ZEPPELIN'S FAILURES AND SUCCESSES
But Count Zeppelin was a man of vision. He dreamed of a real ship of the air—a machine that would sail wherever the helmsman chose, regardless of wind and weather. Many years elapsed before he actually began to work out his dreams, and then he met with failure after failure. He believed in big machines and the loss of one of his airships meant the waste of a large sum of money, but he persisted, even though he spent all his fortune, and had to go heavily in debt. Every one thought him a crank until he built his third airship and proved its worth by making a trip of 270 miles. At once the German Government was interested and saw wonderful military possibilities in the new craft. The Zeppelin was purchased by the government and money was given the inventor to further his experiments.
That was not the end of his failures. Before the war broke out, thirteen Zeppelins had been destroyed by one accident or another. Evidently the building of Zeppelin airships was not a paying undertaking, although they were used to carry passengers on short aërial voyages. But the government made up money losses and Zeppelin went on developing his airships.
Of course, he was not the only one to build airships, nor even the first to build a dirigible. The French built some large dirigibles, but they failed to see any great military advantage in ships that could sail through the air, particularly after the airplane was invented, and so it happened that when the war started the French were devoting virtually all their energies to the construction of speedy, powerful airplanes. As for the British, they did not pay much attention to airships. The idea that their isles might be attacked from the sky seemed an exceedingly remote possibility.