Dr Eckener’s Dream Machine: The Historic Saga of the Round-the-World Zeppelin: The Extraordinary Story of the Zeppelin - Hardcover

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Douglas Botting’s biography of GAVIN MAXWELL was hugely praised and is still in print as a HarperCollins paperback. His previous books reflect his interest in travel, exploration and wild places. He was an exploration film-maker for the BBC’s ‘World About Us’ and became a full-time writer with the publication of his highly praised biography of the German explorer-naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, Humboldt and the Cosmos. His biography of Gerald Durrell, published in March 1999, received excellent, widespread review and feature coverage.

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Early in the morning of 15 August 1929, at a gigantic aircraft hangar on the shores of Lake Constance in Germany, one aristocratic Englishwoman and sixty men of different nationalities clambered on board a fantastical flying machine almost as big as the 'Titanic'. The 'Graf Zeppelin,' one of the most spectacular and best-loved technological marvels of its age, was about to embark on the first-ever passenger round-the-world flight, kept aloft with inflammable hydrogen gas and propelled by a special explosive vapour.

Travelling up to four times the speed of the fastest ocean-going liner and down to less than the height of the Empire State Building, above unknown lands and seas, the 'Graf Zeppelin' flew east-about via the wilds of Siberia to Japan and across the Pacific to continental America and the Atlantic. The airship's creator and commander was a former psychologist and economics journalist called Hugo Eckener, one of the great protagonists of aeronautical history and later opponent of Hitler and his Nazis henchmen.

Relying on contemporary memoirs, diaries, journals and letters, Douglas Botting has written an exhilarating narrative history of the Zeppelin, blending science, adventure and romance to describe how Dr Eckener joined forces with a retired German cavalry officer called Count Zeppelin to pursue a dream of creating the world's first passenger aircraft – and how that dream distorted in world war 1 and finally turned into a nightmare with the fateful crash of the 'Hindenburg' in 1937. Dr Eckener's dream, however, lives on – both in the pages of this book and on an airfield near Berlin…