Close readers of my writings may have noticed a certain affinity for airships, as I’ve written about them numerous times–– even when there is little historical reason for that. And so, today, I will stretch this tenuous connection to its maximum.
If there is any one single topic I have written more about than any other, it would be the United States Capitol. And how could I not? It’s right there in the name of the blog! And I am surely not the only Hill resident who makes sure to look down Pennsylvania Avenue every time I cross it to see what the dome looks like right then. So, when I found an odd little election-related item on eBay that showed not just the Capitol, but an airship above it, I had to get it.
Coins such as this were minted as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s candidacy for President, but they continued to be made and distributed well after the inauguration, and, given the image on the obverse, this is probably a later model. This particular coin’s obverse has a picture of Roosevelt, as well as the words “Rebuild with Roosevelt” at the bottom and “Lucky Tillicum” at the top. The latter phrase long pre-dated Roosevelt, a 1918 article calls a young man “a lucky tillicum” to have around. The word tillicum means ‘person’ in the Chinook language.
It’s the reverse that originally caught my eye, containing as it does an image of the Capitol, with the words “United States Capitol” helpfully added underneath, and an airship above the Senate wing.
Most sources indicate that the airship shown is the USS Akron. Given that this airship had, indeed, flown over the inauguration and it was the only rigid airship owned by the US military, this is a pretty good bet.
The Akron (and its sister ship, USS Macon, still under construction during the inauguration) were built by the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation of Akron, Ohio. That organization was, as the name suggests, a cooperation between the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company and the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH of Friedrichshafen, Germany. As the Zeppelin company had been restricted from their usual work by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, working together with Goodyear was their way of continuing to develop and build Count Zeppelin’s creations.
A number of German executives had come over to facilitate this work. One of them was the famed Zeppelin captain Ernst August Lehmann, who had proved himself first as a civilian airship pilot before the war, then as a wartime commander, as well. When the German army got out of the airship business in 1917, he had been brought back to Friedrichshafen to work at the Zeppelin company headquarters.
His last flight before turning over his command was to fly for 101 hours around the Baltic Sea, to prove that Zeppelins could, in fact, make it across the Atlantic.
While he was not the first to do so – that historic flight would be done
in 1919 by the British rigid airship R34, a ship closely modeled after a sister ship of Lehmann’s last command, he would make the flight numerous times. Lehmann was the highest ranking officer, though not in command, on board the Hindenburg when that airship burned while landing at Lakehurst, NJ. Lehmann would succumb to his injuries the following day.
One passenger on board for the 1917 101 hour flight was a young physics professor from Berlin, Robert Wichard Pohl (That’s him, above). Ostensibly on board to conduct further radio direction finding tests, he was really there just along for the ride, having flown multiple times with Lehmann previously. Pohl wrote a letter to his mother during the flight, a letter that has recently been expanded into a full book on this historic flight by me, and a book that will be released next April.