A century ago, regal airships once ruled the skies

In their time and in their brief day, they were the lords of the skies.

A little more than a century ago, giant airships that resembled huge sausages, as long as a city block, moved majestically across the skies of much of the world. People had been trying to take flight since the mythical Icarus and Daedalus donned the feathers of birds and tried unsuccessfully to fly.

Many others had tried over the centuries, and eventually some of them became somewhat successful with gliders and hot air balloons. But none of those earlier methods could carry one very far or very fast. A hot air balloonist in Columbus took off in 1842 but was at the mercy of prevailing winds. He was having a great time until he landed somewhere near Newark. If one did not care all that much about destinations, it was a great way to travel.

Airships rely on being lifted by a large gas bag. The gas used initially, and for some time, was hydrogen − it works quite well, but it is highly flammable. Helium does not work quite as well but is considerably safer.

Tom Crouch of the National Air and Space Museum explains that “airships are traditionally divided into three classes: rigid, semi-rigid and non-rigid. Non-rigid airships, or pressure airships, depend on the internal pressure of the gas in the envelope to maintain their shape. The blimps so familiar to viewers of major sporting events are pressure airships. Semi-rigid airships are pressure airships with a rigid keel structure.”

By the turn of the 20th century, a number of people in Europe and America were entertaining crowds below with their manually controlled, personal gas bag airships. In Columbus, 15-year-old Cromwell Dixon was captivated by the performance of early aviator A. Roy Knabenshue at the Ohio State Fair in 1905.

Dixon built his own airship by attaching a bicycle frame to the gas bag and synchronizing the sprocket wheel of the bicycle to turn a propeller. He made his first appearance in 1907. The Columbus Dispatch reported, “It was his first flight, his first trial, in fact, and the little airship, propelled by foot power after the fashion of a bicycle, which the youthful protégé of the great Knabenshue built with his own hands, responded to every touch of the enthusiastic lad as he manipulated it gracefully at an altitude of 200 feet for more than an hour before 500 shouting and excited spectators.”

Dixon went on to many other adventures, and he became the first person to fly over the Continental Divide in 1911. Tragically, he died shortly thereafter in a crash of his fragile biplane.

By this time, many young people were hoping to fly some sort of heavier-than-air craft based on the 1903 success of two aeronauts in Dayton named Wilbur and Orville Wright. The early years of flight with biplanes literally made of silk and balsa wood were hazardous, as the death of Dixon made clear. And the early planes could not carry all that much in people or cargo.

Enter Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. Beginning in the mid 1890s, Zeppelin and his associates began to develop a fully rigid dirigible with an internal frame structure and multiple gas bags. The first zeppelin was 420 feet long and 38 feet in diameter. After its first flight in 1900, Zeppelin’s company began regular pleasure and business flights in 1910 with seven rigid dirigibles composing DELAG, the world’s first airline.

A ride aboard a zeppelin was a memorable experience. A gourmet dinner was served in a dining room with large windows, on tables with linen cloths served by waiters in formal attire. It was a relaxing time and certainly preferable to sitting on a bamboo chair in the crowded interior of a Ford Trimotor airplane.

By the end of World War I, rigid dirigibles were being built by the Allies as well as the Germans, and a golden age of airship travel seemed to be in the offing. In Columbus, local businessman Don Casto convinced civic leaders that the future of Columbus depended on reliable air travel – lighter than air, heavier than air or any other way yet to be developed.

The original Port Columbus air terminal opened in 1929 with planned ability to handle dirigibles. The airport terminal was not alone in that regard. The American Insurance Union Citadel – now known as the LeVeque Tower – was completed in 1927 and called itself an American Air Harbor. The building was 555.5 feet tall and was designed to receive dirigible passengers to its top floor.

That never happened. The American airship Shenandoah crashed in a storm near Ava in southeastern Ohio in 1925, killing 14 people. The American airships Akron and Macon crashed as well. And in 1936, the German airship Hindenburg crashed and burned at Lakehurst, New Jersey.

With larger and faster heavier-than-air craft increasing in use, the day of the airship was passing. Airships would continue to be built, but they would be few in number. And none has docked recently at the LeVeque Tower.

Local historian and author Ed Lentz writes the As It Were column for ThisWeek Community News and The Columbus Dispatch.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Airships had brief reign as kings of the skies