Ferdinand von ZeppelinCount Ferdinand von Zeppelin (Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin; 8 July 1838 – 8 March 1917) was a German general and later inventor of the Zeppelin rigid airships. His name soon became synonymous with airships and dominated long-distance flight until the 1930s. He founded the company Luftschiffbau Zeppelin. Ferdinand was the scion of a noble family. Zepelin, the family's eponymous hometown, is a small community outside the town of Bützow in Mecklenburg.
Free imperial cityIn the Holy Roman Empire, the collective term free and imperial cities (Freie und Reichsstädte), briefly worded free imperial city (Freie Reichsstadt, urbs imperialis libera), was used from the fifteenth century to denote a self-ruling city that had a certain amount of autonomy and was represented in the Imperial Diet. An imperial city held the status of Imperial immediacy, and as such, was subordinate only to the Holy Roman Emperor, as opposed to a territorial city or town (Landstadt) which was subordinate to a territorial prince - be it an ecclesiastical lord (prince-bishop, prince-abbot) or a secular prince (duke (Herzog), margrave, count (Graf), etc.
KonstanzKonstanz (ˈkɒnstənts , ˈkɔːnstɑːnts , ˈkɔnstants, locally ˈkɔnʃtants, ˈkoʃd̥əts, ˈxoʃd̥əts), also known as Constance in English, is a university city with approximately 83,000 inhabitants located at the western end of Lake Constance in the south of Germany. The city houses the University of Konstanz and was the residence of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Konstanz for more than 1,200 years. The city is located in the state of Baden-Württemberg and situated at the banks of Lake Constance (Bodensee in German).
Lake ConstanceLake Constance (Bodensee, ˈboːdn̩ˌzeː) refers to three bodies of water on the Rhine at the northern foot of the Alps: Upper Lake Constance (Obersee), Lower Lake Constance (Untersee), and a connecting stretch of the Rhine, called the Lake Rhine (Seerhein). These waterbodies lie within the Lake Constance Basin (Bodenseebecken) in the Alpine Foreland through which the Rhine flows. The lake is situated where Germany, Switzerland, and Austria meet. Its shorelines lie in the German states of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, the Swiss cantons of St.
Rigid airshipA rigid airship is a type of airship (or dirigible) in which the envelope is supported by an internal framework rather than by being kept in shape by the pressure of the lifting gas within the envelope, as in blimps (also called pressure airships) and semi-rigid airships. Rigid airships are often commonly called Zeppelins, though this technically refers only to airships built by the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin company. In 1900, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin successfully performed the maiden flight of his first airship; further models quickly followed.
AirshipAn airship or dirigible balloon is a type of aerostat or lighter-than-air aircraft that can navigate through the air under its own power. Aerostats gain their lift from a lifting gas that is less dense than the surrounding air. In early dirigibles, the lifting gas used was hydrogen, due to its high lifting capacity and ready availability. Helium gas has almost the same lifting capacity and is not flammable, unlike hydrogen, but is rare and relatively expensive.
ZeppelinA Zeppelin is a type of rigid airship named after the German inventor Ferdinand von Zeppelin (ˈt͡sɛpəliːn) who pioneered rigid airship development at the beginning of the 20th century. Zeppelin's notions were first formulated in 1874 and developed in detail in 1893. They were patented in Germany in 1895 and in the United States in 1899. After the outstanding success of the Zeppelin design, the word zeppelin came to be commonly used to refer to all rigid airships.
