Roland E P A - Conqueror of the skies. Zeppelin, its master (1908) (Original edition)

Conqueror of the skies. Zeppelin, its master

Author: E. P. A. Roland · Publisher: Loewes Verlag Ferdinand Carl, Stuttgart · Genre: a book on the history of aviation aimed at young people · Structure: 18 chapters, 6 plates, 1 portrait and 45 illustrations in the text. 184 pages.

Published in Stuttgart around 1909 by Loewes Verlag, this book traces, for young readers, the history and development of aviation from antiquity to the summer of 1908.

 The author compares flight to swimming: just as man had to learn to swim, so too did he have to master, through sustained effort, the art of rising into the air. The book begins with this ‘very ancient longing to conquer the air’ and first asks the question of what flight is: attempts to explain it date back to Archimedes, who studied buoyancy; to Aristotle, who was the first to seek a scientific explanation for the flight of birds; and to Archytas of Tarentum, to whom an artificial dove propelled by mechanical means is attributed. This is followed by an analysis of bird flight, based on the writings of the balloonist Moedebeck and the engineer Wilhelm Kreß.

The following chapters explore flight in legend and history: the Greek myth of Helen and Phrixus carried by the ram with the Golden Fleece, Daedalus and the fall of Icarus, then the first men to have attempted the feat, including the ‘magician’ Simon of Samaria in Rome in the year 67, and the flights of the ‘flying craftsmen’, shoemakers and tailors of the modern era. The account then turns to the invention of the balloon: the hot-air balloon, perhaps known to the Chinese and mentioned in 15th-century German manuscripts by pyrotechnicians, was put into practice by the Montgolfier brothers. On 19 September 1783, a balloon rose before Louis XVI at Versailles carrying a duck, a cockerel and a sheep; on 21 November, Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes carried out the first free ascent. The following chapters describe the general enthusiasm for ballooning, the performance of the spherical balloon and its victims, including Rozier himself, who died with Romain in 1785, and later the scientific ascents, such as the flight by Gaston Tissandier, Sivel and Crocé-Spinelli to over 8,000 metres in 1875. Space is given to the tethered balloon and the kite of Bartsch von Sigsfeld and Parseval, followed by the military uses of the balloon, from the Battle of Fleurus in 1794 to the Siege of Paris in 1870–71,

 including the episode of the balloon driven out to sea without any navigational instruments, whose crew, believing themselves lost, entrusted a final message to a pigeon.

The third part details the development of the airship. In 1852, Giffard combined a steam engine with a 44-metre-long streamlined balloon; in 1872, Haenlein tested the first motorised airship in Brünn; and in 1884, Renard and Krebs’s ‘La France’ completed the first closed aerial journey. The chapter on the ‘conquerors of the air’ mentions the Lebaudy and Parseval airships, the trials conducted by Wölfert (who died in 1897) and Schwarz, and the role of Daimler’s petrol engine. The final chapter is devoted to Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, ‘master of the air’ since his flights in July and August 1908: an officer who had observed the use of balloons during the American Civil War, he built rigid airships with a hull 128 metres long and 17 internal gas cells, achieved long flights in 1908, and following the destruction of his airship at Echterdingen on 5 August 1908 received the support of the German people, with the author seeing in this ‘miracle of idealism’ a new means of preserving peace. The book concludes with a sonnet composed by Ernst Arnold, a friend of the author, in memory of the days at Echterdingen.

Illustrations — 52 in total:

6 plates (‘Tonbilder’)

1 portrait of Count Zeppelin

45 figures in the text (‘Textabbildungen’)

 Publication and editions

The first edition was published around 1909–1910 by Loewes Verlag (Stuttgart). The text ends with the events of August 1908 (the Echterdingen disaster) and their immediate aftermath, which marks the end of the narrative.

The work had at least 5 editions: an entry in the ZVAB explicitly describes a ‘5., verbesserte und vermehrte Auflage’ (5th edition, revised and expanded — VIII + 168 pages, compared with 160 in the earlier editions), and there is a reprint from 1915, also published by Loewes.

The exact number of editions is not documented with certainty beyond these milestones: we know only that there were at least five, probably more, between 1909 and 1915.

Internal dating clues

1. The most explicit reference — the penultimate paragraph of the book:

‘Zur Zeit, da dieses Buch die Presse verläßt, um der deutschen Jugend noch rechtzeitig auf den Weihnachtsgabentisch „fliegen“ zu können’

Here, the author states verbatim that the book is leaving the press in order to arrive in time on the Christmas present table. The book was therefore intended as a Christmas present.

2. The end point of the events described: the text ends in the autumn of 1908 — Echterdingen (5 August 1908), the Parseval balloon in September 1908, and, above all, a sentence in the future tense: the LZ 3 ‘from August 1908 onwards [undergoing] a refit in order to undertake new ascents in October’ (to undertake new ascents in October). The author was therefore writing before or during October 1908.

3. No mention of the 1909 flights: the major Zeppelin journeys of March–May 1909 (Stuttgart, Lucerne, Berlin), which would have been unmissable in a book published later, are absent.

4. No year on the title page (‘ohne Jahr’) — which is consistent with catalogue entries that conventionally date this copy to ‘ca. 1910’.

This copy (160 pages, ending with Chapter 18 and Ernst Arnold’s sonnet) most likely corresponds to the first edition, printed in the autumn of 1908 for Christmas — or, at the very latest, in early 1909. Catalogues that date it ‘around 1910’ do so out of caution, in the absence of a specific year, but the internal content clearly points to late 1908.

Impact on value: a genuine first edition from Christmas 1908, contemporary with the Echterdingen event, is more sought-after than the reprints from 1910–1915.