Bob:

I was really reluctant to leave Rothenburg because we had not yet had a chance to see the older palace of the Bishop-Princes in Wuerzburg, nor the Doll and Toy Museum or the Historical Museum or the Criminology Museum in Rothenberg. That was a lot of interesting stuff to pass up, but two facts about Germany made us leave before we were really ready to. First, trucks don't drive on Sunday in Germany except if they get a special, and presumably very expensive, permit. That may sound weird to my U.S. readers, but what it really means is that the Autobahns become a much more pleasant place to drive since you don't have the rolling roadblocks trundling along at 100 kilometers per hour in the right lane and forcing everybody else to pass. Secondly, most German museums close on Mondays, so if we wanted to see the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen, we had to either see it Sunday afternoon or wait until Tuesday. Now seeing a museum dedicated to Zeppelins might not be tops on the list of German sights for most normal folks, but it was number one on my list. So we checked out after another nice breakfast at our pension in Rothenburg and drove South by Southwest down to Friedrichshafen on the North shore of the Bodensee (the southern shore is shared by Austria and Switzerland).

The weather shifted from clear to completely fogged over as we drove South, and I was again impressed with how ubiquitous fog was in Germany during the Fall. Although we arrived at our pension at 12:00 noon, no one was there and no one answered the phone when we called them on Detlef's cell phone. Temporarily giving up on the room, we continued driving down to the lake shore where the Zeppelin museum is located, parked the car, and toured the museum for the next two and a half hours.

Monika:

Bob:

Basically, Count Zeppelin was to the rigid airship what the Wright Brothers were to the airplane. I have always been interested in airships since the idea of "low and slow" flight seems to me to be the best way of easily seeing the world. So I wanted to get some idea of how Zeppelin had developed his giant airships from around 1900 to 1936 and the Zeppelin Museum certainly provided that information! I had an English audiophone which gave me the basics, but my German was sufficiently good that I could just dive in and start reading the text under each of the pictures or models. The museum had a series of models all built to the same scale that documented the development of the Zeppelins from start to finish, and even some of the WWII and post war developments.

I learned that Count Zeppelin had patented some of his ideas in 1895 and then built a succession of successful airships starting with the LZ-1 and ending with the LZ-130 about 40 years later. In fact, Zeppelin had regular inter-city passenger service inaugurated in Germany prior to World War I, and regular transatlantic passenger service between World War I and World War II. Unfortunately the spectacular crash of the Hindenburg brought a sudden end to both the transatlantic service and any further development of airships for passenger service.

The first part of the museum was a full-scale reconstruction of part of the passenger cabin on the Hindenburg. The cabin itself was luxurious in a rather 1920s Art Deco kind of fashion, and it was clear that every spare ounce had been shaved from the basic structures and furniture. That is, most structures were aluminum or lightweight alloys. The beds were bunks made from an aluminum frame that folded down from the wall at night, somewhat similar to first-class train cabins of that era in design but executed in aluminum. The chairs in the main lounge were apparently made from aluminum tubing but looked quite comfortable. Some aspects of luxury were not, however, sacrificed to weight; when we had lunch in the museum cafeteria I noticed that an enlarged picture of the dining service on the Hindenburg clearly showed that they had used normal plates, silverware, table linen, and so forth. It just goes to show that there are some things Germans will simply not sacrifice to the gods of efficiency.

Monika:

Bob:

Since the U.S. refused to sell helium to Germany after World War I, the Hindenburg had to perforce use hydrogen which is dangerously flammable. But to accommodate customers who smoked, the Hindenburg had a designated smoking area in the shipboard bar that was entered through a kind of air lock and had positive pressurization so that the flames from the cigars and cigarettes could not possibly come into contact with any hydrogen gas. Now that might work for Germans who would dutifully follow such prohibitions, but I would be very concerned that it would not work for the typical U.S. citizen and I would be extremely loathe to try that type of prohibition with certain other nationalities where finding ways to bend or evade the law seems to be almost a national sport. Still, it worked on the Hindenburg, at least until it finally did burn and crash when landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey after a transatlantic flight.

You know, everybody has seen the vivid picture of the Hindenburg going down in flames, but very few people seem to know that well over half of the passengers and crew actually survived the crash. Similarly, well over half the crew survived the crash of the the Macon when it was torn apart by a squall line in the 1930s. What is the typical survival rate for passengers when a modern jet airliner crashes? I would hazard a guess that it is far, far less than 50% and yet people get all worked up about the imaginary dangers of airships.

The construction of the airships changed, of course, over the course of the four decades of active development. Predictably, they became larger with a greater carrying capacity and greater range of operations. But partly the increased efficiency was development a more lightweight truss structure for the internal rigid framework that gave the Zeppelins their shape. What the museum exhibits clearly showed, however, was that the early truss system of the LZ-1 and LZ-2 was relatively simple and straightforward, but the very last generation of Zeppelins had astoundingly complex girder systems. Relatively early on, Zeppelin interspersed each of the main structural girder rings with "helper" girder rings that did not have any internal bracing but just connected to the structural rings on either side. That design proved sufficiently rigid and sufficiently light to allow the construction of the huge airships.

The junction points of the girders were a point of particularly noticeable development as the more complex structures of the later Zeppelins had many girders converging at a single point, up to 7 or 8, I think. The German word for the junctions of the girders was "knot" and the actual connections were indeed astonishing complex just like a knotted rope. I could not even track how all the little flanges were riveted together, but the riveting of the extraordinarily complex knots of the later Zeppelins must have been a nightmarishly difficult operation and certainly required very skilled craftsmen and specially designed riveting tools.

I was also amazed at the growth in size and apparent weight of the diesel engines and the corresponding increase in size of the propellers. By the last generation of Zeppelin, the diesel engines looked huge and very heavy, although they might have been using an aluminum or magnesium alloy engine block to save weight (I couldn't be sure by looking at it and we weren't suppose to touch those exhibits). Similarly the propellers changed from roughly 4 foot diameter ones on LZ-1 to the monstrous 10 foot diameter propellers used by the Hindenburg.

Bob:

Before leaving the museum we made the mistake of visiting the gift shop, and of course I found a Zeppelin tie and hat pin that I wanted and truly did not think I would ever find anywhere else. Monika was nice enough to buy them for me for Christmas. We both felt the need to stretch our legs a bit, so we bought an ice cream cone and walked along the lake shore promenade for a few minutes, but the fog continued to obscure the sky and the view of the mountains in Switzerland across the lake. So we retrieved the car and drove back to see if anyone was at our pension, but again no luck. Just for kicks, we drove out to the Friedrichshafen airport, and we were lucky enough to actually see the very newest Zeppelin NT taking off and landing.

The Zeppelin NT is a semi-rigid airship rather than the completely rigid traditional Zeppelins. That is, it has an internal central rigid keel made of carbon fiber trusses that are as stiff as steel but about 1/5 the weight--they had examples in the museum that we could try to lift alongside the original aluminum girder structures and the difference in weight really was impressive. While not nearly as big as the Hindenburg and the other giant Zeppelins of the 1930s, the Zeppelin NT strikes me as a really fun way to go sightseeing. I can't wait to get home and build my own!

Returning to our pension for the 3rd time, we finally roused someone on the telephone (thank you, Detlef!), and they told us where the keys to the rooms were hidden under some pots outside the house. It reminded me of our experiences touring the former East Germany region during Wanderung 2, and it indicated to me that it must really be an honest neighborhood! Anyway, thus equipped we let ourselves in, took our luggage upstairs, and settled in for the night.

Monika: