gn would be a huge cigar-shaped metal structure with woven horizontal and vertical braces that was covered by a skin of some sort (Nitske, 1977).
His journals, we are told, contained descriptions of years of model building, testing, redesigning, testing again. At last he came up with a working model in the late 1890s, but didn't have the funds to go from model to prototype (Nitske, 1977). In 1896, a German engineering group advanced him the money to build a prototype, and the results were so intriguing that a public company was formed in 1898 to begin construction of the Zeppelin Rigid Airship. The first ones to roll out of the factory were 90 meters long, 14 meters in diameter and had two gondolas, each one carrying a 16 hp engine that drove vertical and horizontal propellers. In 1900 the first successful flight was recorded (Sinclair, 1934, 97).
The strengths. The major strengths of the Zeppelin's design over previous air ships were these:
(a) The cylindrical shape was more ae
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