Zeppelin, Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich Graf von.

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Zeppelin, Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich Graf von, born 08-07-1838, the scion of a noble family. Zeppelin, the family’s eponymous hometown, is a small community outside  in Konstanz am Bodensee, , the son of court marshal Friedrich Jerôme Wilhelm Karl Graf  von Zeppelin and Amélie Françoise Pauline (born Macaire d’Hogguer). Ferdinand spent his childhood with his sister and brother at their Girsberg manor near Konstanz, where he was educated by private tutors and lived there until his death. On 07-08-1869 Ferdinand married Isabella Freiin von Wolff in Berlin. She was from the house of Alt-Schwanenburg , then part of Livonia). They had a daughter, Helene (Hella) von Zeppelin (1879–1967) who in 1909 married Graf Alexander von Brandenstein-Zeppelin (1881–1949).  Ferdinand had a nephew Baron Max Ferdinand Ludwig  von Gemmingen who was to later volunteer at the start of World War I, after he was past military age, to become general staff officer assigned to the military airship LZ 12 Sachsen.  When he was twenty joined the German Army and was a member of the expedition that went to North America to search for the source of the Mississippi River. While in Minnesota in 1870 he made his first ascent in a military balloon. Zeppelin had reached the rank of Brigadier General when he retired from the German Army in 1891. Over the next few years he devoted himself to to the study of aeronautics. In 1894 the German government rejected his proposals for a lighter-than-air flying machine. Although now aged sixty, Zeppelin decided to invest all his own money in a company producing airships. As a special stroke of luck, Zeppelin met with Alfred Colsman
421px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-07917,_Alfred_Colsmann , the son-in-law of his deceased friend and sponsor, Carl Berg. Colsman, who died age 81, on 09-01-1955, in Werdohl, an experienced manager, who was inspired by Zeppelin’s ideas, now took over the consultation Zeppelin. In October 1906, two travels with the new LZ-3 occur. These successful messages ensured the fact that tendencies against Zeppelin began to slowly change. Zeppelin’s former critic, Hugo Eckener
   political economist, became the most engaged lawyer for the thing of Zeppelins. Zeppelin (back right). Kaiser Wilhelm II    greets Zeppelin in Berlin-Tegel after a successful landing in 1909. In 1928 the Graf Zeppelin, piloted by Eckener himself, made the first intercontinental passenger airship flight from Friedrichshafen to Lakehurst. Hugo Eckener died in Friedrichshafen on 14-08-1954 just after his 86th birthday. By 1898 Zeppelin, with a team of 30 workmen, had assembled his first airship. The main principle of Zeppelin’s invention was that hydrogen-filled gas-bags were carried inside a steel skeleton. The airship, which weighed 12 tons and contained 400.000 cubic feet of hydrogen, was driven by propellers connected by two 15-hp Daimler engines. After the Zeppelin LZ made its first flight on 02-07-1900, the German government decided to help fund the project. By the outbreak of the First World War the German Army owned seven of Zeppelin’s airships.
  These Zeppelins could reach a maximum speed of 136 kph and reach a height of 4,250 metres. They had five machine-guns and could carry 2.000 kg (4.400 lbs) of bombs. In the war Zeppelins were used for air rids on Britain and France. However, being large and slow, they were an easy target and by the summer of 1917 the German military had decided to employ them for transporting supplies. However, they were too slow and explosive a target in wartime and too fragile to withstand bad weather. They were found to be vulnerable to antiaircraft fire, and about 40 were shot down over London.  The airship Paul von Hindenburg crashed in the USA.
The Hindenburg was the pride of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party, the NSDAP.
 The last survivor of the disaster, eight-year-old Werner Gustav Doehner,    who was thrown from a window of the burning airship by his mother, Matilde, born Schiele Doehner. Matilde Doehner also survived the Hindenburg disaster, but her husband, Hermann Doehner, and her daughter, Irene Doehner, did not. Mathilde died on 08-11-2019, age 90, in Darmstadt.

Death and burial ground of Zeppelin, Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich Graf von.

Ferdinand von Zeppelin died unspecified at the age of 78, on 08-03-1917
  and is buried on the Prager Cemetery of Stuttgart, almost next to Generalmajor der Infanterie, Hans Speidel
    , the adjutant of Generalfeldmarschall der Panzertruppe, Erwin Rommel,  Generalmajor of the Artillerie, Kommandeur Ersatz V Heergruppe, Kurt Adam and Oberst, Fritz Jaeger a 20 July Plot member and his brother Franz, a resistance fighter in Nazi Germany and a member of the July 20 Plot, the Generaloberarzt Fritz Jaeger.
 

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