Ferdinand von Zeppelin

By Mary Bellis, About.com Guide

During the 10 years the Graf Zeppelin flew, it made 590 flights including 144 ocean crossings. It flew more than one million miles (1,609,344 kilometers), visited the United States, the Arctic, the Middle East, and South America, and carried 13,110 passengers.

When the Hindenburg was built in 1936, the revived Zeppelin company was at the height of its success. Zeppelins had been accepted as a quicker and less expensive way to travel long distances than ocean liners provided. The Hindenburg was 804 feet long (245 meters), had a maximum diameter of 135 feet (41 meters), and contained seven million cubic feet (200,000 cubic meters) of hydrogen in 16 cells. Four 1,050-horsepower (783-kilowatt) Daimler-Benz diesel engines provided a top speed of 82 miles per hour (132 kilometers per hour). The airship could hold more than 70 passengers in luxurious comfort and had a dining room, library, lounge with a grand piano, and large windows. The Hindenburg's May 1936 launch inaugurated the first scheduled air service across the North Atlantic between Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and Lakehurst, New Jersey. Its first trip to the United States took 60 hours, and the return trip took only a quick 50. In 1936, it carried more than 1,300 passengers and several thousand pounds of mail and cargo on its flights. It had made 10 successful roundtrips between Germany and the United States. But that was soon forgotten. On May 6, 1937, as the Hindenburg was preparing to land at Lakehurst, New Jersey, its hydrogen ignited and the airship exploded and burned, killing 35 of the 97 people on board and one member of the ground crew. Its destruction, seen by horrified spectators in New Jersey, marked the end of the commercial use of airships.