complete story of the great dirigibles - from the pioneering efforts of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin to the brief career of the Hindenburg's little-known sister ship, the Graf Zeppelin II. At the turn of the century zeppelins established the world's first passenger-carrying airline. But World War I bombing raids over London earned them the label "baby-killers". In the postwar years Great Britain and the United States competed with Germany for the prestige of building the world's most advanced airship. The British envisioned an empire linked by a fleet of silver giants. For the United States Navy, the zeppelin would be a flying aircraft carrier, transporting fighter planes in its belly. By the late 1920s it seemed that the airship was poised to conquer the skies. In 1926 explorer Roald Amundsen flew across the Arctic Ocean in the dirigible Norge. An ecstatic New York ticker-tape parade greeted the Graf Zeppelin at the end of her pioneering 1929 round-the-world flight. The Graf soon went on to establish the first ever non-stop transatlantic air service. But not all airship enterprises ended in triumph. Two years after the Norge's Arctic exploit, the Italia crashed on a polar ice floe, stranding her surviving crew for forty-nine days. And the first intercontinental flight of the British airship R 101 ended in flames in a French field. The U.S. Navy airships Akron and Macon were wrecked by storms at sea within two years of each other. A haunting photo mosaic shows the site where underwater cameras recently located the skeleton of the huge dirigible Macon on the ocean floor, lying with the Sparrowhawk fighters that were once housed in herinternal hangar.

A bonanza of images and history not just of the titular zeppelin, but of all dirigibles leading up to it. Not only historic pictures and contemporary illustrations but a complete floorplan of the Hindenburg.

My favorite fact, gleaned from it: the Hindenburg had a smoking room -- it was windowless and negatively pressurized to make sure that no sparks could escape.

Also, pictures of the Hindenburg rooms look strangely modern, partly because most of the furniture was built from aluminum, for the weight savings.

Reading this book, I realized that truly, zeppelin research was the NASA of its day. And also, THAT was the model that early SF extrapolated that spaceships would be like. (And the fact that we call them spaceSHIPS is indeed the same concept that leads the Germans to use FAHREN instead of FLIEGEN.) ( )