Aviation Pioneer. He is most recognized as the inventor of the Zeppelin rigid airships, a dirigible balloon aircraft. He was born Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich von Zeppelin in Konstanz, Prussia, the son of Amélie Françoise Pauline Macaire d'Hogguer and Friedrich Jerôme Wilhelm Karl Graf von Zeppelin, a minister to the court of the Duke of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. He attended the Realschule, the Polytechnical Academy in Stuttgart, the Ludwigsburg Military Academy, and the University of Tübingen. He entered the Prussian army in 1858, and in 1863 he traveled to the United States as a military observer in the Union army during the American Civil War. He later explored the headwaters of the Mississippi River and took a balloon flight while he was in Minnesota. In 1869 he married Isabella Freiin von Wolff in Berlin and the couple had one daughter. In 1870 he served during the Franco-Prussian war, and continued to serve in various cavalry regiments in Strassburg, Ulm, and Stuttgart after the peace of 1871. In 1885 he was appointed plenipotentiary officer of Württemberg in Berlin, serving until 1890. He retired in 1891 with the rank of brigadier general. He then dedicated himself to the study of airship design, and in 1899 started construction of his first rigid airship. The first rigid dirigible, called the Zeppelin in his honor, was completed by his Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Luftschiffahrt company in 1900, and he made the first directed flight on July 2, 1900. The count steadily withdrew from active participation in his company from that point. By 1910, a Zeppelin provided the first commercial passenger air service, and made some 1600 flights before World War I. He saw the mass production of his airships during the war and the establishment of a Zeppelin fleet, some of which were used to bomb London. They were, however, too slow and combustible a target for wartime and too fragile to withstand bad weather. He died early in 1917 and did not live to see his country's defeat or his company gutted by the Treaty of Versailles. He found a place in American history when on May 6, 1937 a Zeppelin aircraft, the "Hindenburg," caught fire for an unknown reason over New Jersey with 36 of 97 passengers plus one ground crew member dying, and most survivors being severely burned. The site of the accident has a plaque and has become a National Historic Landmark.