Ferdinand von Zeppelin

Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin was a German aeronautical engineer who developed the rigid airship that bears his name. On July 2, 1900, he piloted his first design, the LZ 1, over Lake Constance, where it rose from the ground and remained airborne for twenty minutes, demonstrating a rigid aluminum internal framework with separate internal gas cells that could be replaced individually, a major advance over earlier non-rigid balloon designs. He founded Luftschiffbau Zeppelin to manufacture his airships, and by 1914 the company's passenger service, DELAG, had carried more than 37,000 passengers over 1,600 flights without a serious incident, establishing long-distance air travel as commercially viable years before fixed-wing airliners could match it. He was made an honorary citizen of several German cities between 1907 and 1912, received the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle in 1908, and was posthumously inducted into the International Air and Space Hall of Fame in 1975.