Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (German: Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin;[1] 8 July 1838 â 8 March 1917) was a German general and later inventor of the Zeppelin rigid airships, which soon became synonymous with airships and dominated long-distance flight until the 1930s. He founded the company Luftschiffbau Zeppelin.
In 1855 he became a cadet of the military school at Ludwigsburg and then started his career as an army officer in the army of Württemberg. By 1858, Zeppelin had been promoted to lieutenant, and that year he was given leave to study science, engineering and chemistry at Tübingen. Würtemberg’s mobilising for the Austro-Sardinian War interrupted this study in 1859 when he was called up to the Ingenieurkorps (Würtemberg engineering corps) at Ulm.
In 1863 Zeppelin took leave to act as an observer for the Union’s Army of the Potomac in the American Civil War in Virginia. Later, he travelled to the Upper Midwest with a party that probably included two Russians. Led by Native American (probably Ojibwe) guides, they canoed and portaged from the western end of Lake Superior up the St. Louis River and across to Crow Wing, Minnesota, on the Upper Mississippi River. On reaching St. Paul (via stagecoach and hired carriage), Zeppelin encountered German-born itinerant balloonist John Steiner and made his first aerial ascent with him from a site near the International Hotel in downtown St. Paul on 19 August. Many years later he attributed the beginning of his thinking about dirigible lighter-than-air craft to this experience.
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