The real Golden Age of airships arrived in 1900, when Count
Ferdinand von Zeppelin launched his Luftschiff Zeppelin 1 from a floating
hangar on Lake Constance in southern Bavaria.

Zeppelin was from a very old and influential family in the
small German kingdom of Wurttemberg. His sovereign sent him to America as an
observer during the Civil War, where he made his first balloon ascent. During
the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, Zeppelin became a popular hero for leading a
daring mission behind enemy lines.

But that war also led to the unification of Germany into the
Prussian-dominated German Empire, and as a Wurttemberger Zeppelin was politely frozen
out of the highest positions in the new regime. He retired as a Lieutenant
General and found himself more or less at loose ends.

So he turned his attention to aviation. Zeppelin had a good
technical education from the university at Tubingen, and approached the subject
analytically. Zeppelin realized that everyone else was building their airships
too small. He proposed to make the square-cube law work to his advantage.

(Everyone know about the square-cube law? If you double the
linear dimensions of an object, the surface area increases four times — the
square — while the volume increases eight times — the cube.) An airship's
weight is all on the surface, but its lift comes from volume. Zeppelin decided
to quit messing around with little hundred-foot sausages of rubberized silk and
build something that could carry a serious payload. Rather than relying on his
own back-of-the-envelope estimates, he hired engineers and used his remaining
clout and personal fortune to commission new engines and materials.

His LZ1 was 420 feet long, with 17 gas cells holding 400,000
cubic feet of hydrogen gas. The gas cells were contained within an aluminum
framework covered with canvas, and the whole thing was powered by two powerful
Daimler gasoline engines. It weighed in at about 13 tons.

As with any prototype, there were problems: the ship was overweight,
it needed a stronger skeleton, the engines were unreliable, and the whole thing
needed better pitch and trim controls. But it flew, and it pointed the way
toward the large, fast airships of the next four decades.

Characters in a steampunk adventure who want to fly long
distances need something like the LZ1 or its more successful descendant the LZ3
of 1907. These provide space for a decent cast of characters, and the speed and
range to let them get into trouble nearly anywhere in the world. In alternate
histories, Zeppelin-style airships crowd out airplanes for passenger transport,
and somehow manage to avoid becoming obsolete in the jet age.