Ludwig Dürr (designer)

Ludwig Dürr (around 1900)

Ludwig Dürr (left) in Berlin, 1928

Ludwig Dürr (* 4. June 1878 in Stuttgart , † 1. January 1956 in Friedrichshafen ) was airship - designer .

Life

Ludwig Dürr was born on June 4, 1878 in Stuttgart. Dürr did an apprenticeship as a mechanic after graduating from community school. In addition, he attended the higher mechanical engineering school in Esslingen . During his studies he worked from 1899 in the Stuttgart design office of the "Society for the Promotion of Airship". Here, based on the construction of the LZ 1, he got to know the basic ideas of Zeppelin's rigid airship construction .

After successfully completing his studies, he followed Zeppelin to Friedrichshafen, where Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin had meanwhile relocated his company headquarters. Here he experienced three successful ascents from LZ 1 , but also the dissolution of the development company. At times he was the only remaining employee of Zeppelin and sometimes worked without pay and accident insurance. In simple barracks on the Manzell lake shore, under the most primitive conditions, he designed the lightweight construction that would be fundamental for all future Zeppelin airships and generally groundbreaking for aviation.

All of the following zeppelin designs (a total of 28 different types, 119 of which were built) come from Ludwig Dürr. He was the chief designer from the LZ 2 to the no longer completed LZ 131 . From 1913 until its dissolution on July 8, 1945, he was the technical director of Luftschiff Zeppelin GmbH. At the beginning of his activity he built a small light metal foundry and developed the rigid and rigid triangular beam. He examined the elasticity and tear resistance of various cover materials and tested the gas tightness of cell materials. He examined and recorded the efficiency of various propellers and created the first wind tunnel . In all his research he proceeded very systematically and created extensive series of measurements. During the First World War, Dürr had a vacuum chamber built to test aircraft engines for altitude. But Ludwig Dürr was not a pure theorist. Between 1906 and 1909 he was at the height control on almost all trips of Zeppelin airships. In this role he drove LZ 5 on May 31, 1909 after a 37-hour drive, completely overtired, into a pear tree near Göppingen.

After the First World War, the construction of airships was banned (except for reparation purposes for the USA), and Ludwig Dürr saved the company by constructing car parts made of light metal. On July 19, 1923 (according to other sources, 1925) he married Lydia Beck and had two daughters and two sons with her. Ludwig Dürr achieved the peak of his reputation with the construction of the large airships LZ 126 , LZ 127 , LZ 129 and LZ 130 . Six universities and technical colleges awarded him honorary doctorates . In his life he received high awards, orders and medals from the German Emperor , the King of Württemberg , the Federal President Theodor Heuss , the Association of German Engineers and other institutions. He was one of the first to receive the Federal Cross of Merit .

Nevertheless, he was always humbly in the shadow of the famous airship captains. His modest and reserved manner remained determinative for him all his life. In 1950 Ludwig Dürr took over a position on the supervisory board of Metallwerk Friedrichshafen GmbH, the successor to Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH.

In his private life, Ludwig Dürr was sporty. He rode his bike to work every day, enjoyed skiing and was an avid balloonist . He loved the mountains and was the head of the Friedrichshafen Alpine Club from 1920 to 1945 . A high path in the Verwall , which connects the Darmstädter Hütte with the Friedrichshafener Hütte , bears his name. Ludwig Dürr was the first motorcyclist in his hometown. He died on January 1, 1956.

Earlier on, Count Zeppelin put a memorial to him in his diary: "The name Dürr will forever be associated with Zeppelin airship construction."

Awards

• 1938: Honorary member of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings
• 1953: Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• Honorary doctorate from the technical colleges and universities of Freiburg, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Tübingen and Graz
• Honorary citizen of the cities of Friedrichshafen and Echterdingen
• There are Ludwig-Dürr-Strasse named after him in Göppingen , Berlin , Münster , Rheine , Süßen , Friedrichshafen , Zeppelinheim , Gelsenkirchen and Echterdingen , in Stuttgart there is a Dürrstrasse named after him.
• The Ludwig-Dürr-Schule , a primary and secondary school with a technical level in Friedrichshafen, is named after him.
• The high-alpine connection between the Friedrichshafener and Darmstädter Hut in the Verwall Mountains in Ludwig-Dürr-Weg was named after him.

Fonts

• Twenty-five years of Zeppelin airship construction . VDI-Verlag, Berlin 1924. - Reprinted in: Peter Kleinheins, Wolfgang Meighörner (ed.): The large zeppelins. The history of airship construction . Springer, Berlin, 3rd, revised edition 2005. ISBN 3-540-21170-5 . Pp. 27-111.

literature

• Horst Ferdinand: Dürr, Ludwig . In: Baden-Württemberg biographies . 3rd volume. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2002, pp. 53–56 ( E-Text )
• Hürttler: Obituary in: Writings of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings , 74th year 1956, pp. 5–8 ( digitized version )
• Peter Kleinheins, Wolfgang Meighörner (ed.): The large zeppelins. The history of airship construction . Springer, Berlin, 3rd, revised edition 2005. ISBN 3-540-21170-5 . In it p. 24–26: Chief designer Dr.-Ing. Ludwig Dürr .
• Ludwig Dürr , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 08/1956 of February 13, 1956, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)
• Günter Schmitt, Werner Schwipps: Pioneers of early aviation . Gondrom Verlag, Bindlach 1995. ISBN 3-8112-1189-7 .
• Karl Stahl:  Dürr, Ludwig. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 4, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1959, ISBN 3-428-00185-0 , p. 174 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen (Ed.): Ludwig Dürr - Pioneer and Inventor . In: JET & PROP , issue 1/06.
• Wolfgang von Zeppelin: Dr. Ing.hc mult. Ludwig Ferdinand Dürr - The fulfilled life of the great engineer in airship construction Zeppelin. Neubert & Jones, Markdorf 2013, ISBN 978-3-9815204-3-9 .

Web links

Commons : Ludwig Dürr  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Ludwig Dürr in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Ludwig Dürr in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ^ History of the Ludwig-Dürr-Schule ( Memento from July 19, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
2. ↑ Harald Derschka : The association for the history of Lake Constance and its surroundings. A look back at one hundred and fifty years of club history 1868–2018. In: Writings of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings , 136, 2018, pp. 1–303, here: p. 229.