The first Zeppelin flight takes place on Lake Constance near Friedrichshafen, Germany.
Lake Constance (German: Bodensee, pronounced [bodnze] (listen)) refers to three bodies of water on the Rhine at the northern foot of the Alps: Upper Lake Constance (Obersee), Lower Lake Constance (Untersee), and a connecting stretch of the Rhine, called the Lake Rhine (Seerhein). These waterbodies lie within the Lake Constance Basin (Bodenseebecken), which is part of the Alpine Foreland and through which the Rhine flows.The lake is situated where Germany, Switzerland, and Austria meet. Its shorelines lie in the German states of Baden-Wrttemberg and Bavaria, the Swiss cantons of St. Gallen, Thurgau, and Schaffhausen, and the Austrian state of Vorarlberg. The Rhine flows, as the Alpine Rhine, into the lake from the south, with its original course forming the Austro-Swiss border, and has its outflow on the Lower Lake where except for Schaffhausen it forms, as High Rhine, the German-Swiss border as far as the city of Basel.The most populous towns on the Upper Lake are Constance (German: Konstanz), Friedrichshafen, Bregenz, Lindau (Bodensee), berlingen and Kreuzlingen. The largest town on the Lower Lake is Radolfzell am Bodensee. The largest islands are Reichenau in the Lower Lake, and Lindau and Mainau in the Upper Lake.
While in English and the Romance languages, the lake is named after the city of Constance, the German name derives from the village of Bodman (municipality of Bodman-Ludwigshafen), in the northwesternmost corner of the lake.
A Zeppelin is a type of rigid airship named after the German inventor Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (German pronunciation: [ˈt͡sɛpəliːn]) who pioneered rigid airship development at the beginning of the 20th century. Zeppelin's notions were first formulated in 1874 and developed in detail in 1893. They were patented in Germany in 1895 and in the United States in 1899. After the outstanding success of the Zeppelin design, the word zeppelin came to be commonly used to refer to all rigid airships. Zeppelins were first flown commercially in 1910 by Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-AG (DELAG), the world's first airline in revenue service. By mid-1914, DELAG had carried over 10,000 fare-paying passengers on over 1,500 flights. During World War I, the German military made extensive use of Zeppelins as bombers and as scouts, resulting in over 500 deaths in bombing raids in Britain.The defeat of Germany in 1918 temporarily slowed the airship business. Although DELAG established a scheduled daily service between Berlin, Munich, and Friedrichshafen in 1919, the airships built for this service eventually had to be surrendered under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which also prohibited Germany from building large airships. An exception was made allowing the construction of one airship for the United States Navy, which saved the company from extinction. In 1926, the restrictions on airship construction were lifted, and with the aid of donations from the public, work began on the construction of LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin. This revived the company's fortunes, and during the 1930s, the airships Graf Zeppelin, and the larger LZ 129 Hindenburg operated regular transatlantic flights from Germany to North America and Brazil. The Art Deco spire of the Empire State Building was originally designed to serve as a mooring mast for Zeppelins and other airships, although it was found that high winds made this impossible and the plan was abandoned. The Hindenburg disaster in 1937, along with political and economic issues, hastened the demise of Zeppelins.