him to his vehicle.
While driving toward the base, noticing how desolated the area was, Eckener asked his driver, “What do the men do when not working?”
“Drink black coffee at the railway café,” he said bitterly, then added, “when it’s open.”
Approaching the airbase’s unmanned gate, Eckener asked. “Not distracted much from concerts and the theatre?”
As the giant airship hanger became visible to Eckener, the driver said, “Nothing distracts us.” In a couple of minutes the ensign dropped off Eckener in front the half way open massive door. “Wait here, I’ll bring your bags to your quarters,” he said driving off.
Breaking the shed’s dark interior was bank of lights at the far end. A voice carried by a gust of the coastal wind shouted, “Welcome to Noldholz, Dr. Eckener.”
Emerging from the dark, a startlingly erect young officer, dressed in a pressed naval uniform with razor edge creases, blazing with an array polished metals and a shine on his boots that could light up a distant planet.
“Captain Peter Strasser!” he said in a spirited tone, suggesting more announcement than introduction. “And you are Dr. Hugo Eckener, of course, DELAG’s mastermind.”
“In Berlin, Colonel Wagner told me you would issue my assignment. Berlin’s thinks at forty-five I am unfit to command an airship.”
“Unfit—a harsh assessment!” blithely laughed Strasser.
“And what am I fit for?”
“Look around,” said Strasser, “this is going to be a school for commanders of airships—Zeppelins. I won’t tolerate any of those wooden framers the army is so fond of.”
“My role?” asked Eckener.
“Chief professor!” said Strasser. “It will be left to you to train the commanders and their crews how to expertly operate Germany’s greatest weapon.”
“Your role?” asked Eckener.
“Send the men you train to their deaths,” said Strasser.
“Pessimistic assessment,” said Eckener.
“The life expectancy of men who fight in the air is measured with a watch. With your valuable experience I hope we use a calendar,” said Strasser.
Strasser was right. Eckener knew it. Flying in war, whether in a balloon, airplane or the most advanced airship was a dangerous business. The odds of survival—at best: bleak.
Hugo Eckener eased himself into the role to which he was extraordinarily suited. As the operations grew, he was less of a professor, and more of a university president. He oversaw the training of four thousands students, and indoctrinated them in airship operations, including engineering, maintenance and meteorology.
Strasser’s duties expanded, as well. His jurisdiction included seven airbases, flung throughout the German empire. The role of airships, at first, was to spy on British dreadnoughts, “using the North Sea as their playground,” said Strasser. Later, they became aggressive offensive weapons.
Zeppelin production blasted into high gear. Friedrichsaven, and the new airship factory in Potsdam were buzzing. While DELAG may produced an airship in four months, now with hundreds of military craftsmen and engineers, the plants were producing a new ship every two weeks. Not duplicates of the same design. But like Darwinian evolution, they were highly calibrated variations reacting to the changing battle conditions. As the Zeppelins grew in gas capacity, and engine power, their range and payload increased, making them practical deliverers of munitions. However, there were drawbacks to dropping a bomb from a height of four miles. What was gained in stealth was lost in accuracy. The actual damage a Zeppelin could inflict, flying 20,000 feet above its target, was negligible.
An officer of the German army, Colonel Wellslacker was the most vociferous critic. He complained his own resources were drained by the navy. His letters to the Kaiser, claimed that Strasser’s Zeppelin program was the worst offender of waste, and if Germany were to lose the war the entire blame would go to the airships and the men who supported their use. Wellslacker’s criticism and a chorus of others, had no effect on Captain Strasser’s zealotry for airships. He retorted by telling his critics, “A bomb-dropping Zeppelin causes Londoners demoralizing terror.” The Strasser doctrine claimed they were as useful as army’s bullet spraying Maschinengewehrs and as powerful as the navy’s torpedo belching U-Boats which roamed the Atlantic, disrupting British and American trade.
Nothing could stop Strasser. Not the British’s “high flyers,” now capable chasing the Zeps on their own stratospheric turf. Not the anti-aircraft guns growing in range. Not even the incendiary bullets that set the hydrogen gas bags ablaze. Nothing stopped Strasser until the last days of the war, when on August 5, 1918 he led the last Zeppelin raid on England. His ship: the L-70. The biggest. The fastest. The most technologically advanced thing to part the clouds. Seven hundred feet long; held two million cubic feet of hydrogen. It’s munitions payload: four tons. Twenty-three thousand feet above the sea its seven high altitude Maybach engines could whisk over enemy territory at eighty miles an hour.
At 9:07 p.m. as the sun sets over the English coast, Strasser, in his command post, seventeen thousand feet above the waves, issued the anticipated command from the radio room. “To all airships. Attack!” As if an afterthought, he added three extra words, betraying an uncharacteristic note of self-doubt; “according to plan.” To the men who escaped death that evening, the extra words suggested that his authority alone was insufficient. His order was picked up not only by his comrades flying four older style, battle weary airships joining his raid, but it divulged his position to dozens of British fighter pilots from the Yarmouth airstation. One pilot in particular. The world famous chocolateer, Major Egbert Cadbury, was about to score his second Zeppelin kill. It would be his greatest military achievement since November 28, 1916, when, the “candyman” sent the L-21 flaming into the North Sea. This evening Cadbury, with gunner Robert Leckie in the back seat of his high-speed De Havilland DH.4 approached Strasser’s ship from the stern. From two hundred and seventy feet below he fired four drums of explosive ammunition. They pierced the L-70’s stern, exploding against the metal frames and set the hydrogen in the gas bags ablaze.
The corpse of Strasser was discovered floating face up in the North Sea the next morning. No evidence of burns. Metals intact. Never was it determined what killed him, but some theorized that during the seventeen thousand foot fall his heart stopped pumping blood. Romantics claimed Strasser knew the Zeppelin program was over, and with its end was his raison d’etra.
Even at its maddening pace, all eighty-eight wartime airships were designed by Ludwig Durr. At its peak there were four construction plants spread throughout Germany, although the majority of the airships came from original plant at Friedrichshafen, producing fifty-nine. The zenith of that plant’s production came in 1915, producing a record of nineteen. The Potsdam plant, which was the second most productive, managed to produce a total of sixteen. But production stopped altogether there by the winter of 1916. The Staaken plant only produced twelve, but the most disappointing plant was Frankfort, with a total production of one L-4.
On a chilly fall morning at 5 a.m., inside a cleaned up railway carriage at Rethondes, France, representatives of the Central and Allied powers put ink to paper. In a few hours the Armistice would take effect. At 11:00 a.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 the war was over. Disguised as a commoner, the Kaiser escaped by train to the neutrality of the Netherlands.
Back in French hands: Alsace-Lorraine. But that was not all Germany would surrender.
The terms required her to forfeit most her of weapons: 1,700 planes; 5,000 locomotives; 150,000 railroad cars, and something that would nearly end Hugo Eckener’s dream.
The war changed Europe. Empires had fallen. Zeppelin was in shambles. The Count was dead. Eckener was now in charge of what was left.
On August 24, 1919, just ten months after the Armistice was signed, Zeppelin naïvely launched the Bodensee, coded LZ-120. Although only one-third the size of the super-Zep that delivered Strasser to his death, its engineering was super. Its streamlined profile, and four 260 horsepower engines pushed the propellers up to fourteen hundred revolutions per minute. It wasn’t just fast, but at eighty-two miles an hour it the fastest airship ever launched. By wartime standards it was small. At four hundred feet long it only held 700,000 cubic feet of lifting gas, but it had twice the engine power which allowed it to carry twenty-five thousand pounds of passengers, mail and cargo. In clear weather, the Bodensee could rush twenty-eight passengers from Friedrichshafen to Berlin, three hundred seventy-three miles, in only six hours, fourteen hours faster than train.
Unfortunately for Eckener none of these technical achievements mattered. DELAG was doomed. Its post-war life lasted only ninety-eight days. Ten of those days were lost to maintenance and dodging bad weather. But its success was impressive. Despite the lost flying opportunities, Eckener managed to squeeze out 103 flights, carrying 2,380 passengers, 11,000 pounds of mail for 32,000 miles without an injury or loss of a single letter. But, this efficiency and achievement was not appreciated by all. There was an airship critic more powerful than Colonel Wellslacker.
The Allies extinguished DELAG’s dream. Too fresh were the brutal memories of the Zeppelin’s nightly bombing raids against British and French homes. On street corner’s there were ample reminders. The penny press was happy to refresh the horrific memories. Pages screamed with lurid anthropomorphic caricatures of menacing, cigar-shaped monsters, demonically flying against a black sky, lacerated by searchlights and punctuated by ineffectual anti-aircraft guns.
The Inter-Allied Air Control Commission, the zealous implementers of the Versailles Treaty, found their pretext to stop DELAG.
On a cold Monday in December, a high commissioner, accompanied by two local authorities marched through the doors of the office at the Berlin hanger. The commissioner informed Eckener, who had just arrived on the morning flight, that all flights are to be cancelled. Furthermore, all airship construction must be stopped.
While the commissioner watched, the Bodensee was hauled into the hanger. Helped by his German colleagues, the commissioner chained and locked the doors.
“Within thirty days,” he told Eckener. “the disposition of your case will be rendered.”
A year later the commissioner returned with their verdict. The Bodensee would be “seized, and no airships could be built exceeding a million cubic feet.”
This was a death sentence in the guise of a reasonable compromise. The Bodensee appeared to be successful. As an experiment, it was. But it lost money. It was expected to. So would very ship of that size. To haul enough passengers, mail and cargo to make a profit the ship would need to be at least three or four times as large.
In the spring of 1921 the Bodensee flew to Friedrichshafen to prepare for it trip to Rome.
The Commission “graciously,” gave Eckener the option: the authorities could fly the ship to its new home, or Eckener’s crew would be permitted.
He brooded for a day and in a telegram Eckener retorted. “Fly it yourself!”
Forty-eight hours later, waiting for the Commission to arrive he changed his mind.
“Friedrichshafen sabotaged the airship!” Claimed unidentified source in the French newspaper, Le Monde. A pressure bomb lodged into a frame, at a certain altitude over Switzerland, would explode, turning the “airship into a ball of flames.”
“Assemble the crew!” Eckener ordered an officer. “We’re flying to Rome!”
While twenty of his men stood at attention in front of the shed, Eckener wet his finger and held it in the breeze. “We are so fortunate to have such good flying weather today. Before we launch, there is a little item in the news that may interest to some of you. It’s short. So I feel it’s permitable to take the time to read it.”
After finishing the article, he asked. “This is rather short notice, I know. Taking this last flight on the Zeppelin, does it present a hardship to anyone? If so, please step out now.”
The men remained still and silent.
“It may also interest the romantics that we shall be passing where the American President Theodore Roosevelt spent his honeymoon in 1886.”
“Monte Bianco. The Alps? That’s about three miles high?” offered one of his men.
“15,771 feet! Europe’s highest point!” Eckener said, dismissing them to their stations.
From the control car, seven hundred feet above the Alpine glacier, Eckener caustically commented “the pressure bomb couldn’t have been German. It would have exploded by now.”
To further make his point, Eckener sailed the Bodensee over the French Mediterranean cities of Nice and Cannes. The trip culminated at the Italian Airdrome in Ciampino. The entire flight was eight hundred twenty-five miles and took twelve hours and forty-nine minutes, at an average speed of 65 miles an hour.
The Italian ground crew did something inexplicable, while Eckener and his men waited for horses to be hitched to the three wagons that would be used to drive them to the railway station. They valved off the hydrogen from the gasbags, allowing the valuable gas to just escape into the air. Heading back on the train to Friedrichshafen, Eckener bitterly criticized the Italians’ for wasting the gas.
Seven years later, when the Eckener learned that Bodensee had been scrapped without a single attempt to ever fly it, he was forced to applaud the foresight of Italian ground crew. “Why needlessly subject anyone to the dangers of 700,000 cubic feet of hydrogen.”
Upon Eckener’s return from Italy, two days latter, after an exhausting train ride, he was greeted with an a more ruinous complaint from the Inter-Allied Air Control Commission. While he was gone, team of their inspectors assessed his three sheds. Their preliminary conclusion: the size and capacity of the sheds—violated the treaty. Driving off, the French official leading the expedition shouted back: “They’ll need to be razed!”
“They’ll need to be razed!”
Help, in the most improbable way, came from the unlikeliest of quarters.
Like so many ideas, it was an evolution. A chain of events led to a conclusion that would horrified the original link.
Step by step, each link on the chain grew further a field from the original intentions. The unanticipated result was that the Zeppelin Company constructed a passenger airship in a design that was a starling departure from the classic Zeppelin, or anything that had ever flown.
In the aftermath of the war, in the American Navy’s view, the division of the reparations wasn’t fair—in at least one area: airships. The Navy and their civilian contractor, the Goodyear Tire Company had a burning interest in dirigibles, and to facilitate that interest they pressed their claim with the allied authorities. But, no airships were available. This was fine. They had grander ambitions than acquiring a war model or even one of the Bodensee class.
They desired an airship: bigger and better than had ever been manufactured. Through covert emissaries with loose connections to the American military, meetings with Eckener were set up. From the outset he was suspicious since none of the characters convinced him they had any authority at all. Worse, he suspected they might be spies from the Inter-Allied Commission. However, he became more optimistic when the destruction of his hangers were stayed. However, as negotiations proceeded, there were new problems. Somehow word leaked. The allies discovered that America might end up with a huge airship that could be used for military purposes. They were not happy about this possibility.
The Americans claimed that their motivation was to stimulate commercial use of dirigibles. The allies weren’t buying it.
However, Eckener’s was advancing at least one of goals, even everything was just the talk: his hangers had not yet been destroyed, but he was becoming frustrated that the deal had come to a complete standstill and he might be forced to give up airship building altogether if there were no viable contracts.
Then one day it all changed. An offer was put before him so ludicrous, that it had to be genuine.
Zeppelin would build a huge airship using a design unusable for military purposes. The financing would come from several sources: the German government, as part of their reparations; the United States Navy, who hoped to gain valuable technical expertise from the ship’s development; and the unlikely partner, a society for the advancement of prodigies, the Burning Glass Foundation. The foundation would be the actual owners of the ship. However, the helium, and the gas cells used, would remain the property of the United States Navy.
Surprisingly, the proposal was readily accepted by the allies. There were two currents. The fears and hatred toward Germany were easing; the initial zealous implementation of the Versailles Treaty was started to have a backlash. The allies were not eager to be seen as inflictors of unnecessary hardship on the struggling Germany.
Then there was another factor. The disbelief that the idea, as proposed would ever materialize. The scheme seem so far fetched and complicated, that the allies felt comfortable that it would die on its own weight.
They misjudged the powerful forces behind the proposal. The airship was built. This morning it leaves for America.
Pavilion
After a minute or two of Eckener and Lehmann’s reverie, the urgency of this morning’s mission forces the senior officers to concentrate at the matters at hand. They salute the Graf, and climb down the seven flights of stairs to initiate launch procedures.
Outside the hanger: 4:58
To emphasize the international flavor of the launch, Eckener decked out the ceremonial “pavilion,” as he calls the roped off area, with dozens of flags mounted on ten-foot aluminum poles. Gently animated by the cool breeze drifting over Lake Constance, the banners supposedly represented the prodigies’ countries of origin and their hometowns. For this to be accurate, there would need to be three or four times as many of the girls. However, the flags were at least all European, with one inexplicable exception: a solitary New York City flag. More correctly, it’s from the borough of Brooklyn, known for rundown tenements and a strip of dilapidated amusement parks at the end of a streetcar line. The flag is gold lined and depicts a robed, golden hair goddess carrying an axe sheaved in sticks. Unlike all of the other flags, which were brand new, its right edge is slightly burned.
The congregation’s spectators milling around, several hundred feet from the “Red Shed,” behind the rope barrier, were lit by palpitating torches and dog-eyed headlights. Their seats were desinated according to a rank. The fifteen rows of seats are divided into three distinct sections: the correspondents traveling on the voyage; the prodigy’s families; and everyone else, who included townsfolk and about a hundred amateur aviators.
The seven correspondents occupy the narrow first row. Like royalty, their rank allows a special privilege. The clan and the serfs endure backless wooden benches, While the scribes sit on luxurious brown leather-padded chairs, pulled from the officer’s mess. The clan holds the ground from rows two to six, while the serfs are required to sit behind velvet stanchions starting at row seven.
Scribing for the most influential news outlets, the correspondents represent: two wire services, Reuters, and United Press International, a s well as, four European dailies: The London Times, the Berlin Journal and two Parisian papers, Le Monde and Le Figaro. Curiously, the New York World, founded by Joseph Pulitizer, but now in decline, beat out the far more prestigious New York Times. Eckener had made it his business to not only familiarize himself with their articles but he had met all of these reporters in person—with one exception: Charley Lafferty of the World. Eckener had seen his byline on a wide range of articles, ranging from architecture to psychology, but the last time he could find anything that the reporter had written, it was as bureau chief of Paris several months ago. Without explanation, the Burning Glass Foundation insisted on inviting Laffery. Lafferty made Eckener uneasy. He looked vaguely familiar, but Eckener couldn’t place him. To make matters worse, there was something about Charley which made him a liability. He only had one leg. On an airship this is problematic. Two-legged passengers are knocked around by turbulent winds. Disturbing signs were already becoming evident. While the other six reporters sat in their special chairs, Lafferty, bracing himself with his crutches, stood at the left end, next to chair number seven. Ironically, he looked both helpless and intimidating. Eckener, as a businessman and as an airship captain operated on the basis of the most subtle of nuances. The silhouette of a one legged man hovering over the journalists was not an omen he welcomed.
The clan sat behind the press
Behind the journalist was the “Clan.” This was the family of prodigies. Dependant on the cooperation of the parents or guardians the foundation ingratiated itself by extending up to seven invitations, which included beautiful lake view rooms at the Zeppelin owned Kurgarten Hotel, adjacent to the airfield.
The third seating tier was the largest, and could be counted on to provide the most enthusiasm. They were not passengers, nor family. Although there were a few scattered mechanics, and a couple townsfolk, this rank was by the growing legion of European and American aviation enthusiasts. They lived to see recordbreaking balloonists and puddlejumping aviators.
Rocket of the Azores
The long journey to southern Germany, for some, was already worth it.
“Rocket of the Azores,” one of the princes of this realm, holds court at the first seat in the seventh row. In 1919 the one-armed French pilot was the first flyboy to try to capture the Holy Grail of aviation: the Raymond Orteig Award. It was a $25,000 prize for the first non-stop solo flight from Paris to New York, or the other way around.
Rocket’s real name was Jean Lucien. The moniker was bestowed on him by the newspapers after a ruptured fuel line caused his twin-engine plane to crash off the coast of the Azores.
Control tower operator prepares for launch
A light flashing out of the door of the South Hanger is the first sign of the launch activity. It’s waved by thirty seven-year-old Commander Gresham briskly jogging toward the triangular mooring mast. The 150 foot tower looks a like a pyramid topped oil derrick on rounded base propelled by three pairs of tank-like tractors. He throws the crowd a wave. They respond with cheers.
Gresham climbs the seven steps to the first of three decks. Turning back, using his flashlight he tosses the crowd another wave, and they cheer as he disappears into elevator in the tower’s center. Inside the heavy mesh cage, he jogs a lever, which kicks on a forty horse-power electric winch attached to a two-inch braided steel cable. The car lurches, and grinds steadily 150 feet up the narrow metal frame shaft to the top deck.
Inside the spartan command post, Gresham turns on a hanging overhead light with a silver aluminum shade. The red mouthpiece phone, placed conspicuously in the center of the desk, rings.
Grabbing it before the second ring, Gresham, jumps erect. “Yes, Herr Doktor.” Listening to Eckener’s instructions, Gresham notices the fidgety needles and rows of blinking lights beckoning to him from the 36-inch metal control panel.
“Yes, Herr Doctor.” He switches the phone to his left hand, and throws a toggle switch. Four banks of lights attached to the mooring mast’s exterior burst on, casting a flood of harsh illumination on the north side of red beehive. “Herr Doktor, the lights are on.”
Glowing like an immense Chinese lantern, the spectators “ooww” and “ahh,” as if watching fireworks, as they get their first peek at the tapering red rings culminating to round the top.
At a quick glance the hanger suggests a cocoon, and the witnesses could not help but feel that a monstrous caterpillar was about to break through the casing and gobble them all alive.
Like a cocoon, spun from a mile of silk thread, the rings were actually one long expanding tube keeping its shape with five-foot interlocking grooves, spaced at three-foot intervals, animated by a gas and liquid circulation system. Inside are seven rubber arteries, reinforced with sixteenth-inch steel wire webbing.
This construction makes the hanger surprising versatile. Its sleek aerodynamic design allows it to withstand winds up to forty miles an hour with no additional measures.
But, should conditions grow more extreme, there are escalating counter measures. To give the shell more heft, one or more of the arteries could be filled water.
In the most extreme storms, approaching the ferocity of a hurricane, the captain employs emergency procedures outlined in “Schedule Seven.” Instead resisting, the hanger, owing to the ship’s rollers, can move with the wind on the land enough feet to avoid being ripped apart.
In lesser emergencies, when the ship’s lifting gas can be preserved outside of the vessel. Some or all of the helium from the ship’s airbags can be channeled into the gas arteries in only seven minutes. When the crisis is over, the helium can either be routed back into the airship or can be repurified and compressed into seven-foot iron cylinders for long term storage.
Eckener waits for the audience to drink in the sight then gives the commander his next order.
“Yes, Herr Docktor,” he says. Using his right thumb, and his fist clenched, Gresham pushes down hard on a glowing green half-moon button centered in the middle of the console. Holding it firm for several seconds, he releases the pressure. “Undocking, is initiated, Herr Doktor!” Three startling whistles, and a grim foghorn emanate from the shed.
The beehive unwinds
The top ring begins to collapse into itself, like a disappearing sausage. One ring recedes after another.
The press’ literature gives cryptic hints that the airship inside of this unusual shed would be a configuration unlike anything that had ever flown.
This claim is not a particularly amazing. In the last three decades the same could be said for so many things that have taken flight: airplanes with seven tiers of wings and gyrocopters with no wings at all.
As the layers of the mystery fall away, the audience’s imagination grows proportionally.
Although some are guessing that the shed’s beehive shape suggests that the airship would look like bumble bee, others with more imagination are throwing out the idea that it would probably resemble the more graceful dragonfly. However, because of the feeling that the shed functions more like a unraveling cocoon, this new airship would probably have butterfly characteristics. Some with a less flamboyant bent envisioned a moth.
Its shell now completely absorbed into the ship’s storage compartments, its contours are like nothing the spectators have seen go into the air. Unlike the clumsy rigids that the Count floated over Lake Constance at the turn of the century or the sleek Super-Zeps that Peter Strasser used to bomb London during the war, this new craft sports the most improbable of all configurations, exceeding the most preposterous of the spectator’s guesses.
Fidgeting next to Rocket of the Azores, a seven-year-old boy in oversized work boots standing on the bench, is the first to articulate what no one has yet to say out loud. Whispering to the Rocket, he says, “It’s an elephant!”
Transfixed on the beast quietly glowing in the floodlights of mooring mast, the aviator distractedly says to the boy, “I think you’re right.” Softly, as if unconsciously fearing to wake the tremendous pachyderm he confirms the boy’s observation, “That’s exactly what it is!”
The new airship is a twenty story tall colossus. It’s flying elephant with wings mammoth enough to swirl stardust into new galaxies. Its trunk alone is the length of the Statue of Liberty. Its massive legs are like ten houses stacked on each other.
One hand clapping
Lurching to his feet like a jack-in-box, the one-armed French pilot, exuberantly yells “Ho—way! Ho—way!” and simulates clapping by banging his left shoulder with his open palm. The group clustered around him joins the French pilot by shouting various interpretations of “ho—way,” and slapping their left shoulders.
In the rows behind him, witnessing what appears to be an aviation ritual, other members of the audience join Rocket. Except for the front row note takers, within a few seconds most of the audience, the klan, the townies, shout some variation of “ho—way, ho—way,” while beating their innocent shoulder’s into hamburger.
The mooring mast
In the mooring mast’s control room, the red mouthpiece phone rings. Commander Gresham answers. “Yes, Herr Docktor” and receives Eckener’s orders to attach the airship.
The Commander pushes the half moon button. Once again the whistle to blows and the foghorn groans.
From the elephant airship’s rump an arrow with a winch line attached is shot, sailing to the ground with a clang.
The boys next to Rocket asks “What’s that?”
“A line, pulled by an arrow. They well probably use it to attach it to the mooring mast,” says Rocket.
Gresham appears at the mooring mast’s top balcony, tosses a hook line to the ground then jumps into the elevator. On the ground, he snaps the two lines together, and then takes the elevator back to the control room.
In favor of recognizance, The London Times correspondent, Mr. Whitiger surrenders his front row leather chair. Passing one legged Charley Lafferty, he nods respectfully. Sidling up to Rocket, Mr. Whitiger introduces himself as one of the reporters who will be accompanying the prodigies.
“They’re aoubt to attached the mooring mast to the ship.” Rocket says directing Whitiger’s attention back to the activity.
“Mooring mast?” Whitiger’s repeats back to the aviator. “Is that the name for that thing? What’s it do?” asks Whitiger.
“For this ship, who can tell? It looks like it’s going into the elephant’s rear. Everyone that I’ve seen attached at the nose cone,” says Rocket.
Persisting, Whitiger asks, “Generally what do they do?”
“It keeps it alive,” says Rocket.
“What keeps this ship alive?” asks Whitiger.
“The lifting gas—hydrogen,” says Rocket. “But by now, I assume, that all of the gas cells are filled. They’re probably filling it with petrol and adding ballast. There’s always last minute adjustments.”
Interrupting, Whitiger says flatly. “This ship doesn’t use hydrogen.”
“What gets it up? Peanuts?” asks Rocket.
“Helium,” says Whitiger.
“There has never been a Zeppelin that uses helium. Only the United States produces enough for aviation. Germany is embargoed. They can’t buy it. The United States government considers it a weapon. Helium’s resistant to incendiary bullets.”
“This elephant is an American ship. That’s probably the difference,” Whitiger said.
“He’s right!” interrupts Herman Gegner, the Berlin Daily correspondent, who also traded leather for recognizance. “It uses helium. American agents are here—protecting their precious gas.”
“Where are they getting it from,” asks Whitiger.
“Galveston. It’s a Texas town—destroyed by a flood in 1900. Two weeks ago, the canisters were barged on the Rhine. I saw them unloading at that dock down there. Four men and two dog-faced guards. ”
Returning his attention to Rocket, Whitiger dismisses his German colleague with a half smile. “This mooring mast, what else does it do to keep this elephant alive?”
“Petrol,” says Rocket, “for the engines.”
Giving the London Times reporter a cockeyed smile, Gegner says “In the spirit of accuracy--a celebration in which Mr.Whitiger is usually the absent or tardy guest, it should be noted this ship is not likely to use gasoline.”
“What then, Mr. Gegner, peanut shells?” asks Rocket.
“Blaugas!” snaps Gegner.
“How do you spell that?” asks Whitiger.
“It’s in your materials packet,” said Gegner.
“What’s that?” Rocket asks.
“It’s a mixture of propylene, methane and hydrogen—all weightless,” says Gegner. “To protect the ship from fire, it’s stored in bags within helium gasbags. As the engines consume the fuel, the weight stays the same. Quite ingenius!”
Design challenges created by airship
Power, strength—versatility: the three bromides Dr. Ludwig Durr’s uses to combat the meteorological threats posed to an airship designed in the shape of an elephant. “It’s impossible to overestimate the dangers presented by the weather,” he repeatedly told the Burning Glass Foundation in the early meetings.
“The fields of Ernest Nichol’s Ohio farm offer fresh proof. Particles of the Shenandoah (the first American built airship), are mixed in the soil and litter the green grass of the sloping hills,” Durr told them. A storm—unremarkable in strength and fury, sliced the “under-engineered” ship in half. The calamity took fourteen lives. An aerial photograph of the Shenandoah’s wreckage hangs in both Durr’s and Eckener’s office. Whenever a question arises about safety or workmanship, the old warriors win their argument by pointing to, or referring to the photograph. The prime lesson gleaned by Durr, is that helium, which the Shenandoah used, “is no panacea.”
The specific purpose of the elephant airship, beyond the recruiting tour, is not known by Eckener. Not for lack of curiosity. Repeatedly, while hammering out the contact with the foundation, Eckener tried to find out. Ostensibly he needed to know how it would be used inorder engineer it properly. This was a specious argument, Eckener could hardly defend. Why anyone would go to such expense to have an airship in the shape of an elephant was a mystery that burned within him.
Eckener’s crew suspects he knows its purpose, but keeps the secret. He fosters this perception. When it comes up, he prefers to say, “I can’t tell you.” Not “I don’t know.” Suggesting honor, over ignorance.
Eckener knew, and would say the airship would frequently launch and land. Paramount: comfort and safety, not efficiency. This ship is not the practical workhorse that the Bodensee could have been or the Graf Zeppelin would be.
To make the Hannibal as safe was the foundation demands, Durr insisted on the strongest and most versatile engines possible. After exhaustive testing, and experimentation with several configurations and sizes, Durr settled on fourteen 560 horsepower, twelve-cylinder motors produced by Maybach. The choice: ironic, but ultimately gratifying, yet it strained relations with Eckener’s key vendor, jeopardizing the future work on the Graf Zeppelin. Maybach, due to their long association, was the obvious choice. Even at the risk of angering Maybach executives Durr was not willing to compromise, putting Eckener in an awkward position when he placed the final order. After the show of disloyalty, Maybach was contentious, and resisting discounts and the preferred service Zeppelin expects.
In emergencies, theoretically, the airship operates with as few as two working engines, but Durr installed fourteen, nearly three times as many as planned for the Graf.
Compensating for the increased maintenance burden, twelve of the fourteen are bolted inside of the elephant’s body along the two lower keels, allowing easy lubrication and repair—a dividend of helium, since the heat generated by the engines pose a lesser threat of fire than airships using inflammable hydrogen. All that’s visible is the seven-foot propellers at the end of fourteen-foot outriggers.
This enhances the illusion that the airship flies by the strength of the elephant’s giant wings, which would never be possible since the flapping cycle takes seventy seconds.
Not only do the engines make the airship go, but they stop it, as well.
A single lever pulled from the bridge, disengages, realignes and re-engages the transmission gears from the fourteen engines. Velocity is reversed in only twenty-eight seconds. In ideal conditions, the speed of the airship can be reduced from eighty knots per hour to zero in seven minutes.
Adjusting the outriggers’ angle of thrust through its 70-degree arc, allows the airship to regulate altitude without sacrificing ballast or lifting gas.
Design and logistical challenges presented by the Hannibal were enormous. Plant capacity was stretched the to its limits, and so were the nerves of Durr, who required nerve treatments by his physician seven times.
Secret from the press
Constantly jeopardizing the project and aggravating the logistical and engineering challenges was a foundation demand. They required that the elephant airship’s design remain secret until the very moment it was unveiled. Yet they insisted on announcing that an unusually shaped Zeppelin for their use had been ordered. Conceding the difficulty of constructing and testing something so remarkable, the foundation begrudgingly allowed Eckener some latitude in his management of the press.
At the Paris signing of the contract, Zeppelin and the Burning Glass Foundation issued a joint press release. Although some of specifications were released, not enough was divulged to compromise the secret shape. Initially the American press reacted hostilely to the contract. Editorials in major dailies complained that the American capacity for dirigible production was suitable, and the dangers of a transoceanic flight would more than offset any technological advantage gained by using the German firm. But quickly the furor died, and so did the presses interest in the project. The argument regarding airships reverted back to their practicality in an era with dominated by airplane. In the minds of the press and the public they represented, the airship was little more than a quaint anachronism.
Tall as a skyscraper
Apart from such ornamentation, as a trunk, tail, a couple ears and four legs, the cylindrical frame infrastructure of the elephant airship was the same as the conventional Zeppelin, except fatter and shorter. Shaped like a stout coffee can, the main structure was 250 long by 170 foot tall, or as high as fourteen elephant standing on each other’s shoulders. By Zeppelin standards, these proportions were peculiar. The Graf Zeppelin, when completed would be 770 feet long, by 125 feet in diameter, a ratio of about five to one. However, the elephant’s ratio is about one to one and one half.
Had to fit in Lakehurst
The airship’s height is constrained by a single fact. Periodic servicing and maintenance is contracted to the Airstation at Lakehurst, New Jersey, America’s counterpart to the Friedrichshafen. Capable of housing three Woolworths, side by side its hanger is the “world’s largest room.” Its doors are two 172-foot tall counterbalanced leaves weighing more than a battleship. The head of elephant airship clears the hanger’s arch by seven inches.
Gasbags were ten stories tall
The bags looked like ten-story slices of neatly-cut cherry cobbler. In order to achieve the strength and the sealability required to securely hold the helium, they were constructed from two kinds of rare organic material. The outside was encased in brilliant red silk, salvaged from a bankrupt American circus which had used the textile for a tent that showcased trapeze artists.
Strange lining for gasbags
Goldbeaters’ skin is used for the gas bags’ inner lining. Unlike silk, which is the product made by a fated insect, goldbeaters’ skin is part of an animal. It is the strong, translucent, membrane covering the large intestine of an ox. Its properties for preserving manuscripts had been known for centuries.
Its aeronautical use was unknown until one autumn day in the 18th century. On September 11, 1783, before audience of 30,000 skeptics, amateur scientist Baron de Beaumanoir launched an 18-inch balloon from the garden of the Hotel de Surgeres in Paris. Like a kite, the inflated goldbeaters bag was tethered by a 1,700-foot silk thread, allowing the translucent balloon to mingle with the threatening rain clouds. Intermittently, the sun’s light illuminated the clear balloon, like a glowing apparition. In some less sophisticated quarters of Parisian society that day, this spectacle initiated a flurry of tales about the coming apocalypse. Paper, until that day, with its restricted strength and sealing capacity had been the standard.
How the skin is prepared
Goldbeaters’ skin is painstakingly prepared, usually by the gifted children of oxherders and butchers. Using a razor sharp whalebone scraper, the fat and the stringy, uneven material is carefully removed. Out of the direct sunlight, to prevent yellowing, the skin is dried and softened. Finally, it is smoothed into sheets about the size of a man’s handkerchief. Whereas Baron de Beaumanoir’s balloon, containing about a cubic foot of hydrogen, used three single ply goldbeaters’ sheets, every one of the 300 Elephant airship gas bags required 20,000 fifteen ply sheets to safely contain their 10,000 cubic feet of helium.
Trap doors opened
Trap doors, attached to the elephant’s outer thighs, crank open. “Something’s dropping out,” says Rocket watching a bundle of ropes lower to the ground. Each of the four lines, branch into ten lines.
“Here they come,” Gegner comments as four squads of ten uniformed men, grab rings at the ends of the rope.
“May I call you Rocket?” asked Whitiger.
Silently angry, the aviator’s face ripples. “That’s not my name,” he says sharply; his bright blue eyes darting to the reporter’s pad. With “If you quote me,” his formality contradicting his easy public manner. “call me Jean Lucien of Paris.”
Tilting his head challengingly, Whitiger asks, “You wouldn’t be offended if the story mentions your 1919 Portugal exploit?”
One eye on the airship and the other on Whitiger’s pad, Rocket says, “Despite the lies of my critics, I’ve not forsaken the Atlantic, nor am I the coward they claim!”
Rocket eyes catch Whitiger inadvertently glancing at the aviator’s stump. “This!” he roars, “No impediment!” pulling two packets from the pocket of his topcoat. The bulky one is half filled with Virginia tobacco; the smaller, cigarette papers. With an acrobat’s grace and a magician’s dexterity, Rocket rolls and lights a perfectly formed cigarette.
Whitigers invites Rocket to expand by starting a new page.
Taking a luxurious drag, in a melancholy tone the aviator says, “Rocket: he smoked store-boughts! ‘Rocket of the Azores’ is a younger, less wise man, full of spirit. ‘Rocket’ believed that the flyer was courageous and daring.” Extinguishing the cigarette with his left foot, he continues in a voice less harsh, “Jean Lucien, the man I am today, is seasoned, more temperate. He knows that a transatlantic flight requires precise planning, a mastery of detail, willingness to compromise and the acceptance of potential humiliation. Eckener: he knows this!”
Snapping shut his notebook, Whitiger says, “Jean Lucien it is then.”
Eckener appears
A white uniformed squad erects a simple twenty-one-foot metal platform a few yards in front of the audience, while another unit assembles a battery of lights.
Staggering out of hangar one, clumsily shutting the door behind him, a lone figure meanders towards the stage like a determined drunkard carrying sacks of invisible ballast. It is the bedraggled, newly exhausted Hugo Eckener, starkly contrasting the dashing Greshman, stilling working the mooring mast.
“The old fox,” says the Rocket, pointing at Eckener, “is out of his hole.”
“Walks like an old man. Is he going to die before he gets here?”says the London Times reporter. “Fifty-nine? Looks a hundred.”
“Of course, he does—this morning,” says Rocket.
Overhearing Rocket’s comment, Gegner, the Berlin reporter questions Rocket’s nuance, “This morning?”
“A grand entrance. He’s going to miss it,” Rocket says.
“Is it theoretically possible,” asks the Times reporter, “that getting ready for his first transatlantic flight—in an aircraft, shaped like that, has depleted him, and his age is catching up?”
Giving no quarter to Whitiger’s opinion, Rocket says abruptly “No! Not Eckener!”
“Not Eckener?” Incredulously both reporters ask. “Why not Eckener?”
“He doesn’t need sleep or rest—not when he’s like this. He’s a camel. He stores up rest,” said Rocket.
An officer places a two-tiered wooden step behind the metal platform the moment Eckener arrives. Squinting, the Times reporter says “I don’t see any rest humps?”
“Rest humps, absurd,” says the Berlin reporter. “Ballast bags, specially coded. He stores sleep, rest, ambition in them. I read, that. I’m sure it in your paper.”
“That probably what accounts for those mysterious extra pounds in the final weigh-off,” says Whitiger.
Eckener speaks
“Friends, aviators, and families of the prodigies, lend me your ears?” Eckener, booms in a voice, startlingly robust. “Considering the size of the hearing organs in our presence today,” he says motioning toward the elephant airship’s giant ears. “I think that both Marc Antony and the Bard would forgive my highjacking and mangling of Caesar’s funeral speech.” All chatter stops.
Letting out a puff of smoke, Eckerner says, “While my officers, not to be confused with the Praetorian guard, hook up the sound amplification system, I would like to say a couple of words. I am used to giving orders over 400-horsepower engines. I don’t think many of you will miss much of what I have to say. In the back, I see some of my old faithful friends. If you have any trouble hearing—listen harder.”
From the back row an old timer comments, “My deaf aunt in Frankfurt, told me when you launched the Bodensee, she had to go into her living room to hear you. For her, could you speak a little louder?”
“Your aunt’s interest is gratifying, but since I have an eighty hour flight ahead of me, I should conserve some of my voice for another woman.”
“Dr. Kohl,” someone shouts.
“No! I was thinking about the great debate I may have with the Statue of Liberty. The goddess’ hearing is starting to go. All of the noise from the ships.”
Another wisecracker asks, “in a perilous voyage, is it prudent to anger a god?”
Looking back at the airship, puffing his cigar, Eckener ignores question. “This morning, the Zeppelin Corporation is undertaking a great challenge. Crossing the Atlantic by air— is far from routine. Those who have crossed, or have had such aspirations are owed a great debt to Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown who made the first treacherous journey eight years ago in their nineteen-hour flight from Newfoundland to Ireland. Today we are—”
“Dr. Eckener!” Interrupts, Rocket of the Azores.
Reluctantly acknowledging, Eckener says, “You have a question?”
“The 1919 flight: sixteen hours and twenty-seven minutes.”
“On matters about crossing the Atlantic in the year 1919, I defer to your knowledge,” says Eckener. “Those of you who are too young to know or too old to remember, we have the honor of being corrected by an illustrious aviation pioneer. In 1919 he made an historic flight. Like many who try to conquer the Atlantic, his success can best be appreciated by its spirit. Jean Lucien, would you stand for a moment.”
Feigning humility, waving his single hand, Rocket stands.
“Mr. Lucian,” Eckener asks, “what was that colorful name? Wasn’t it explosive and geographical? Was it ‘Portugal’s little firecracker?’”
Slyly smiling at the London Times reporter, Rocket says “Precisely, Herr Doktor, your memory for details— infallible!”
“This will be only the second airship crossing. The British R-34 in 1919 was the first. There are some other distinctions between this and that flight. Our voyage, I estimate, will take from 70 to 90 hours. The R-34 required 108. This trip, I expect, will be easier for me. Major Pritchard, the ship’s commander, by parachute, jumped to the field. Ankle broke, he directed the landing. The Mineola ground crew: no experience with rigids. Lakehurst does. Setting an aviation record: not our objective. Our mission: transport the airship to America. Crossing the ocean by cargo ship, with an elephant of this size: too hazardous—if possible at all. After this ship reaches America there are no plans to leave the continent. The Mississippi is probably the largest body of water it will cross. Once I get a signed receipt at the airship station in Lakehurst, New Jersey, my direct responsibilities to this project are over,” said Eckener.
Explains the course to America
The Le Monde reporter, interprets Eckener’s pause as an invitation for questions. “Dr. Eckener, the literature says the airship will always be with 500 miles of land.”
“That’s an approximation. Flying over water a little as possible is our strategy. For instance, we will leave Calais and fly the English Channel to Dover, which is only 28 miles over the water. From there, we will stay close to the British seaside cities, such as Whitstable, Felixstowe, Sunderland, Dundee, Wick, Brough and over to the most north-westerly point on the British mainland, Cape Wrath, which is fifty-eight degrees, fifty-five minutes north latitude, and five degree west longitude. From this point, when the Stevenson Lighthouse behind us, I will know that there will be no chance of land for about 537 miles. That is until we reach the east coast of Iceland. From about Hof, we’ll fly southerly to Reykjavik. From there, we say farewell to the Faxaflói bay and set across the Denmark Strait for 466 miles to Akiqsserniak in Greenland. Now our journey takes us across terrain only marginally safer than water itself. Here we cross Greenland’s ice cap. Save a few wolves, reindeer and the occasional polar bear, its uninhabited until we reach the west coast capital city of Godthåb. This is 437 miles. Depending on conditions, I may take Greenland’s tropical route—the southern cape. This requires 500 additional miles. We fly 486 miles across the Labrador Sea to Lacy Island, which is part of the Button Islands. This is a treacherous region with bad fog and fierce ice storms. However, once in Labrador, the most dangerous part of seafaring is over. The remainder of the trip to Lakehurst will continue to be near the Atlantic, but we will never be forced to lose sight of land. The choice at this point is to take the more direct route, cutting across Labrador, Newfoundland, and Quebec. Our plans now are to take the longer course, passing over the Cape Childley Islands. Hebron, a primitive place by most standards, will be the first major manmade landmark I expect to see in many miles. It is a Moravian Mission building founded 103 years ago. About 35 miles south we will come upon Bishop’s Mitre in the Kaumajet Mountains at about 3,600 feet, located at fifty-seven degrees, fifty-four minutes north and sixty one degrees, fifty-nine minutes west. At this point, we will journey mostly across Canada to Quebec City, making our longest land leg in North America for about 897 miles. Then we turn southeast. Ninety-eight miles later we enter the United States in Maine, and continue another 109 miles to Brunwick, where we once again rejoin the Atlantic. We pass Bridgeford, Portsmith and come to Boston. We turn southwest and cut across Worchester, Hartford, Connecticut, Bridgeport, Stamford, and then we sail into the New York Harbor. I expect this to be the grandest moment of the trip.”
“The great debate with the Statue of Liberty,” yells several members of the audience.
It remains how great the debate shall be. After loitering in the harbor for some time, onto Lakehurst, New Jersey.”
“The prodigies where do they go,” asks the Le Monde reporter.
“The prodigies, after a reception, leave Lakehurst by train to Alexandria. In that small city they will judge the finalists at a hotel called the Crossroads. I will be a guest at the Waldorf-Astoria. The airship will be inspected, repaired, refueled and prepared to pick up the prodigies and the winners in Alexandria.”
How many miles
“In total, how many miles is the trip?” asks Whitiger of the London Times.
“The entire voyage?” asks Eckener.
“Just your part.”
“At best 4,860 miles,” Eckener says, and clarifies by adding. “Unlikely the trip could be flown in less than 5,000 miles. That’s with near perfect weather conditions, which I have yet to experience.”
“How many of those ‘near perfect’ miles are over the water?” asks the Berlin correspondent.
“There’s no practical reason for that statistic, but I knew you would ask. Last night, enthusiastically, Captain Lehmann, figured it out. He approximates that it will be about 1,516 miles over major bodies of water. Rivers, streams or narrow straights—excluded. Compare this jump to sailing the ship directly across the Atlantic. From Esposenda Portugal to New York Harbor—3,400 miles. Ideal weather conditions, of course. Long jumps—the great feat of aviation. This airship will find its own place in history. My friend the Rocket of the Azores, can tell you a little of what its like to crash 1,000 miles from Lisbon. Had the Oreiga prize been offered for several 500 mile jumps, the $25,000 would not still be asking for a winner,” said Eckener.
“Planning any stops?” asks Gegner.
“No! Not intentionally. Emergencies may require a change,” says Eckener.
“What kind of emergency?”
“We have 6,700 miles of fuel. A safety margin of 1,700 miles. Should a storm force many more miles, I’ll have to get more fuel,” said Eckener.
The Le Monde reporter challenges, “Since this ship,” he said pointing to page seven, “uses an exotic fuel called ‘Blaugas,’ doesn’t this limit your opportunities? Are there Blaugas stations in Greenland? I hope for the safety of the prodigies, and for myself, your calculations are better than your choice of color. When the sun fully rises, I fear that the rays reflecting off of this red airship will singe my retinas.”
“The color—the Foundation’s choice, not mine. ‘Zeppelin Silver’— my preference. Its reflective properties make it less reactive to solar heat, forcing the ship to rise and fall with the capricious rhythms of the dancing of the clouds,” says Eckener.
“The fuel —your choice?” asks Le Monde.
“Yes!” Eckener snaps. “The fuel—less problematic than your question implies. Our fuel system is versatile. The engines use ‘Blaugas,’ diesesl, or conventional gasoline—the same fuel the taxi used to drive you here. There are fourteen 550 hp Maybach engines. We can run two on ‘Blaugas,’ one on diesel and two on gasoline, or any other combination. I’ll find fuel in any city with a taxi.”
“Dr. Eckener, the most perplexing feature—of this most perplexing aircraft is that it contains an airplane inside of its belly. For what purpose does this serve?” asks Le Monde.
“The craft is a modified biplane, with stubby proportions— a Curtiss ‘Sparrowhawk.’ I chose that model because of its narrow wingspan. Only twenty-five feet. It’s length at twenty-one feet—quite compact. Without passengers or additional gear, the plane is only 2,117 pounds. It has a powerful 400 horsepower Wright single-row radial engine, and reaches 177 miles per hour,” says Eckener.
“Its modification?” asks a reporter.
“A skyhook!” said Eckener.
“The purpose?” he asks.
“The original plans,” says Eckener. “Called for landing strip on the elephant’s back. The tests—disappointing. Planes sliding off the head. Sticking to the tail.”
“I didn’t notice the ‘Elephant Back Runway’ mentioned in the materials?” dubiously asks one of the reporters.
“Several of the preliminary items, weren’t included,” says Eckener.
“The skyhook?” asks a reporter, insisting on returning to a more tangible topic.
“The plane is scooped into the airship with the help of a three-foot hook attached to the top of the fuselage. The pilot loops it onto a metal frame—a swinging trapeze, which is hoisted into a seven-foot tall hanger in the elephant’s belly,” says Eckener.
“What is its purpose for this aircraft?” asked a reporter.
“Flexibility,” says Eckener.
“For instance?” asks the reporter.
“Launching and landing airships is the most dangerous part. A small plane, can reduces the need for that expense and that danger.”
The reporter from the New York World, Charley Lafferty, still standing on his one leg, asks, “Forgive me, Dr. Eckener, I can’t help but think that the utility this toy airline is far fetched.”
“Toy airplane,” Eckener says chuckling. “Rather amusing—the premise of the question, Mr. Lafferty! If the sun was higher, you’d be standing in the shadow of twenty-story flying elephant, and yet you have determined that an auxiliary airplane, with only a modest modification, is what is far fetched!”
“Just asking questions,” says Lafferty.
“Since the ultimate destiny of this ship remains unknown to me,” Eckener says, “I can’t judge, unlike our reporter from the New York World, what is and is not far fetched. However, Mr. Lafferty I will address your question by saying this. We have a situation which requires this feature already. The president of the Burning Glass Foundation, Dr. Natalie Kohl, who is to accompany the girls on the tour, is delayed. As soon after we launch, I’m sending the plane after her.”
Several reporters ask “Where’s Dr. Kohl”
“Unavoidably delayed,” said Eckener.
“What was the delay,” they ask.
“She didn’t say—I didn’t ask. Right now, she’s in Strasburg. ‘Mr. Lafferty’s extravagance’ will pick her up at the airport and she will rendezvous with us over Stuttgart.”
“Since Dr. Kohl,” Lafferty acerbically asks, “is unable to join the early, and probably the most frightening portion of the trip, will be it your responsibility, Dr. Eckener, to nursemaid the seven girls.”
“Nursemaid, Mr. Lafferty—hardly. These are rather extraordinary young women— quite mature,” said Eckener.
“Have you met any them?” asks a reporter.
“No!” admits Eckener. “Not personally.”
“Isn’t that odd,” asks Lafferty, “since they are an integral part of the trip?”
“From my perspective, they aren’t. The recruiting tour that the Burning Glass Foundation is sponsoring is separate. My mission— build and deliver the airship! Of course, I will do my best to accommodate—,” he says, stopping short, interrupted by an officer tapping his shoulder. Nervously he points to the east hills banking against Lake Constance.
Appearing at the knoll’s apogee is a silhouette of a procession of brand new1927 Mercedes-Benz sports models with a trio pugnacious chrome exhaust pipes, jetting from their vented engine hoods.
As if asking permission to board a ship, each car equipped with powerful, eyeglass shaped nickel-plated headlights flashes its lights twice as it turns onto the sinuous road winding down to the airfield. The left eye of elephant airship, using a 250-watt lamp, amplified by a seventh-order Frenzel lens, returns the salute.
The prodigies arrive
Relieved by their arrival, Eckener says, “In a moment, some of your questions will be answered. The prodigies—appear to be rolling down the hill.”
As the ritual of flashes continues, Eckener is silenced and awed by a stunningly sublime vision created from little more than an ounce of soil and a few volts of electricity.
Biting the dried dirt, the tread of the car’s tires swirls fine particles of dust into the morning air, forming a terrestrial nebula, consuming the caravan like a ghostly womb. The seven cars appear to fuse into a single, ethereal entity. The sleek white convertibles, encased in their cloudy tubular vortex, undulate down the forested road like luxuriating comets in a slow moving rollercoaster.
Eckener sees more than spinning wheels, illuminated particles of flying dirt, bouncing chassis, and the majesty of the sparkling carriages ferrying the intellectual princesses of Europe. It was grander— unseeable with just eyes, fathomable only in the hallowed chamber of his imagination, reserved only for his most august conceptualizations. Eckener perceives it as an electric current oscillating through the cars like a magnetic force field transmuting the girls’ individual cerebral energy into a combined intellect, forming an amalgamated mastermind, a super consciousness—pure genius.
The families, sitting behind the four correspondents who remain seated, stand first. Displaying expressions of pride, concern and curiosity, fathers, mothers, and even distant uncles and aunts excitedly point and guess which car contains their daughter or niece.
For Rocket the moment is more complex. He is agitated by a vague incongruity. His consciousness, swinging and swaying like a hysterical pendulum is divided into two hemispheres. One side— the pragmatic aviator, his technical attention fixed on the fluids and gases being pumped into the rear of the harshly lighted elephant. The other side, joins the vicarious pride of the families, mesmerized by the softly illuminated cloud, oozing down the hillside.
Rocket’s imaginary pendulum starts to dissolve. The two spectacles merge into a solitary image, and his anxiety is overwhelming—something is wrong! Something needs to be said! But he waits for another to make the move.
It doesn’t come from the erudite scribes, who dispense slabs of eloquence in 700-word dispatches. It doesn’t come from the wily president of the Zeppelin Company, who for seven months agonized over every rivet and decimal point. It doesn’t come from the townies, who by shear numbers might have offered the insight. It doesn’t even come from those who would have the greatest stake—the families; the girls’ conceivers and nurturers, the potential beneficiaries of the girls’ success.
It’s left to Rocket. He alone has to compose and belt out the aria to the silent opera, heave speckles of paint on the invisible canvas, improvise a system of trigonometric reasoning, calculating the cubic feet required to contain a quantity of genius.
Pointing at the twenty-story elephant, his one hand shaking like epileptic Hermes delivering the message of the apocalypse, Rocket is seized in a conniption fit. Involuntarily his lanky body convolutes to his trembling feet. As errant gatekeepers, his lips betray him. They allow the exorcizing of these incongruous words, “It’s too small! The elephant is not big enough to hold that much genius.”
Eckener’s eardrums like an arrow shooting through the crowd are pierced by Rocket’s revelation.
Walking alongside of the spectators, heading toward Rocket, Eckener says, “A lot has been and will be said about this airship, but too small? That’s surprising. I’m leaving all of my genius behind and reporters have sent theirs ahead by steamer. That should leave plenty of room.”
Rocket’s silent is buried in the spectators’ cheers as the caravan exits the dusty fog and the prodigies’ facial features materialize into distinct feminine personalities.
The fleet of Mercedes park parallel, seven-feet apart in a rigidly diagonal formation. The chauffeurs, suavely garbed in smashing pearly white suits, shiny black top hats, bright red bow ties and alabaster white-gloves, pop out of front seats to sling open the doors.
The girls’ movie star entrance contrasts their schoolgirl attire; navy blazers, knee-length shirts, and white blouses. Sliding out of the back of the cars, their demeanor is dazed than dazzling.
Their rescuers, seven young Zeppelin officers in starched dress whites, fallout to escorts them.
Strained expressions, nervous twitches and sideways smiles give testimony to the girls’ discomfort; wearing flat shoes, two stumble before clearing the cars.
Approaching the stand, the prodigies, cling to the escort’s arms like life preservers, while managing to pick out and acknowledge their families with little waves and forced half smiles.
The prodigies one by one, catch their first startling glimpse of the mammoth airship. Their expressions of anxious disbelief make it clear that even from the honored passengers, the configuration of the airship had been kept imperviously secret.
Dr. Kohl’s voice amplified
“Your attention?” Eckener, scooting out of the way of a radio technician, asks the audience. All but a few townies stop talking. “In a moment, through the use of this amplified transceiver, we’ll speak to Dr. Kohl in Stuttgart.”
Neither encouraging nor acknowledging the attention, the girls self-consciously stand solidly erect on the raised platform, while eager family smile and wave.
“The signal is steady,” the radioman informs Eckener, but warns of the “occasional interference.”
On faith that Kohl is at the other end of the transmission, Eckener begins “Dr. Natalie Kohl is in Stuttgart—at the airport. She is the author of the “Torch: redemption through personal mythology” and the new president of the Burning Glass Foundation. Her first major assignment is to escort these remarkable young ladies across the Atlantic to recruit the program’s new prodigies. I am now starting to fear I am verging into territory beyond my depth.
Speaking loudly into the microphone, his gray eyes scanning the audience, Eckener asks, “Dr. Kohl, can you hear me?”
He’s greeted with a fling of high-pitched feedback followed a raking burst of static.
Futilely Eckener repeats, “Dr. Kohl.” Only the desolate static answers. Maintaining grinning eye contact with the audience, Eckener with chafing deliberation asks, “Lieutenant! You did actually speak to her—a moment ago, didn’t you?”
“Yes, Herr Doktor. There was interference, but the signal—it was strong,” defends the radioman.
He turns toward the audience. “Technological failures, not totally unanticipated—have materialized. I hope, momentarily, Dr. Kohl’s voice is restored. However,” he started to say with suspicious optimism, “Zeppelin prides itself on our resourcefulness. Much like our engines, which can run on Blaugas, diesel or taxi cab gasoline, I can muster a few questions, while the lieutenant valiantly continues hailing Dr. Kohl.”
Eckener begins to introduce the prodigies
Stepping off the metal platform, keeping an eye on the radioman, Eckener saunters towards the girl at the east edge. As he stops behind her, her golden locks start to bob and twist like an apple tree bumped by a gargantuan. Her modest breasts quiver as her stomach convulses as if punched a juiced slugger.
Eckener tries to divert the attention from her as her shallow breath escalates into frenzied hyperventilation. He avuncularly smiles, and nervously improvises, “Since I’m so ill prepared for this formal introduction, it would be helpful to me if one of your parents, or member of your family came up to help me introduce you.”
Her bony shoulders and slender arms freeze as she struggles to say something, anything. Wildly darting, her starburst lavender eyes plead for Eckener to choose another girl—any girl. After an agonizing moment, her glacial posture cracks. Two fingers on her frozen right arm, jigger and twitch.
Eckener remarks to the audience, “This reminds me of the first time I flew in an airship with the Crazy Count, except— I was a little nervous.” Impugning the girl’s mental state, Eckener’s joke is repaid in the cold currency of silence, and a ferocious arctic blast ices the humor three-hundred spectators into a frigid army and the six other prodigies into a gallery of cold marble figurines.
Suddenly it’s uneasily quiet and still. The only audible sound was the rustle from the fabric of elephant’s tremendous wings, knocked around by the morning breeze.
The frost abruptly ends as the radioman shouts, “Kohl is back!”
“Patch her through—quickly!” says relieved Eckener.
A crackled voice through a thin blanket of static asks, “Dr. Eckner, can you hear me?”
Crouching over the desk model, spring-held carbon microphone, he excitedly asks “Do I have the pleasure,” he says pushing the smudged bakelite receiver hard against his good ear, “of speaking to eminent Dr. Kohl?”
Haltingly she asks, “My voice—does is it transmit—acceptably?”
Surveying the faces of the audience, Eckener asks. “Can you hear Dr. Kohl well enough?”
Looking at audience’s faces for reassurance Eckener says, “Yes, Dr. Kohl, the transmission is suitable.”
“The technician here tells me that the transmission —at anytime —may be interrupted. So I will be brief,” says Kohl’s scratchy voice.
“So will I,” says Eckener. “Dr. Kohl, there are about three hundred people here quite interested in these young ladies and your mission,”
“I will try to satisfy their curiosity,” says Kohl.
“I was introducing the young ladies, would you like to begin there?” asks Eckener.
“Since I can’t assure the transmission will allow that much time, it’s best that answer general questions about the tour.”
“Of course, Dr. Kohl,” says Eckener. “I would like to invite questions from the audience.”
Eagerly the reporter from the Le Monde stands. Eckener signals him to the microphone.
“Dr. Kohl, this is Pierre Lagrand of the Le Monde of Paris.”
Flatly she says, “Honored.”
“Can you hear me fine?” the French reporter asks.
“Faint, but sufficient,” says Dr. Kohl.
“We share some common heritage,” said Lagrand.
“Is that so?” she asks disinterestedly.
“I was raised in Alsace-Lorraine.”
“I’m from Strassburg!” says Dr. Kohl abruptly.
“Of course, Dr. Kohl. I lived there as well, including Mulhouse, and Metz. My mother weaved linen in the textile factories along the Ill River and my father built Peugeots.”
“Monsieur Lagrand—the tour. Any questions?” she snaps. “At any moment, the transmission may be lost! We can share our precious childhood memories over an apéritif as we cross the Atlantic!”
“My apologies, Dr. Kohl, you’re correct. While we sip, you can tell me what it was like to live in a schizophrenic region with forced dual identities,” says the reporter.
“Your experience sounds more interesting, but for now—the tour” says Dr. Kohl.
“The tour will recruit the next generation of prodigies for the Burning Glass Foundation? Instead of chosening from European girls, they will all be American?” the reporter says rhetorically.
“Yes, Monsieur, the foundation is re-locating from Paris to San Francisco. All of the girls will be American. Is that your question?” demands Dr. Kohl.
“What possible criterion does your foundation use to determine if a child is a prodigy?” asks the French reporter.
“Let me clarify. Being a prodigy alone is not sufficient. The search is for genius,” says Dr. Kohl.
“What is the difference?” asks Lagrand.
“A prodigy is a child, usually younger than ten, who masters one or more skills at an early age. Mozart’s was three. We all appreciate the talents of an extraordinary cook. Baking pastry, brewing beer, roasting lamb. Preparing an appetizing meal for ten guests is a coveted talent; possessed usually by a mature woman. However, if a girl of six demonstrates these skills, we would call her a child prodigy. As enjoyable as that meal might be, even the most gracious of guests would not call the girl a genius,” says Kohl.
“Genius? Then what is it?” asks Lagrand.
“Genius is not competence! It’s not accuracy! Adding up a column of a thousand figures —not a genius. This is the domain of the savant. No matter how fast the competent child adds up those numbers, our perception the universe does not change. That’s domain of genius. Twenty years ago Albert Einstein publishes his theory of special relativity. He dethroned Newtonian notions of space and time, just as Galileo displaced Aristotle. Genius is not even accurate. Newton’s Principia, the greatest scientific literature published to that point, neglected much of how matter functions. Aristotle, ignorant of Newton’s gravity, claimed a rock falls because it craves to be with the other rocks. Foolishness—today, but his genius reigned longer than the Roman Empire,” says Kohl.
“You say that genius is not efficient, and it’s not even correct. But you still have not said what a genius is!” demands the reporter.
“Geniuses are blind to the rainbow’s full spectrum. This weakness forces them to focus their full attention on few colors; colors the rest of us may not know exists,” says Dr. Kohl as the transmission turns to static.
UP Ship
Exasperated Eckener, waving off the radioman, stirs up a “that woman” tone, saying with absolute finality, “That’s all from the ‘illustrious’ Dr. Kohl. Proper introductions of the young ladies—a casualty of aviation. Families— they know who the girls are. The press—in the coming hours, will have ample opportunities to interview them directly. In the back seats, as charming as these ladies are, you’re here for the Hannibal.”
Eckener signals to a crew of seven uniformed men to dismantle and remove the platform sections to the hanger.
On their return, the collapse and stow the rows of benches as they herd the audience closer to the lake.
A door inside the airship’s hind leg opens.
Pointing to the opened door, says Eckener, “Upon us now is the moment we have all waited.”
Two white-gloved officers lead the young ladies toward the door. The taller of the two officers motions for the girls to stop. The other officer says a couple of words to them. The girls turn and wave to the spectators.
Girls entered hind leg
Standing next to the Elephant’s massive hind leg, from the spectators view, the girls look like anxious little blue fleas. Turning back toward the audience, the seven prodigies get their final glance at their family while offering brave waves.
Disappearing inside the Elephant Airship, the crowd continues to exuberantly wave at the girls, as the seven journalists follow them inside, as Eckener explains to the spectators some weighty matters.
Without a microphone Eckener shouts to the crowd “The weigh off is complete. The helium inside the gasbags is balanced against the load—within seven pounds of zero. In minutes the passenger entrance door will be sealed. Except those seven mysterious pounds, when I have taken my position in the control room, this seventy-ton airship should weigh nothing at all. Once a strong man, a few years ago when the circus used our fields for their show, lifted the Bodense airship. It did require an Atlas, one of those girls could have done it.” He motions to Ludwig Durr. “Before I get inside, there is one last thing. Ludwig! Come here!” Next to the uniformed men the design engineer looks like he could be one of their grandfathers. Embarrassed, Durr guardedly walks over.
“This is the airship’s designer, Ludwig Durr. Except for the first one, he designed all of the Zeppelins,” says Eckener.
“Yes, Herr Doktor, all except for the first Rigid. Its hanger, in its time—just as crazy as the Hannibal’s, but for entirely different reasons. It floated on the lake so it could be turned toward the wind. The Hannibal, my god, could not have been designed by a younger Ludwig. If I were older, I wouldn’t have had the energy. The ship found me at the only time in my career where I had sufficient experience and enough stamina. Today, there is not enough left in me to dream up a skillet.”
“Don’t take that seriously. As soon as we leave, no later than when we cross the Channel, he’ll be working on the greatest Zeppelin—ever” says Eckener.
“The Hannibal is not?” Durr asks facetiously.
“It’s the sole member of a special class,” says Eckener shaking Durr’s hand. “In a thousand years the membership roster of its class to grow by zero. The next airship we’ll produce will be named in honor of the Count— the ‘Graf Zeppelin.’ In Hangar One its skeleton hangs—near completion. After we’ve launched, those of you who are interested, may tour the ‘Graf.’ You’ll be in the hands of the greatest aviation designer—my friend, Dr. Durr, whose genius—we depend on to Lakehurst—safely.”
Eckener salutes Durr, peers at the milling spectators, and turns towards the airship and resolutely marches into the rising sun.
The President of the Zeppelin Company and now the resurrected airship commander, harnesses his eagerness to rule the sky once again by forcing himself to stop at the entrance to pay one last public courtesy before entering. Sharply he turns back, and briskly salutes the audience, picking out Durr’s quiet smile and steps inside the ship’s vestibule. Behind him the door slides shut.
Grabbing the smooth ivory railing, Eckener steps onto the escalating spiral staircase. In only 29 thrilling seconds he’s corkscrewed seven flights to the bridge deck. Slightly dizzy, he firmly plants one foot after another on the matt-green tiled landing. He takes several reassuring breaths before tottering toward the bridge, passing on his left the gallery of garish hand painted murals, lighted by the soft glow of eye level portholes running the length of the two-hundred-foot corridor.
Rounding the corner, Eckener gets his first gander of the bridge in full operation, the radio officer shouts to Lehmann, “Captain, the first radiogram, what should it say?”
Preparing to release the two banks of guy lines, Lehmann sticks his head out the engineering cubby. Noticing Eckner’s laggard arrival, he looks up at the radioman and enquires scholarly, “Morris—what did he say?”
For a moment the radioman is stuck, then he speculates, “What hath God wrought?”
Absorbed in the pulsating grandeur of the of tri-level crescent shaped bridge lodged in the elephant’s cranium, Eckener vaguely overhears the banter, and absently preempts Lehmann with his own thematic version of Samuel Morris’ first telegram. “For this voyage,” he says incognizantely, as his magnetized eyes brush over the buzzing, whirling and blinking control panels, “it might be more appropriate if the message read ‘What has genius wrought?’”
“Yes, Herr Doctor,” affirms the radioman to a non-responsive commander whose slate gray eyes glide over the sinuous looms of intersecting steel cables, exposed electrical wires and shiny black rubber tubes, as if now for the first time he is seeing the glorious product of the revived Zeppelin Company and is contemplating his own day of redemption.
The radioman taps out the message and dispatches it to Zeppelin’s own radio office in Hanger One, as the meteorologist tacks up the latest North Sea weather in the chart room on the other side of the spacious pilot’s crib.
Amid the dizzifying tapping, tacking and whirling, Eckener solemnly settles into the pilot’s chair as if were an emperor’s throne and contemplates the intricate carving of the ivory rudder wheel, as if it contained a sacred message. Gingerly he places his right, then his left hand on the wheel. With his full strength, he squeezes as if soldering his fingers and palms to a sparking dynamo, imbibing its intoxicating current like an electrified elixir.
A shrill high-pitched note blows out of the voicepipe whistle, attached to the control panel. Eckener grabs its cone and puts it to his mouth, “Yes, Captain Lehmann.”
“The guy lines,” Lehmann states abruptly.
Before replying, Eckener’s eyes luxuriously sweep across the sumptuous panoramic window. The triangular glass sectionals of this extruding kaleidoscopic arc, not only catch but heighten the defiance of lake’s ripples, the compliance of the slope of Hanger One, and the contemptuousness of the razor jags of the Swiss mountain range cutting the new dawn. “Ready to drop?” Eckener inquires.
“Ready!” says Lehmann impatiently.
One hundred seventy-five feet below the bridge, the gray-haired ground commander, waiting for the ropes to unfurl, pulls from his unbuttoned top pocket—a gleaming whistle. Caressing the silver with his weathered lips, his team hears the silent shriek and snaps to attention before the sound pierces the morning air.
Raring like a hitched team of ravenous thoroughbreds, the fourteen men stand in ready anticipation, as the gray-haired commander marches past them, toward the mooring mast. Along the trek, he stops to examine the seal on the hind leg door. From the mooring mast’s balcony, Captain Gresham, supervises the last few feet of the cables and hoses retracting from the elephant’s rear. All that now connects the elephant to the mast is the three-foot steel locking ball, which at Eckener’s signal would be released.
The door seal is tight, concludes the gray-haired commander.
On the bridge’s, Gresham’s voice crackles over Eckener’s radio, “Herr Docktor, ready for mooring mast release?”
“Stand by,” orders Eckener, grabbing the voicepipe. “Lehmann! Activate the guy line dispatcher! Now!”
“Yes, Herr Doktor.”
Thick bundles of hemp rope, like oval platters of exploding spaghetti, unfurl down the elephant’s sides. Catching sight, the gray-haired commander blows his whistle prompting his men to scurry around the airship to grab the ropes’ ringed ends.
Lehmann looks out the window to observe the men securing the ropes around their muscular arms and torsos.
Satisfied his men have anchored the ropes to their bodies, the gray haired ground commander marches to the front of the ship, looks up toward the bridge and waves off Lehmann.
Eckener’s voicepipe beckons. “Herr Doktor, Ropes secure!” announces Lehmann.
Using his radio, Eckener signals the mooring mast. “Yes, Herr Docktor,” answers Gresham.
“Release!” Eckener says sprightly.
Immediately the lieutenant’s ringed hand pushes the green ball lever forward. The winch’s engine, at the base of the mast, like an awakened hungry lion, angrily roars to life, compelling the steel cables to snake over its pulleys to release an interlocking ball from its grip on the elephant’s rear. Then the lieutenant yanks a yellow lever causing the mooring mast’s tractor wheels to lurch backwards several yards to safety.
Finished, Gresham jumps into the tower’s elevator to join the ground crew.
The seventy-foot hemp tethers, anchored by the bodies of the gray hair commander’s fourteen men, is all that cements the airship to the ground. Gravity participates as only a minor player. The total relative weight of the 70,000-ton airship: seven pounds.
In a moment, the scales will be tipped even less. Having served its purpose, a piece of newly calibrated equipment, will be left behind.
A man of science, Hugo Eckener is not superstitious. In youth—a student of mind; in maturity—aerodynamics. The safe operations of an airship, he believes, is the result of meticulous planning and rigid adherence to protocol. However, procedures, rigidly executed repeatedly have the scent of tradition, which exudes the faint fragrance of superstition.
To the extent applicable to this experimental craft, Eckener is enforcing all of his usual protocols. However, there was something he was required to do just before launch, which endlessly perplexes him.
Catching sight of Eckener on the bridge, the gray-haired ground commander, using his pocket light, flashes twice, signaling that his men have deployed the guy lines.
Pondering the beckoning lights and switches, speaking to Eckener on the voicepipe, Captain Lehmann says “I am ready, Herr Doktor.”
On the ground, the fourteen men, tightly holding the guy lines are ready.
The journalists—peering from the observation lounge—ready.
The prodigies—evaluating their locations to sit—ready.
The anxious spectators: family; aviators; townies—ready.
The officers on the bridge; their crew in their work stations—ready.
Only one laggard—not—ready. Eckener is not ready !
One chore undone.
Eckener pulls down a hinged table and locks it firmly. Solemnly he places his traveling phonograph squarely in the small table’s center and opens it as Lehmann walks into the Captain’s Crib.
Incredulously Lehmann demands, “Herr Docktor! Is this the time to play music?”
Ignoring Lehmann’s protest, vigilantly Eckener winds the crank seven times
“Am I out of uniform?” Lehmann furiously demands. “Should I be wearing baggy pants and star-spangled floppy shoes?”
Wordlessly, Eckener places a smudged hand labeled vinyl disk on the spindle. Finished, he scrutinizes his agitated second-in-command as if chewing over the fitness of Lehmann uniform.
“A button, maybe two, could be polished brighter. Otherwise you’re a passable specimen.”
“How do you evaluate a commander who indulges his musical interests at the most critical moment of an airship launch? Herr Docktor, is this the time?”
Twisting the microphone of the public address system close to the phonograph’s speaker, Eckener quietly declares. “Yes, Captain Lehmann, this is the time to execute—precisely the terms of the contract which allows the Zeppelin Company to pay its workers and pursue its dreams.” Satisfied with the position of the amplification, he rhetorically asks, “Would you have me to violate my solemn oath, causing ruin to Zeppelin, the community of Friedricshaven, and possibly all of Western civilization?”
“Western civilization?” Lehmann retorts quizzically. “You underestimate the consequences. The gravitational pull of the solar system may be in jeopardy. Correct that—no the Milk Way, if not the entire collapse of the universe.”
“Finally, Captain, you are starting to have a realistic grip of the risks we face.”
“Risks I hadn’t counted on,” says Lehmann with depressed resignation.
“The moment the recording starts—release the birds,” orders Eckener.
Crouching before the machine, Eckener places the needle at the record’s catch grove. Taking several breaths, he depresses the start button. The turntable, gatherings its momentum plateaus its rotation at seventy-seven revolutions per minute; one less spin than promised by Ludwig Durr.
“Birds released!” grunts Lehmann.
A pigeon hurricane storms out of the hatch located within the elephant’s mouth. The feathered thunder, along with the elated cheers of the spectators watching the scores of birds escaping in all directions, submerges the garbled and scratchy sound of the recording. Only Eckener hears its message.
In that moment it was only one of many messages broadcasted.
Communiqués exhorting expressions of high hopes and soaring aspirations had been written the night before by the prodigies while they waited in the hotel rooms. At midnight the notes were collected, microfilmed down to one-seventieth their original size and stuffed into half-inch tubes, which were carefully attached to the pigeon’s strongest tale feathers.
As the hand-labeled record reaches its final grove, the pigeons are well on their way to the schools, the local newspapers and the homes of the prodigies. Its purpose fulfilled , Eckener folds the record player, attaches it to a line and lowers it through a porthole in the elephant’s ear to the awaiting gray-haired ground commander.
Reeling the line back onto the bridge, Eckener gives the order that makes sense to his first officer.
“Up ship!” briskly announces Eckener.
Energetically Captain Lehmann acknowledges the order. “Yes, Herr Docktor!” He presses the initial series of seven buttons causing the warning siren to wail and a new flurry of cheers to erupt from the spectators. The shriek of gray-haired ground commander’s silver whistle joins the cacophony, prompting his men to tighten their grip on the guy lines, anticipating that the ship is about to become lighter by 583 pounds of water.
“Prepare to jettison ballast!” orders Eckener.
“Ready! Herr Docktor!” acknowledges Lehmann walking to the ballast board.
“Seventy gallons!” barks Eckener.
“Yes! Releasing seventy gallons,” Lehmann says advancing the first of seven wheels on the ballast board a quarter turn.
Placed flat against the control panel, Eckener’s palm feels the vibration of the rumbling water pushed through mile of copper arteries by the hydraulic circulation system.
Spray
Pressurized water geysers out the elephant’s upturned trunk like an oceanic spray from Poseidon’s perfume atomizer. The droplets, refracting the sun’s rays, are bursting into a sparkling half moon rainbow. The spectators, even the ensembled ladies, whose high heels are getting soaked from the puddles of condensation, are captivated in prismatic rapture.
The tiny sacrifice of ballast charms not only the audience, but modestly kick-starts the primordial struggle over gravity, waged ever since that day when the first winged creature took flight from the steaming Earth.
The gray-haired commander spots the first detectable evidence that the loss of the water’s weight is lifting the ship. The left hind foot is inching off the ground. He orders the front men, in order to keep the ship level, to ease the rope’s tension on the right, while signaling the back men to pull tighter on the left.
“Announce that the guys will be released in thirty seconds.”
“Yes, Herr Docktor,” Lehmann says picking up the intercom’s microphone.
Foreshadowing his impending authority, the second in command collectively intercoms the crew, notifying them of the momentary launch.
Thumb and forefinger glued to the toggle switch of the running lights, Eckener’s cool grey eyes methodically survey the rhythmic flickers of the luminescent control panel. Filling his lungs with courage producing air, he flips the switch. Hearing the click, his eyes leap through the window, flying over the glistening lake to hover over the jagged Swiss mountains. The next sound—not an innocuous little click.
Hissing and popping like a ghastly brotherhood of lunatic firecrackers, the pair of 750-watt running lights, installed in the elephant’s eyes, shockingly burst to life with the horrendous brilliance of an avenging super nova.
The phosphorescent glare stinging his retinas, the ground commander’s pupils dilate to a cat’s eye. Blinded, and flinching, he chops the air with both hands, signaling his men to release the guy lines.
Adeptly the crew drops the ropes. Instantly, they are mechanically snapped up and consumed by the hungry spring-hinged hatches.
Now cut from the last of its earthly umbilical, the airship—trembling and wobbling, floats virtually in place. Theoretically it weighs several hundred pounds less than zero. Yet—it fails to zoom upward
“Guy lines retracted,” Lehemnn informs Eckener.
Not alarmed by the airship’s lack of buoyancy, Eckener tosses the gray-haired ground commander a dazzling split-second eclipse with a single flash of the running lights.
Eyes violently strobing, he wrests his crew’s attention away from the elephant’s aviatitory stasis, by using his silver whistle to issue three high-pitched boomeranging notes. Smashing against the elephant’s metallic skin like a meteor shower, the screeches force the men to heed.
In the brilliant limelight of the elephant’s eyes, and Lehmann’s harsh stare from 150 feet above, the gray-haired ground commander grandiosely pantomimes a launching burlesque. Starting by deeply bending his pliable knees, with both of his masterful hands, he grabs the invisible hubcap-size handle attached to the elephant’s feet. Valiantly, ignoring the pain in his rhomboids and trapezoids, and the other six hundred squirming muscles in his lean body, he hoists the enormous weight to his chest, and then finally in one fabulous Herculean exertion, summoning the strength of the Titans, he shoves the phantom elephant off toward imagined distant galaxies, where yonder starlight reigns brighter than all of the suns of the universe.
But for the gray-haired maestro, one moment of glory is not enough. Several times he repeats the epic, not only for the edification of his men, yearning for further instruction, but to satisfy the gods’ unquenchable thirst for examples of human perfection. The encores, however, are not quite identical. The movements, with each repetition, are sculpted more smoothly. The finale, number seven, a sweep so graceful that the jealous ballerinas of Mount Olympus are bawling with envy.
Less elegant
Far less elegant is the arduous chore in store for the fourteen men, who have the job of actually physically casting the 70-ton elephant adrift.
Liberated from the guy lines, the crew are no longer kite-string-tugging Lilliputians, but raucous and ready Argonauts, kindled for high adventure. Chafing at the gate, awaiting the Maestro’s cue, their ears ache to hear his clarion call. In seconds, the volley of whistles comes.
Vigorously they grab and attempt to hoist the ringed handles, but the success is unevenly parceled. Some can only wrench the elephant’s enormous weight to their knees, while others manage to drag the ring to their burning stomachs, but the most brawny heroically shimmy it to their bulging chests.
Commanded by yet another screech of the Maestro’s silver whistle, the modern Argonauts are charged with the mission to stir up the momentum not yet achieved by the sacrifice of ballast or the freedom from tethers.
To fortify their dwindling strength before the big push, the Maestro, though eyes beguiled by the blinding light, conjures the presence of a maritime apparition through his whistling virtuosity. As the Argonauts gallantly wrestle the load, he forces out of his silver whistle the divine melody to the Volga Boatman, the Russian heave hoe folk song. “Ay-da, da, ay-da! Ay-da, da, ay-da.” The men closest to the Maestro, holding up the elephant’s forelegs are the first infected by contagious chant, but they lend their voices only to a timid whisper of the song’s shadow. The hind leg men, at the second refrain, grab the tune from the air and inhale the stoic strength of the ancient barge pullers of the icy river. By the third refrain, in a single thunderous voice melding Maestro’s whistle, and the hearts of all of the Argonauts, the chant “Ay-da, da, ay-da! Ay-da, da, ay-da.”
The song’s pitch and tempo spirals into the morning sun like an exalted anthem. The solar rays jerk over the sloping hills, setting the gray-haired ground commander’s face blazing, while the elephant’s burning eyes illuminate his mane. His tall, angular body is lit so brightly, that the Maestro appears to his men not as a whistle-blowing Zeppelin officer but as a phantasmagoric silver flare issuing the clarion call to send the ship into the sky.
Unable to resist any longer, the men lurch, shove and then inexorably heave the gigantic elephant airship into the lowest rung of the atmosphere.
At the moment it leaves their hands, no longer are they Lilliputians holding down a stringed giant, nor Argonauts bound for the Golden Fleece, nor boatmen dragging a barge along the Volga. They are simply the Zeppelin ground crew, who just happen to have pushed a seventy-ton flying elephant into the sky, whose passengers are the most brilliant young women in Europe.
Teetering and swaying like an under inflated balloon, the airship’s torso groans, hardly gaining altitude, hanging in the air only a dozen feet above the feverish crew who shoved it off.
On the bridge Eckener takes his right hand off the rudder wheel to yank the voicepipe. “Captain Lehmann, the wings.”
“Yes, Herr Docktor,” Lehmann says curtly.
Feathered in a high relief shell of lacquered textile, the wings produce zero lift, but facilitate steering to make up for the missing rudder usually found on conventional airships.
Each is constructed from three lightweight frames of duraluminum, and are linked together by the hidden joints the size of small dinner tables, and are animated by thin steel cables. Slowly, starting to flap, they creak and whine to their mechanical life, as Eckener answers the whistling voicepipe. “Engines?” asks Lehmann.
“One quarter speed—forward—on all twelve automatic engines!” Eckener orders.
“The angle of the engine’s outriggers?” Lehmann asks.
“Seventy degrees!” say’s Eckener.
The dozen 750-horsepower Maybach engines sputter to life like a coughing cyclone.
Edging over the lake, slowly gaining altitude, the airship leaves Friedricshaven and the three hundred spectators to ponder the destinies of the seven prodigies, the seven journalists, the fourteen crew members, and the captain, Herr Doktor Eckener, whose fate is always at the mercy of the next gust of wind.
1 comments:
Needs works
Frank!
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