How did the Civil War change the course of aviation history?
Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was a young Prussian military officer when he was sent to the United States in 1863 as a military observer attached to the Union Army. The enthusiastic young lieutenant rode along on several missions with Union cavalry, and was almost captured by the Confederates a week before the Battle of Gettysburg.
Having come so far, von Zeppelin set out to explore the breadth of the United States. And so it was that he ended up in Minneapolis, where he ran into something that changed his life:
A ride in a balloon.
The balloon was being operated by John Steiner, who had spent a year as an aeronaut for the Union Army. On August 19 he let von Zeppelin go up on a tethered ascent. The young nobleman rose six hundred feet into the air. He was hooked.
Steiner regaled von Zeppelin with tales of doing military reconnaissance over Confederate lines, noting that the biggest problem was the inability to steer the balloon. The answer, Steiner thought, would be to create a cigar-shaped balloon with a rudder that could be easily guided through the air.
Von Zeppelin was soon on his way back to Germany, but he never forgot that balloon ride, or Steiner’s idea. Twenty-five years later, after he retired from the army, he set out to build a rigid, steerable ballon. The first Zeppelin made its maiden flight on July 2, 1900, launching a new age of lighter-than-air travel that owed its birth to the War Between the States.
Aeronauts from the Balloon Corps performed valuable reconnaissance for the Union Army. The best known among them was Thaddeus Lowe, whose efforts are credited with helping the Union win the Battle of Fair Oaks.
The ascent of the LZ-1, the first Zeppelin, in 1900. More than a hundred Zeppelins were used by the Germans during World War I.
Zeppelins carried passengers back and forth across the Atlantic in the 1930s, until the Hindenburg exploded over Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937, killing thirty-seven people. With that, the age of the airship was over.