This monument looked rather interesting from behind, looking out onto Lake Constance. It wasn’t immediately obvious what it was, but it transpired to be the Zeppelin Säule, or Zeppelin column, which commemorates the life and work of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1838-1917).
The town that really owns the whole Zeppelin story is Friedrichshafen. A Zeppelin was basically a giant flying cigar, a rigid airship filled with gas (usually hydrogen), powered by propellers and steered like a slow, majestic whale in the sky. Invented by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin in the early 1900s, these rather incredible contraptions were engineering marvels for their time and became a bit of a science experiment alongside something of a cruise in the sky. This is the sort of thing that Richard (who was present whilst I took photos of this monument, although he was on the phone to someone as he struggles to live in the moment) would have loved to travel on, especially if there was a business class section with free champagne.
Now, the issue with these things is that they were filled with explosive gas and kept blowing up, but the principle was good. Count Zeppelin set up shop in the town, building his first airships and launching them from giant hangars by the water. It became the beating heart of Zeppelin engineering, a mix of optimism, innovation and the occasional fiery mishaps were something they hoped to get over. For a while they did, but the 1937 Hindenburg disaster put an effective end to the whole enterprise.
The lighting adds to the whole set-up, it feels like a fitting tribute to a man who designed an entirely new form of transport. I’m not an expert in balloons floating across the Atlantic, but I suspect that if the concept had been developed that they could have made it safer and more reliable, but with the advent of the aircraft it was perhaps always a bit doomed….