https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin

A Zeppelin is a type of rigid airship named after the German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (German pronunciation: [ˈt͡sɛpəliːn]) who pioneered rigid airship development at the beginning of the 20th century. Zeppelin's notions were first formulated in 1874^[1] and developed in detail in 1893.^[2] They were patented in Germany in 1895 and in the United States in 1899.^[3] After the outstanding success of the Zeppelin design, the word zeppelin came to be commonly used to refer to all rigid airships. Zeppelins were first flown commercially in 1910 by Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-AG (DELAG), the world's first airline in revenue service. By mid-1914, DELAG had carried over 10,000 fare-paying passengers on over 1,500 flights. During World War I, the German military made extensive use of Zeppelins as bombers and as scouts, killing over 500 people in bombing raids in Britain.^[

The first flight of LZ 1 over Lake Constance (the Bodensee) in 1900

In 1898 Count Zeppelin founded the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Luftschiffahrt^[16] (Society for the Promotion of Airship Flight), contributing more than half of its 800,000 mark share-capital himself. Responsibility for the detail design was given to Kober, whose place was later taken by Ludwig Dürr, and construction of the first airship began in 1899 in a floating assembly-