First flights
Inventor of the airship is Jean-Baptiste Marie Charles Meunier. Meunier airship was to be made in the form of an ellipsoid. Controllability was to be carried out with the help of three propellers, rotated manually force of 80 people. By varying the amount of gas in the balloon through the use ballonet could adjust the height of the airship, and he therefore proposed that the two membranes - outer and inner core. The airship designed by Giffard, who had borrowed these ideas from Meunier more than half a century later, made its first flight only on Sept. 24, 1852. This difference between the date of the invention the balloon (1783) and the first flight of the airship due to the lack of time for the aerostatic engine aircraft. The next technological breakthrough occurred in 1884 when it was implemented the first fully controllable free flight of the French military airship with an electric motor La France by Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs. The length of the airship was 52 m, volume - 1 900 m ³, 23 minutes was covered with a distance of 8 km with an engine capacity of 8.5 liters. pp.
Nevertheless, these devices were short-lived and extremely fragile. Regular controlled flight did not occur until the internal combustion engine.
October 19, 1901 French balloonist Alberto Santos-Dumont after several attempts orbited at a speed of just over 20 km / h Eiffel Tower on your phone Santos-Dumont number 6. Then it felt eccentricity, but later the airship for decades become one of the most advanced vehicles. At the same time when airships began gaining recognition, the development of rigid airships as not to stand still: then they were able to carry more cargo than aircraft, and this situation lasted for decades. The design of the airship and its development related to the German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.