Empires of the Skies

"Of all people who might have solved the problem of human flight, few would have suspected Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a fusty, old-school member of the Wurrtemburg nobility, recently ousted from the German military and convinced that a flying machine will be his ticket back to military glory. Instead, by the dawn of the twentieth century, he creates something much bigger: a system of flight that embodies the cutting edge of multiple sciences and a business that would last for decades and make his name synonymous with airships. Not even the Wright brothers, who were creating their competing technology at nearly the same moment, managed such close association. Zeppelin, aging, leaves his company in the hands of Hugo Eckener, his partner and publicity expert, who has a vision of the airship connecting people all over the world. He guides the Zeppelin Company, always on the brink of collapse, through the first world war and some of Germany's most difficult years, as he tries to establish the first airline route across the Atlantic. But, just as Zeppelin had a rival for the best flight technology in the Wright Bros., Eckener meets his match in Pan American's Juan Trippe in the race t