Eckener, Hugo b.August 10, 1868; Flensburg (Schlesvig), Prussia d.August 14, 1954; Friedrichshafen Baden,Wurttemberg

The world’s most prominent advocate of rigid airship flight between the world wars, whose spectacular zeppelin voyages helped to rebuild German ties with the United States.

Eckener’s early career as a journalist brought him into contact with Graf Ferdi­nand von Zeppelin, whose dream of lighter- than-air flight he adopted with enthusiasm.

An indifferent student as a youth, Eck- ener grew more interested in intellectual pursuits as a young adult. He studied eco­nomics, philosophy, history, and psychology at the universities of Berlin, Munich, and Leipzig, where he earned a doctorate with a dissertation in what today would be known as experimental psychology. During the 1890s and early 1900s, he worked as a jour­nalist and editor, first in Flensburg and then at Friedrichshafen in southern Germany, where he resettled for health reasons at the end of the 1890s. He worked there as a cor­respondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung (Frankfurt Newspaper), writing commen­tary articles as well as music and art criti­cism. Friedrichshafen was also the center of Graf Zeppelin’s experiments with rigid air­ships, and Eckener was assigned to cover Graf ’s earliest, and mostly failed, efforts.

A string of zeppelin crashes at first re­inforced Eckener’s skepticism about the fu­ture of the airship. He gradually developed a fascination with the great machines, how­ever, and, after a personal meeting with Zeppelin in 1908, accepted the Graf’s offer of a position in charge of public relations to help counter expert criticism from promi­nent physicists and engineers. Eckener then played a key role in directing the attention of German naval authorities toward the

long-distance reconnaissance potential of the airship. He helped establish the Deutsche Luftschiff-Aktien-Gesellschaft (DELAG, or German Airship Corporation) and in 1911 was licensed as an airship pilot. From that point on, he directed the training of pilots for the corporation and assumed an increasingly preeminent role in the zep­pelin program.

Eckener directed the training of naval airship commanders during World War I, but the zeppelin was an acute military dis­appointment. Although the unrivalled range of the airship made it useful for ma­rine reconnaissance and a few successful raids were carried out over England, the huge size and relatively slow speed ren­dered the airship quite vulnerable. Over half of Germany’s naval airships fell victim during the fighting to enemy fighters, storms, and lightning.

At the war’s end, Allied authorities seized the newly built passenger zeppelin LZ 120 and mandated size restrictions on future construction which would have meant the end of airships capable of carry­ing passengers. Desperate to save what he viewed as his life’s work, Eckener offered to build a large new airship for delivery to the Americans in lieu of monetary reparations for the airships German ground personnel had destroyed to prevent them falling into Allied hands. As he had anticipated, U.S. authorities—particularly naval person­nel—were eager to accept the proposal. The American Goodyear company, a rival to the German airship program, had pro­duced in the airship ZR 1 a vessel consid­ered by most experts to be technically infe­rior to the German product.

Thus empowered to legally circumvent Allied aircraft construction restrictions, Eckener in 1923 and 1924 built the colos­sal LZ 126, which he personally piloted across the Atlantic to Lakehurst, New Jer­sey, in October 1924. The ocean crossing was a spectacular success, covered by an in­tensive international publicity campaign engineered in part by the media-savvy Eck- ener himself. New York stopped in its tracks to watch the passing of the airship, and half a million people greeted the arrival of the LZ 126 (soon to be the Los Angeles') at Lakehurst. Eckener was given a ticker tape parade through Manhattan and re­ceived by Calvin Coolidge at the White House as the “modern Columbus.”

Eckener’s success made him a hero in Germany as well, and he built upon it. With help from the government and a na­tional fund drive, he built the Graf Zep­pelin, the world’s largest airship. In August 1929, Eckener flew the new GrafZeppelin around the world, profiting from the sale of newspaper rights, winning the “Special Gold Medal” of the American National Geographic Society, and evoking a huge popular response where the airship touched down in Tokyo and Los Angeles. This was followed by an Arctic flight in collaboration with the Russians in 1931, another pio­neering success. Eckener was now so popu­lar that the Social Democrats seriously dis­cussed running him as a presidential candidate in 1932 against Adolf Hitler.

With the rise of the Nazis, however, and the still-mysterious explosion of the Hin­denburg at Lakehurst in 1937, Eckener’s air­ship program was doomed. He himself was forced into retirement from public life, and his beloved airships were scrapped by the Nazis. After the war, he tried without suc­cess to revive international interest in the airship and spent the last years of his retire­ment composing his memoirs.

David Murphy

See also Treaty of Versailles; Zeppelin

References and Further Reading

Botting, Douglas. Dr. Eckener^,s Dream

Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

De Syon, Guillaume. Zeppelin! Germany and the Airship, 1900-1939. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Eckener, Hugo. Im Zeppelin uber Lander und Meere. Flensburg: Verlagshaus Christian Wolff, 1949.

Itataliaander, Rolf. Hugo Eckener: Ein moderner Columbus. Konstanz: Verlag Friedrich Stadler, 1979.

Gertrud Ederle swam the English Channel, August 6, 1926, in the record time of14 1/2 hours. She is the first woman ever to have accomplished this feat. Here, William Burgess, her trainer, is shown greasing Ederle down before her start. (Bettmann/Corbis)