Bernhard Lau

Bernhard Lau (* 11. September 1875 in Mohrin ; † 5. September 1926 in Berlin ) was one of the first employees of Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin and later captain of the built by Zeppelin airships .

Life

Paul Bernhard Lau was born in the then German Mohrin in the Neumark. At the age of 14 he entered the naval school of the Imperial Navy on April 16, 1890 as a cabin boy . He was stationed on the cruiser SMS Hertha and the gunboat SMS Iltis and left the navy with the rank of chief helmsman on May 31, 1908. During his service, he was awarded the General Badge of Honor of the Royal Prussian Order.

On July 4, 1909, he married Margarete Schütze in Bernburg . The couple had four children, including Helmut Lau, who survived the crash of the Hindenburg airship in Lakehurst as a crew member .

On May 15, 1908, Lau entered the service of the still young Luftschiffbau Zeppelin and initially worked as a navigation officer. In 1910, as a technical advisor, he accompanied Count Zeppelin and the meteorologist Hugo Hergesell on their polar expedition to Spitzbergen, the aim of which was to examine the possibility of a trip to the North Pole by airship. On September 11, 1911, Lau was granted the patent as an airship commander. During the First World War he was responsible for the acceptance of almost all war airships. In this capacity, he and Hugo Eckener transferred the LZ 104 intended for the Africa trip to Jambol in Bulgaria , where an airship port was located during the war. After the war, Lau, a specialist in balloon cell construction, became head of the hydrogen plant (today: Friedrichshafen oxygen plant). He also carried out test drives with civilian airships, for example the LZ 120 . For his services to airship travel during the First World War, he was awarded the Wilhelm Cross and the Bulgarian Order of Civil Merit .

Bernhard Lau died after a stroke on a business trip in Berlin.

Swiss journey with LZ 4

As early as 1908, Lau took part in the "Swiss Voyage" of LZ 4 as a crew member . The journey began on July 1, 1908 at around 8 a.m. at the floating airship hangar in Friedrichshafen and led via Constance, Lake Lucerne , Lake Zug and Lake Zurich . The airship crossed Zurich around 3 p.m. and landed again in Friedrichshafen on the same day. With a total distance of 340 kilometers, this trip attracted general attention.

Average with LZ 5 in Göppingen

LZ 5 measured 136 meters in length and 13 meters in diameter. It held 15,000 cubic meters of hydrogen and, with the help of two 105 hp Daimler engines, achieved a top speed of 48.6 km / h. On May 29, 1909, LZ 5 undertook a trip with Graf Zeppelin, the engineers Ludwig Dürr and Stahl, the captains Hacker and Lau and three fitters without a specific destination. After a quiet journey, the airship turned over Bitterfeld.

On May 31st, the airship landed in Göppingen, where Dürr drove the ship from exhaustion against a single pear tree and damaged it. However, after a temporary repair with hop poles and only one motor, the journey could be continued.

Due to the lower buoyancy force due to the loss of some gas cells, the barrel weight used for trimming was removed. The trimming was carried out by Captain Lau as a "living running weight", who ensured a horizontal position between the two gondolas of the airship in the gangway.

literature

• Peter Meyer: The big airship book . Elsbeth Rütten Verlag, Mönchengladbach 1976, ISBN 3-921447-11-9 .
• Adolf Miethe , Hugo Hergesell (ed.): With Zeppelin to Spitzbergen . German publishing house Bong, Berlin 1911.
• Georg Hacker: The Men of Manzell Memories of the first Zeppelin captain . Frankfurter Societäts-Druckerei, Frankfurt a. M. 1936.

Web links

• Excerpt from Hacker's book The Men of Manzell. Memories of the first Zeppelin captain . (PDF; 106 kB) accessed on December 29, 2012.
• Golf Dornseif: Failed airship replenishment for Lettow-Vorbeck . (PDF; 2.5 MB) accessed on December 29, 2012.