any, July 8th, 1838. His boyhood was not unlike that of
others in Central Europe; and, as a matter of course, young Zeppelin was
enrolled at a military school at Ludwigsburg, from which he in due time
graduated into a lieutenancy in the Wurttemberg Army, but he was not
particularly enthralled with the quiet life of a garrison in peace time.
His creative faculties demanded something more of life than the routine
of inspections, drills and dress parades. When he died on March 8, 1917,
in Berlin, the whole world mourned the loss of one whose genius and
vision had developed the rigid airship into a practical vehicle of the
sky, proved of inestimable value in peace and war. Zeppelin had lived to
see _more than a hundred rigid airships built_ from his designs and
under his personal supervision. And so completely was his personality
interwoven with the creation of these aerial giants that throughout the
world all dirigible lighter-than-air craft are looked upon as the noted
Zeppelins, and are referred to as such. It is an unconscious but none
the less fitting tribute to the man who, starting when he was past the
half century mark, has made possible the greatest of all vehicles for us
to use in our new dominion--the air.

An Officer in the American Union Army

[PLATE 2: Zeppelin "LZ-3" Over Count Zeppelin's First Floating
Shed October 1906.

Zeppelin "LZ-3" in First Temporary Land Shed.

Which was erected and used while the new double shed, completed
in 1908, was being built at Friedrichshafen.]

Here in America the Civil War was attracting the adventurous from all
parts of the world and shortly after it started, Zeppelin came over to
join the Union Army as a volunteer officer and thus to add to his
military education, but Zeppelin was not only the officer. He loved to
roam in out of the way places and whenever opportunity afforded he
organized hunting parties and went off on long sojourns in the then
sparsely inhabited regions of the Mississippi Valley. Here he played the
explorer and wrote letters back home dwelling on the pleasures of
exploration and the possibilities in store for him who could invent
something that would take one to the far and inaccessible parts of the
earth.

Zeppelin's First Rigid Design

His impressions gained during the American Civil War, where he had the
opportunity of making captive balloon ascensions, and also in the
Franco-German War where he had the opportunity of