page_title: Early flying machines
section_title: Dirigibles or airships
hierarchical_section_title: Early flying machines / Lighter than air / Dirigibles or airships
context_page_description: Early flying machines include all forms of aircraft studied or constructed before the development of the modern aeroplane by 1910. The story of modern flight begins more than a century before the first successful manned aeroplane, and the earliest aircraft thousands of years before.
context_section_description: Work on developing a dirigible (steerable) balloon, nowadays called an airship, continued sporadically throughout the 19th century. The first sustained powered, controlled flight in history is believed to have taken place on 24 September 1852 when Henri Giffard flew about 17 miles (27 km) in France from Paris to Trappes with the Giffard dirigible, a non-rigid airship filled with hydrogen and powered by a 3 horsepower (2.2 kW) steam engine driving a 3-bladed propeller.
  In 1863, Solomon Andrews flew his aereon design, an unpowered, controllable dirigible in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. He flew a later design in 1866 around New York City and as far as Oyster Bay, New York. His technique of gliding under gravity works by changing the lift to provide propulsive force as the airship alternately rises and sinks, and so does not need a powerplant.
  A further advance was made on 9 August 1884, when the first fully controllable free flight was made by Charles Renard and Arthur Constantin Krebs in a French Army electric-powered airship, La France. The 170-foot (52 m) long, 66,000-cubic-foot (1,900 m³) airship covered 8 km (5 mi) in 23 minutes with the aid of an 8.5 horsepower (6.3 kW) electric motor, returning to its starting point. This was the first flight over a closed circuit.
  These aircraft were not practical. Besides being generally frail and short-lived, they were non-rigid or at best semi-rigid. Consequently, it was difficult to make them large enough to carry a commercial load.
  Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin realised that a rigid outer frame would allow a much bigger airship. He founded the Zeppelin firm, whose rigid Luftschiff Zeppelin 1 (LZ 1) first flew from the Bodensee on the Swiss border on 2 July 1900. The flight lasted 18 minutes. The second and third flights, in October 1900 and on 24 October 1900 respectively, beat the 6 m/s (13 mph) speed record of the French airship La France by 3 m/s (7 mph).
  The Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont became famous by designing, building, and flying dirigibles. He built and flew the first fully practical dirigible capable of routine, controlled flight. With his dirigible No.6 he won the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize on 19 October 1901 with a flight that took off from Saint-Cloud, rounded the Eiffel Tower and returned to its starting point. By this point, the airship had been established as the first practicable form of air travel.
caption: The dirigible balloon created by Giffard in 1852
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