Luftschiffbau Zeppelin

And the Groff Zeppelin flew around the world, making stops in places like Tokyo and, Flew over San Francisco, London's Wembley Stadium.

And what's really fascinating is we think about the Zeppelins and the airships as kind of this odd little blimp in the history of aviation.

But there was this really, I would say, a real debate at the time over what would be the future of aviation.

Would it be airplanes or airships? And for a long time, airships were able to do things that airplanes couldn't possibly conceive of doing or people who built the airplanes couldn't conceive of them achieving for decades.

And so even just to kind of remind people that these were very much a fixture of the skies, they were absolutely thrilling to see kind of the ultimate expression of the hopes of modernity and technological advancement in kind of this dual use technology.

Like we have many examples of today, like drones or AI.

I mean, the Zeppelins are very much part of that conversation.

And also the fact that it was the first thing that people were really excited about after World War I that was German.

Aircraft were still short-ranged and fragile things, but rigid airships were different.

The Germans had been building them since before the First World War, and the Zeppelin Company had been flying commercial passengers since 1910.

A rigid airship could carry dozens of passengers across oceans in days instead of weeks.

They were enormous, majestic, and from a certain distance, convincingly reliable.