The following list shows the number of Zeppelin airships built up to the outbreak of the war, and the fate of each of them:
| Zeppelin No. | Year of Completion | Name | Remarks |
| 1 | 1900 | L.Z. I | Broken up after experiments spring 1901. |
| 2 | 1905 | L.Z. II | Wrecked January 1906. |
| 3 | 1906 | Z. I | Taken over by the army. Broken up February 1913. |
| 4 | 1908 | L.Z. IV | Burnt August 1908. |
| 5 | 1909 | Z. II | Taken over by the army. Wrecked April 1910. |
| 6 | 1909 | L.Z. VI | Burnt September 1910. |
| 7 | 1910 | Deutschland | Wrecked June 1910. |
| 8 | 1911 | Ersatz Deutschland | Wrecked May 1911. |
| 9 | 1911 | Ersatz Z. II | Taken over by the army. Broken up summer 1914. |
| 10 | 1911 | Schwaben | Wrecked June 1912. |
| 11 | 1912 | Viktoria Luise | Wrecked June 1915. |
| 12 | 1912 | Z. III | Taken over by the army. Broken up summer 1914. |
| 13 | 1912 | Hansa | Broken up summer 1916. |
| 14 | 1912 | L.I | Taken over by the navy. Wrecked September 1913. |
| 15 | 1913 | Ersatz Z. I | Taken over by the army. Wrecked March 1913. |
| 16 | 1913 | Z. IV | Taken over by the army. Broken up spring 1916. |
| 17 | 1913 | Sachsen | Broken up spring 1916. |
| 18 | 1913 | L. 2 | Taken over by the navy. Burnt October 1913. |
| 19 | 1913 | Ersatz E.Z. I | Taken over by the army. Wrecked June 1914. |
| 20 | 1913 | Z. V | Taken over by the army. Crashed after damage by gunfire in Poland, August 1914. |
| 21 | 1913 | Z. VI | Taken over by the army. Crashed at Cologne after damage by gunfire over Liége, 6th August 1914. |
| 22 | 1914 | Z. VII | Taken over by the army. Crashed in the Argonne after damage by gunfire, August 1914. |
| 23 | 1914 | Z. VIII | Taken over by the army. Brought down by gunfire at Badonvillers, 23rd August 1914. |
| 24 | 1914 | Z. VIII | Taken over by the army. Brought down by gunfire at Badonvillers, 23rd August 1914. |
| 23 | 1914 | L. 3 | Taken over by the navy. Wrecked off Fanö, 17th February 1915. |
| 25 | 1914 | Z. IX | Taken over by the army. Dismantled August 1914. |
The list is full of wreckage; what it does not show is the immense progress made in a few years. As early as 1907 Count Zeppelin made a voyage of eight hours in his third airship, covering 211 miles. In 1909 he voyaged, in stages, from Friedrichshafen to Berlin, landing at Tegel in the presence of the Emperor on the 29th of August, and returning safely to Friedrichshafen by the 2nd of September. But the growing efficiency of the Zeppelin and the growing confidence of the German public are best seen in the records of passenger-carrying flights. The Zeppelin Company, being founded and supported by national enterprise, did not sell any ships to foreign powers. For passenger-carrying purposes it supplied ships to the subsidiary company usually called the Delag (that is, the Deutsche Luftschiffahrt Aktien-Gesellschaft), which had its headquarters at Frankfort-on-the-Main. The Delag acquired six Zeppelin airships, which, unlike the military and naval ships, bore names. A record of the voyages made by the Viktoria Luise, the Hansa, and the Sachsen will show how rapidly the German people were familiarized with the Zeppelin, and how safe air-travel became, when safety was essential, as it is in all passenger-carrying enterprises. The Viktoria Luise made her first trip on the 4th of March 1912, with twenty-three passengers on board, from Friedrichshafen to Frankfort-on-the-Main—a distance of about two hundred miles, which she covered in seven and a half hours. She made her hundredth trip on the 23rd of June 1912; her two-hundredth on the 21st of October in the same year; in the following year her three-hundredth trip was made on the 30th of June, and her four-hundredth on the 26th of November. In these four hundred trips she carried 8,551 persons and travelled 29,430 miles. Some of them were made over the sea; on the 27th of June, for instance, she left Hamburg in the morning, and reached Cuxhaven in about two hours. There she picked up with a Hamburg-America liner starting for New York, and accompanied the steamer for some distance; then she steered for Heligoland, and flying round the island very low was greeted with cheers by the inhabitants. Part of her return journey was made against a head-wind of sixteen miles an hour, and she reached Hamburg after a voyage of eight hours, during which she had covered a distance of about two hundred and fifty miles. The Hansa, beginning in July 1912, by the end of 1913 had made two hundred and seventy-five trips, carrying 5,697 persons and travelling 22,319 miles. The Sachsen, beginning in May 1913, before the end of the year had made two hundred and six trips, carrying 4,857 persons and travelling about 13,700 miles. A wrecked Zeppelin is such a picture of destruction, such a vast display of twisted metal and rags lying wreathed across a landscape, that those who see it are apt to get an exaggerated idea of the dangers of airship travel. With all his misfortunes, it was Count Zeppelin's luck for many years that no life was lost among those who travelled in his ships.
In May 1906, before Count Zeppelin's enterprise had received the stamp of Imperial and national approval, there was formed, under the inspiration of the German Emperor, a society for airship development. The success of the Lebaudy airship in France prompted the construction in Germany of two types of semi-rigid airship—the Parseval and the Gross. Only four of the latter type were built, and all four suffered mishap; the last and best of them, built in 1911, is said to have shown a better performance than the best contemporary Zeppelin. The Parseval was designed in 1906 by Major August von Parseval, of the Third Bavarian Infantry Regiment, who retired from the German army in 1907 in order to devote himself entirely to scientific work. He was already famous for the kite balloon, which he had invented in collaboration with Hauptmann Bartsch von Sigsfeld, who died in 1906. The Parseval kite balloon was adopted or imitated by all other nations during the war. The Parseval airship was as good an airship, of the non-rigid type, as had ever been built; it was supplanted, later on, by the rigid type, because an airship's lift depends on its size, and very large airships could not be built without a rigid framework. The society for airship development bought up Major von Parseval's plans, and began to construct Parseval airships. The statutes of the society forbade it to sell ships for profit, so an allied company was formed, the Luftfahrzeugbau-Gesellschaft, with works at Bitterfeld, and a subsidiary company, the L.V.G., or Luftverkehrs-Gesellschaft, to exploit Parseval airships for passenger-carrying, with its headquarters at Berlin and sheds at Johannisthal. Two passenger-carrying ships were built, the Stollwerk in 1910, and the Charlotte in 1912. The Parseval ships, perhaps because, being non-rigid, they were held to be inferior to the Zeppelins, were freely sold to foreign powers—one to the Austrian army in 1909, one to the Russian and one to the Turkish army in 1910, one to the Japanese army in 1912, another to the Russian and two to the Italian army in 1913; last of all, in the same year, one to the British Admiralty. Some eighteen Parseval airships were built and launched between 1909 and 1913. The third great airship-building company in Germany was the Schütte-Lanz Company, with its factory in Mannheim. It was named from Heinrich Lanz, the founder of machine works near Mannheim, who supplied the money, and Professor Schütte, of the Technical University, Danzig, who supplied the skill. Its rigid airships were made of wood; they were built from 1912 onwards expressly for the uses of the army and navy, and they played a great part in the war.
Those who were responsible for the development of the airship in Germany took the people into partnership, and devoted themselves largely to passenger-carrying. The airship became popular; and the officers and men who worked it were practised in navigation all the year round. The people, for their part, regarded the Zeppelin with the enthusiasm of patriotic fervour. France had taken the lead and had shown the way with the dirigible, but Germany, by recruiting the people for the cause, soon out-distanced her. The passenger ships served as training-ships for crews, and, if occasion should arise, were readily convertible to warlike purposes. Yet things changed and moved so fast, that before the war broke out, although the German people still believed that the Zeppelin gave them the sovereignty of the air, the German Government had been troubled by doubts, had changed its policy, and was striving hard to overtake the French in the construction and manning of army aeroplanes. The consequence was that the war found Germany better provided with aeroplanes for use on the western front than with airships for operations oversea. The German Emperor, speaking to a wounded soldier, is reported to have said that he never willed this war. One proof that this war was not the war he willed may be found in the state of preparation of the German air force. If war with England had been any part of the German plan, German airships would have been more numerous, and would have been ready for immediate action, as the armies that invaded Belgium were ready. The German theory was that England was not prepared for war, which, with certain brilliant and crucial exceptions, was true, and that therefore England would not go to war, which proved to be false. The French were supplying themselves with a great force of aeroplanes, and for all that could be known, air operations on the western front might determine the fortunes of the campaign. So the German Government turned its attention to machines that are heavier than air.
What had brought about this situation was the rapid and surprising development of the aeroplane by France. Here it is necessary to go back and take up the story again at the beginning of those few and headlong years.
French aviation derives directly from Lilienthal and collaterally from the Wrights. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church; but the martyrs, for the most part, die in faith, without assurance of the harvest that is to come. When Lilienthal was killed he can hardly have known that his example and his careful records would so soon bear fruit in other countries. He was regarded by his fellow-countrymen as a whimsical acrobat, who took mad risks and paid the price. But as soon as he was dead, the story of what he had done got abroad, and began to raise up for him disciples and successors, who carried on his experiments. The chief of these in France was Captain F. Ferber, an officer of artillery and a student of science, who from 1896 onwards was a teacher in the military school at Fontainebleau. It was in 1898 that he first came across an account of Lilienthal; the reading of it impressed him as deeply as it impressed the Wrights. Here was a man, he thought, who had discovered the right way of learning to fly; if only the way were followed, success was sure. Like the Wrights, Ferber lays stress chiefly on practice. It was he, not Lilienthal, who was the author of the saying, 'To design a flying machine is nothing; to build one is nothing much; to try it in the air is everything'. In the book on aviation which he wrote shortly before his death in 1909 he expounds his creed and narrates his experiences. His mathematical knowledge, he says, served him well, for it saved him from being condemned as an empiric by those dogmatic men of science, very numerous in France (and, he might have added, in the universities of all countries), who believe that science points the way to practice, whereas the most that science can do, says Ferber, is to follow in the wake of practice, and interpret it. So he set himself to work on a plan as old as the world—first to create the facts, and then to expound them in speech and writing.
He began to build gliders, but had no success with them until he found out for himself what he had not gathered from his reading of Lilienthal—that an up-current of wind is necessary for a prolonged glide. His first successful flight was made with his fourth glider on the 7th of December 1901. He got into touch with Mr. Chanute, another of Lilienthal's scattered disciples, and through him was supplied with papers and photographs concerning the gliding experiments of the Wrights. These were a revelation to him, and he used them in making his fifth glider, which was a great improvement on its predecessors. He lectured at Lyons to the Aero Club of the Rhone on the progress of aviation by means of gliding, and published his lecture in the Revue d'Artillerie of March 1904. About this time the air was full of rumours of flight. M. Ernest Archdeacon, of Paris, took up the subject with ardour, wrote many articles on it, and encouraged others to work at it. A young man, called Gabriel Voisin, who heard Captain Ferber lecture at Lyons, came on to the platform after the lecture and declared that he wished to devote his life to the cause of aviation. The next morning he started for Paris, and with the help of M. Archdeacon founded the earliest aeroplane factory in France—the firm of the brothers Voisin, which became the mainstay of early French aviation.
Ferber himself was carrying out a series of experiments at Nice with an aeroplane which he fitted with a six horse-power engine and suspended from a tall mast, when he was invited by Colonel Renard to help with the work of the official research laboratory at Chalais Meudon. He joined the staff, but found that the officials of a Government organization are as ill qualified as the theorists of a university for progress in practical invention. The lower members of the hierarchy are men under orders, who do what they are told to do; the higher members are hampered by having to work through subordinates, who often do not understand their aims and take no particular interest in the work in hand. Nevertheless, he improved his aeroplane, stabilizing it by means of a long tail, and fitting it with wheels for landing, in place of the skids which were used by the Wrights. Then, like those who had gone before him, he was held up by the question of the engine. Engineers are a conservative race of men, and perhaps the perfected aeroplane would still be waiting for a suitable engine if they had not been prompted to innovation by the fashion of motor-racing. There are strange links in the chain of cause and effect; the pneumatic tyre made the motor-bicycle possible; for motor-bicycle races a light engine was devised which later on was adapted to the needs of the aeroplane. Ferber made acquaintance with M. Levavasseur, who had invented an engine of eighty horse-power weighing less than five pounds per horse-power, and had won many races with it. This engine was named the Antoinette in honour of the daughter of M. Gastambide, a capitalist, who had supplied the inventor with funds. The most famous of early French aviators, Santos Dumont, Farman, Blériot, Delagrange, and others, owed much to this engine. Ferber might have had it before any of them, for M. Levavasseur offered to build it for him—twenty-four horse-power with a weight of about a hundred and twelve pounds—but public moneys could not be advanced for an engine that did not exist, so the other pioneers, who had followed Ferber in gliding experiments, preceded him in flying. In 1906 Ferber obtained Government permission to join the Antoinette firm for a period, and by 1908 he was flying in an aeroplane of his own design. He was killed in September 1909, on the aerodrome of Beuvrequen, near Boulogne, by capsizing on rough ground in the act of alighting. His own estimate of his work was modest; he had acted, he said, as a ferment and a popularizer, and had helped to put France on the right track; but it was his pride that he belonged to the great school, the school of Lilienthal, Pilcher, Chanute, and the Wrights, who went to work by a progressive method of practical experiment, who combined daring with patience, and found their way into the air.