hours. She made her hundredth trip on the
23rd of June 1912; her two-hundredth on the 21st of October in the same
year; in the following year her three-hundredth trip was made on the
30th of June, and her four-hundredth on the 26th of November. In these
four hundred trips she carried 8,551 persons and travelled 29,430 miles.
Some of them were made over the sea; on the 27th of June, for instance,
she left Hamburg in the morning, and reached Cuxhaven in about two
hours. There she picked up with a Hamburg-America liner starting for New
York, and accompanied the steamer for some distance; then she steered
for Heligoland, and flying round the island very low was greeted with
cheers by the inhabitants. Part of her return journey was made against a
head-wind of sixteen miles an hour, and she reached Hamburg after a
voyage of eight hours, during which she had covered a distance of about
two hundred and fifty miles. The _Hansa_, beginning in July 1912, by the
end of 1913 had made two hundred and seventy-five trips, carrying 5,697
persons and travelling 22,319 miles. The _Sachsen_, beginning in May
1913, before the end of the year had made two hundred and six trips,
carrying 4,857 persons and travelling about 13,700 miles. A wrecked
Zeppelin is such a picture of destruction, such a vast display of
twisted metal and rags lying wreathed across a landscape, that those who
see it are apt to get an exaggerated idea of the dangers of airship
travel. With all his misfortunes, it was Count Zeppelin's luck for many
years that no life was lost among those who travelled in his ships.

In May 1906, before Count Zeppelin's enterprise had received the
stamp of Imperial and national approval, there was formed, under the
inspiration of the German Emperor, a society for airship development.
The success of the Lebaudy airship in France prompted the
construction in Germany of two types of semi-rigid airship--the
Parseval and the Gross. Only four of the latter type were built, and
all four suffered mishap; the last and best of them, built in 1911,
is said to have shown a better performance than the best contemporary
Zeppelin. The Parseval was designed in 1906 by Major August von Parseval,
of the Third Bavarian Infantry Regiment, who retired from the German
army in 1907 in order to devote himself entirely to scientific work.
He was already famous for the kite balloon, which he had invented in
collaboration with Hauptmann Bartsch von Sigsfeld, who die