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drogen. The Zeppelin Company was founded by Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin after he retired from the military at the age of 52. The Count became interested in the field after attending an 1874 lecture by Heinrich von Stephan, the Postmaster General of the German Empire. Heinrich talked about the possibility of delivering mail using an airship built with a rigid frame containing several separate gasbags. Ferdinand was inspired, but it took him until 1893 to drawn up a detailed design for just such an aerial vehicle. He applied for a patent two years later. The very first Zeppelin flew over Germany%u2019s Lake Constance on July 2, 1900. It was called the LZ-1. LZ stood for Luftschiff Zeppelin, or Zeppelin Airship. The airships were numbered consecutively up through LZ-131, which was never completed. One of the last, the LZ-129, was the illfated Hindenburg, which burst into flames, and was destroyed while attempting to land at Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937. Most of Zeppelin%u2019s airships were made with a frame of a special aluminum/copper alloy, called duralumin.While von Zeppelin was quite successful, he wasn%u2019t the only one building rigid airships. For example, between 1909 and 1918, Germany%u2019s Luftschiffbau Sch%u00fctteLanz company built 24 of them%u2014with plywood frames rather than aluminum alloy. Two others were constructed in Great Britain for the Royal Navy in the early 1900s, but only one actually flew. France also had one built with hollow wooden spars braced with wire, and it flew on April 13, 1913. Technically, none of these should be called Zeppelins, because Count von Zeppelin didn%u2019t build them, but the word zeppelin eventually became a generic term for any airship having a rigid frame.Major August von Parseval was also a designer and builder of semi-rigid airships. He launched his first experimental model, the Versuchsluftschiff (experimental airship) in 1906, and had built 22 non-rigid and semi-rigid airships by 1919. All were known as Parsevals.In 1923, America%u2019s Goodyear Tire and Rubber joined up with Germany%u2019s Luftschiffbau Zeppelin to form the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation, in order to build airships in Akron, Ohio. In the early 1930s, the company built the U.S.S. Maconand the U.S.S. Akron for the Navy, both of which could function as flying aircraft carriers. Among the largest flying objects in the world, by 1935 both had been destroyed in crashes. Because Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, a leading proponent of airships, was killed when the Akron went down, it was the end of the Navy%u2019s rigid airship program.