The dream that fell to earth

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The Dream Machine of the title is the Graf Zeppelin, the airship which, in August 1929, under the command of Dr Hugo Eckener, flew round the world in just over 21 days, landing only three times. It carried a crew of 41 and 20 passengers. The only woman on board was Lady Grace Hay-Drummond-Hay, a reporter for Hearst Newspapers, who was to become a Zeppelin groupie. Among the other passengers were a Polar explorer, a young American multimillionaire, a commander in the Japanese navy, the King of Spain's personal physician, and a Russian meteorologist who spoke no language but his own.

When the airship failed, because of the weather, to fulfil an agreement to overfly Moscow, Pravda denounced the flight's "aristocratic, anti-Bolshevik character". But this was very much a lone voice. Everywhere else scenes of extraordinary enthusiasm greeted the appearance of this " fabulous silver fish, floating quietly in the ocean of air", as Eckener described it. He himself, at the age of 61, became a worldwide celebrity, as Lindbergh had two years earlier. "Who is the best-known personality on earth?" the Corriere della Sera asked its readers. "Hugo Eckener," they replied. In 1932 he was even asked to run for president in place of Hindenburg. He refused. "My life's work is the Zeppelin," he said.

This work had begun in January 1906, when Eckener had met the inventor of the rigid airship and its eponym, the 68-year-old Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, after the disastrous crash of the second prototype, LZ2, on its first flight. The two joined forces and set up a company, DELAG. Its initial efforts were spectacularly unsuccessful: LZ6 was destroyed in its hangar, LZ7 crashed on its first flight, LZ8 before its first take-off. It was not until 1911 that their fortunes changed: during that balmy summer LZ10, the Schwaben, criss-crossed Germany in a series of short air tours, while its passengers, who paid through the nose for their flight, sat at small tables in the gondola, enjoylineding the view and plates of caviar, lobster and Westphalian ham, washed down with hock, 1842 cognac and very old pale sherry.

In 1914, on the outbreak of war, the company was taken over by the government, and the centre of operations moved from Friedrichshafen, on the shore of the Bodensee, to Nordholz on the North Sea coast: a more convenient location for the bombardment of England. On 19 January 1915, L3 bombed Great Yarmouth and L4 King's Lynn, killing two civilians in each town. The most successful raid was that of L31: it missed its target, the Bank of England, but caused huge fires in the dockside warehouses.

After the war the company resumed operations, but, forced to hand over two machines as war reparations, and forbidden, by the Treaty of Versailles, to build others large enough for commerce, turned to the manufacture of aluminium pots and pans. However, in 1922 the US Navy ordered a Zeppelin - this was LZ126, a state-of-the-art ship, fully stream-with the gondola built on the keel - which, in October 1924, Eckener piloted across the Atlantic from Friedrichshafen to the naval air station at Lakehurst, New Jersey, where it was given a rapturous reception. And, when the 1925 Treaty of Locarno rescinded the limitations on size, Eckener built LZ127, the Graf Zeppelin.

After the circumnavigation he used the ship for a series of commercial flights to South America and began construction of an even bigger machine, LZ129 (LZ128 did not make it off the drawing board), for a transatlantic passenger service. It was this ship, the Hindenburg, filled with hydrogen rather than the helium it had been designed for (the US government forbade the export of the gas), which, on 6 May 1937, caught fire as it landed at Lakehurst and, in 34 seconds, was completely destroyed, thus putting an end to the Zeppelin dream.

For it was a dream, and Eckener a romantic, rather than the hardheaded, practical man he appeared to be. In the end there was nothing the Zeppelin could do that the aeroplane, in time, could not do better. It demanded a far larger crew, while its huge bulk - the Graf Zeppelin was almost the size of the Titanic - meant its speed was low - 60 to 80 mph - and made it far more susceptible to wind and weather: as Eckener, an expert yachtsman, remarked, it could not be flown, but must be sailed like a ship.

Douglas Botting's research into this fascinating subject is impressive, and he writes of Eckener and his Zeppelins with verve, gusto and affection. "Pure Jules Verne", the German War Minister scribbled on a plan submitted by Count Zeppelin in the 1890s; and there is something inescapably Vernish, irresistibly reminiscent of Robur's Clipper of the Clouds, in the Graf Zeppelin's stately progress, at a height of a few hundred feet, over the Siberian tundra, while her heterogeneous collection of passengers throng to the open windows of the gondola and thrill at the spectacle of nature at its wildest.