subject: What Are Dirigibles [print this page] Less than a hundred years after the first successful balloons were made, men had made a kind of balloon that could be driven by an engine and steered. Such a balloon is called a dirigible, which means "able to be directed, or steered." A Frenchman named Henri Giffard made the first dirigible, in 1852, but most of the credit for the great dirigibles is due to a German, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, after the year 1900. In fact, dirigibles are often called Zeppelins. They are also called airships.
Zeppelin's airships were cigar-shaped, which makes it harder for the wind to blow them around. They were rigid airships, meaning that they had a metal framework inside the "bag," and they were divided into many airtight compartments, so that if the gas leaked out of one compartment the others would remain full and would keep the airship afloat. The first "bombers" were Zeppelins used by the Germans to drop bombs on London during World War I. Count von Zeppelin also began the first air transport. He had a passenger service among the big cities of Germany, and later-during the 1930s-these big airships carried passengers from Europe to North and South America.
The United States Navy also used many dirigibles. These great dirigibles were 700 to 800 feet long, and held about 6,500,000 cubic feet of gas. They would go 70 to 100 miles per hour, and had a range of 10,- 000 miles. A big one would carry about a hundred passengers. The Navy dirigibles could also carry four or five fighter planes. The dirigibles were driven by gasoline engines and propellers as on an airplane-as many as eight propellers on a big airship. Unfortunately, there were many bad accidents in dirigibles, which cost many lives. The last of these was in 1937, when the German passenger airship Hindenhurg, the biggest ever built, caught fire when it wis landing at Lakewood, New Jersey. The fire was possible because the Hindenburg used hydrogen gas instead of helium gas (which does not burn). Nevertheless, the big airships never became popular again, especially since airplanes were being made bigger and faster than ever
