Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin was an engineer whose self-named company made the first successful rigid airship. The path from his inspiration during a balloon trip in Minnesota in ...

Born into German nobility in 1838, Ferdinand von Zeppelin attended an engineering college and then joined the German army. During the U.S. Civil War, he was sent to Virginia to serve as an observer ...

Radio broadcaster Herbert Morrison’s “oh, the humanity!” exclamation amid the 1937 Hindenburg disaster sounded in my mind recently as I gazed at an exhibit near the German ground where the airship’s ...