Head of The Zeppelin Company
After the War, Eckener succeeded Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who had died on 8 March 1917. After considerable conflict with Zeppelin's business manager, Alfred Colesman, who wanted to replace the production of airships with production of other (and likely more profitable) products, Eckener was able to keep the Zeppelin factory at Friedrichshafen on Bodensee (Lake Constance) in Württemberg, southern Germany, from being retooled. Colesman left the company soon afterwards.
The Treaty of Versailles had forbidden Germans to construct airships of the size needed to operate the profitable trans-Atlantic service that was Eckener's goal. However, after much skilful lobbying, he persuaded the US and German governments to allow the company to build LZ 126, later rechristened the USS Los Angeles (ZR-3), for the US Navy as part of Germany's war reparations. Eckener himself captained the airship on its delivery flight to Lakehurst, New Jersey. The Los Angeles became the longest-serving rigid airship ever operated by the US Navy.
Read more about this topic: Hugo Eckener
Famous quotes containing the words head of, head and/or company:
“I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)
“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice or wealth and chastity, which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Endeavor, as much as you can, to keep company with people above you.... Do not mistake, when I say company above you, and think that I mean with regard to their birth; that is the least consideration; but I mean with regard to their merit, and the light in which the world considers them.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)