Dr. Eckener's Dream Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel
by Douglas Botting
Our Price: $20.12
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $7.51 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Douglas BottingEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2002-10-01
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Dr. Eckener's Dream Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel
Book Review: Excellent
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a well written, well-researched, and highly entertaining account of one important part of the history of the rigid airship--a history that really shouldn't have ended. The US Navy originally planned to use Zeppelins as airborne aircraft carriers--carrying reconnaissance aircraft. Two were built and both met with bad luck. Had the Navy been successful, worked out the problems, and advanced the technology, it would have been unlikely that the Japanese could have moved their fleet unseen to within striking distance of Pearl Harbor. They made great defensive weapons, lousy offensive ones. Additionally a serious plan was afoot to finance a fleet of cargo Zeppelins for the Pacific. The beasts may be slow but they are faster than large surface vessels and are terrific heavy-haulers. They also don't make a mess of the ocean or ruin whale communications.
This book is a great way to get a sense of an extinct technology that might have been not only workable but also preferable to our current ones. Speed has made the world smaller but we're rapidly learning that isn't such a wonderful thing. Zeppelins would have helped create space--breathing room--in the global economy. Travel would be almost forced to be leisurely and civilized. Today it's more fun to take a bus to Cleveland than to fly in a loud and cramped jumbo jet to Paris. The jets pollute the upper atmosphere causing tremendous environmental damage, the Zeppelins wouldn't have.
Those of us who love this subject and would enjoy seeing the skies filled with these gentle behemoths seem like hopeless romantics, but maybe the intuitive appeal is less irrational than suspected. Maybe we sense that the positive gains provided by fast communications and modern transportation technologies are not exactly outweighing the overall losses. Trains, trolleys, airships, surface ships, a phone that's not with you 24/7, and a whole lot less Internet, might actually be the optimum technologies for a sane and sensible world. Bigger, faster, and more powerful are the options the dinosaurs went for and look where it led 'em.
Summary of Dr. Eckener's Dream Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel
A richly detailed history of the opulent age of the zeppelin and the visionary builder behind the great airship, Dr. Hugo Eckener
It wasn't the airplane that first romanced the public's imagination at the dawn of the twentieth century , but the great airships known as dirigibles, or zeppelins. Championing this great leap into the technological future was a visionary German entrepreneur, Doctor Hugo Eckener.
For Eckener, the development of the airship, especially coming in the aftermath of the First World War, represented an opportunity to shrink the world through safe and speedy international travel. Botting's engrossing story vividly recaptures the spirit of the times, when new technologies in communication, transportation, manufacturing and other areas were revolutionizing society. The great airships were a source of wonder wherever they flew, and Eckener was likened to Christopher Columbus, hailed around the world as the great explorer of his day, not unlike the astronauts would be a few generations later.
From its utitlitarian beginnings in the Great War, the airship reached its apotheosis with the round-the-world flight of the Graf Zeppelin in 1929. Seventeen years after the voyage of the Titanic, this great airship- twice as big and three times as fast as that ill-fated liner-captured the world's attention and seemed to blaze a path to the future. That future, of course, was not to be, as Eckener's dream evaporated soon after, with the destruction of the Hindenburg and the impending success of the airplane.
It wasn't the airplane that first romanced the public's imagination at the dawn of the twentieth century , but the great airships known as dirigibles, or zeppelins. Championing this great leap into the technological future was a visionary German entrepreneur, Doctor Hugo Eckener.
For Eckener, the development of the airship, especially coming in the aftermath of the First World War, represented an opportunity to shrink the world through safe and speedy international travel. Botting's engrossing story vividly recaptures the spirit of the times, when new technologies in communication, transportation, manufacturing and other areas were revolutionizing society. The great airships were a source of wonder wherever they flew, and Eckener was likened to Christopher Columbus, hailed around the world as the great explorer of his day, not unlike the astronauts would be a few generations later.
From its utitlitarian beginnings in the Great War, the airship reached its apotheosis with the round-the-world flight of the Graf Zeppelin in 1929. Seventeen years after the voyage of the Titanic, this great airship- twice as big and three times as fast as that ill-fated liner-captured the world's attention and seemed to blaze a path to the future. That future, of course, was not to be, as Eckener's dream evaporated soon after, with the destruction of the Hindenburg and the impending success of the airplane.
For the decade preceding World War II, the last word in transoceanic travel belonged to rigid airships--dirigibles. Douglas Botting's Dr. Eckener's Dream Machine traces the development and demise of these huge machines, which he calls a "supreme example of one evolutionary branch of aeronautical development."
The first dirigible, invented by Ferdinand von Zeppelin, was launched in 1900. It was another German, Dr. Hugo Eckener, however, who recognized and developed the potential of this vehicle as a viable commercial craft. By the late-1930s airships nearly 800 feet long had not only circumnavigated the globe but were regularly transporting passengers and mail from Europe to South America and the United States. Though the end of these vehicles commercial viability was preordained by rapid advances in airplane technology, Eckener's hopes were abruptly and finally ended with the fiery 1937 crash of the Hindenburg over Lakehurst, New Jersey. Botting briefly sketches the history and technology of lighter-than-air ships, but his enthusiasms are most apparent in detailed and novelistic narratives of various voyages, specially the 1929 circumnavigation by the Graf Zeppelin and the last trip of the Hindenburg. He is clearly enthusiastic about airships--sometimes overly so--but concludes, like Eckener, that they occupied, at best, a brief niche in air travel.
Botting's book is somewhat uneven. He is at his best when conveying the thrills, dangers and beauty of the voyages themselves and showing how Eckener and his ships were victims of politics as much as highly inflammable hydrogen. His discussions of history and technology are less adept, but the book in the end is a brisk and at times engaging primer of a wondrous and mostly forgotten aeronautical era. --H. O'Billovitch
Air Travel Books
- Books > Subjects > Travel > Specialty Travel
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Air Travel Books
France from the Airby Raymond Chevallier, Francois Cali
Thames & Hudson Ltd; Published: 1972-10-30; Hardcover; Book
Italy from the Airby Guido Alberto; Lefevre, Franco Rossi
Thames & Hudson; Published: 1993; Hardcover; Book
Air Travel (My First Library)by Robin Kerrod
Macdonald; Published: 1985-07-18; Hardcover; Book
Air travel: They wanted to fly (History workshop)by H. T Sutton
Cassell; Published: 1969; Unknown Binding; Book
Price of Air Travel (Hobart Papers)by Michael H. Cooper, Alan Keith Maynard
Institute of Economic Affairs; Published: 1971-05-24; Paperback; Book
Studies in International Space Lawby Bin Cheng
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 1998-03-05; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $168.88
Price in other shops:
Fly-Rights: A Consumer Guide to Air TravelUS Government Printing Office; Published: 1994-10-03; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.75
By Land, by Air, by Sea: The Ultimate Family Travel Activity Bookby Steve Bennett, Ruth Bennett
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 1994-12-01; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.00
Price in other shops:
Military Space (Brassey's Air Power: Aircraft, Weapons Systems and Technology)by Davie De Garis, Richard Winterton, Richard Harding
Brasseys Publications; Published: 1990-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $106.99
Chasing the Gloryby Parfit
Scribner; Published: 1988-10-25; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $4.50
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
Lindberg Graf ZeppelinJ. Lloyd International; Lindberg; J. Lloyd International; Toy; Hobby
Best price: $58.77
Price in other shops:
Airship Aerodynamics: Technical Manualby War Department
University Press of the Pacific; Published: 2003-06-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.03
Price in other shops:
Golden Age of the Great Passenger Airships : Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburgby Harold G. Dick
Smithsonian Books; Published: 1992-12-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $24.91
Price in other shops: