Graf von Zeppelin's first airship was flown in 1900. Initially finance for the research was supplied by the count himself, by private donations, and even a lottery. With the growing success of each flight, public interest also grew. In 1908, the Zeppelin LZ 4 was destroyed during a high-profile test flight. This proved fortunate, since it caused a flood of public support. The ensuing donation campaign collected over 6 million German marks which was used to set up both Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH was set up by Graf von Zeppelin in 1908 thanks to funds raised by the public after the Zeppelin LZ 4 was destroyed during a high-profile test flight. 'Luftschiffbau' is a German word meaning building of airships. The company manufactured many Zeppelin airships for both civilian and military use over the next few decades. However, with the rise of the Nazis in 1933, focus shifted to 'heavier than air' aircraft, due to their military superiority. By the beginning of World War II demand for airships had disappeared. The last active vessel (LZ 130) was decommissioned early in the war and broken up for its aluminium. In the late 1920s to 1940 the company worked with the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company to build two Zeppelins in the United States and the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation was created to facilitate the relationship. The partnership ended after World War II began, but the American company continued to build blimps under the Goodyear name. Luftschiffbau Zeppelin stopped manufacturing in 1938, though by the autumn of 1941 the company had accepted contracts to produce V-2 rocket propellant tanks and fuselage sections. In June 1943, Allied bombing during Operation Bellicose hit the Zeppelin V-2 facility, and production was subsequently moved to the Mittelwerk. The company continued during the war and disappeared sometime around 1945. Almost 50 years later, the company re-emerged in Germany. The parent group company of the current Zeppelin maker was re-established in 1993 and the operating company producing the current Zeppelins was created in 2001.

Steel makers, armaments and engineering manufacturers founded in Sheffield in 1828 by the miller Edward Vickers and his father-in-law George Naylor. In 1863 the company moved to a new site in Sheffield on the River Don in Brightside. The company went public in 1867 as Vickers, Sons & Company and gradually acquired more businesses. In 1911, the company name was changed to Vickers Ltd. The company expanded into aircraft manufacture with the formation of Vickers Ltd (Aviation Department). In 1927, Vickers merged their armaments, shipbuilding and heavy engineering activities with Armstrong Whitworth to form Vickers-Armstrong Limited.

1887-1979, Knight Aeronautical Designer and Engineer Wallis is best known to the general public for his development of the bouncing bomb during World War II, made famous in the Dambusters film. He was born on 26 September 1887 at Ripley in Derbyshire. He was a pupil at Christ's Hospital School and then served as an apprentice, first at the Thames Ironworks, Shipbuilding and Engineering Company Limited, from 1905-1907, then as an apprentice fitter (later draughtsman in the Marine Engine Department) at John Samuel White and Company, Limited, at Cowes on the Isle of Wight from 1907-1913. Wallis' lifelong involvement with aeronautics and association with Vickers began when he was invited to join the Chief Draughtsman - Airships at Vickers as Chief Assistant in the designing of the R9 airship from 1913-1915. Wallis was intermittently engaged on war service and airship design. Towards the end of the First World War, Wallis became engrossed in the design of the R80 airship, but the Royal Air Force discontinued the project in 1921. In 1922 Barnes Wallis took a degree by correspondence in engineering from London University. He served as Chief Engineer, for the Airship Guarantee Company, Vickers Limited, London and Howden, Yorkshire, from 1922-1929. In 1924 the British Government initiated a programme for the construction of two experimental airships, one of which, the R100, was designed and constructed by the Airship Guarantee Company, as subsidiary of Vickers. Barnes Wallis designed this airship individually. The loss of the R101 in 1930 brought an abrupt end to all airship development in Great Britain. Wallis' attention was diverted to aircraft. Wallis was invited to join the Aviation Department of Vickers as Chief Designer (Structures) and was almost entirely associated with the Weybridge Design Office, which post he filled from 1930-1937. He was appointed Special Director in 1936, where he worked on the use of geodetic design and construction for Wellesley and Wellington aircraft. In aircraft design, Wallis is best known for his use of geodetic construction. He had the opportunity of applying this method when Vickers constructed a single engine low wing monoplane that came to be known as the Wellesley. The next aircraft with which Wallis was associated was the Wellington twin-engined bomber, which first flew in 1936. For much of the time during the Second World War, Wallis was heavily engaged in supervising improvements to the Wellingtons and adaptations for special purposes. At the same time, he developed his ideas on strategic bombing of German industrial targets, including the dams in the Ruhr district. For this purpose Wallis devised the bouncing bombs. The authorities gave Wallis permission to put into practice his long held idea of a ten-ton bomb, nicknamed Tallboy to destroy targets conventional bombs would hardly dent. Towards the end of the Second World War, Wallis' ten ton bomb, Grand Slam was first dropped in March 1945. Wallis served as Assistant Chief Designer (Aviation Section) for Vickers-Armstrong at Weybridge from 1938-1944. He was awarded the CBE in 1943. After the Second World War, Wallis served as Chief of Aeronautical Research and Development at Vickers-Armstrong from 1945-1971 and was appointed Special Director and Head of Independent Research in 1946, with freedom to develop at will. Wallis turned his attention to variable geometry or swing-wing aircraft. Over the next thirteen years, with first the Wild Goose, then Swallow models, Wallis developed this revolutionary concept, overcoming technical problems as he worked towards the prototype stage. Various potential applications of the principle were cancelled in the light of changing operational requirements and increasing costs. Wallis continued to work on designs for high speed aeroplanes, eventually proposing the adoption of a rectangular fuselage as the most efficient form for hypersonic aircraft, as well as on a new form of submarine. He was knighted in 1968 and retired from Vickers in May 1971, by now the British Aircraft Corporation. He died on 30 October 1979 in Leatherhead Hospital.

Sir Charles Dennistoun Burney was born in Bermuda on 28 December 1888, the only among the three children of Sir Cecil Burney, first baronet, and his wife Lucinda. Burney received a formal naval education, starting his training at the Britannia in 1903, and joining the battleship Exmouth as midshipman in early 1905. Burney joined the destroyer Afridi in 1909, and soon afterwards the Crusader, which used for experimental work by the anti-submarine committee, of which his father was the first president. Burney became very interested in the experiments then in progress for destroying submarines and was also quick to see the potential of the aeroplane as a means of spotting submarines, sparking off an interest in aeronautics. When the First World War broke out, Burney was given command of the destroyer Velox, but soon afterwards he joined the Vernon, the Portsmouth torpedo school, where up to that time much of the navy's scientific research and development had taken place. At Vernon he was primarily responsible for the development of the explosive paravane, a small underwater aeroplane used to destroy submarines and mines. By 1916 he had taken out 11 patents dealing with paravanes and associated equipment and was rewarde dfor his work in the 1917 birthday honours by his appointment as CMG, an honour rarely given to a lieutenant. In 1920 Burney retired from the navy as a lieutenant-commander and at the age of 40 he was promoted on the retired list to commander. In 1921 he married Gladys, the younger daughter of George Henry High, of Chicago; they had a son. Burney succeeded his father in the baronetcy in 1929. After the war, Burney took out a series of patents relating to precast concrete as a building material and joined Vickers Ltd as a consultant. He realized that the new developments in aviation held both economic and political implications. He set out hiw ideas were set out in a 1929 article entitled 'The World, the Air and the Future' and entered parliament as a Unionist member for Uxbridge in 1922, holding his seat until 1929. Burney was keen to start his airship service using the German Zeppelins surrendered to Britain at the cessation of hostilities, but these were found to be too corroded. After lengthy negotiations with Vickers and the government, Burney formed the Airship Guarantee Company, appointing Barnes Wallis as chief designer in 1923, and soon after Nevil Shute Norway, who became a novelist, as chief calculator. An order for a new airship, the R.100, was placed with Burney's firm, but the government decided that competition was healthy and put together its own design team at the Air Ministry (consisting mainly of members already discarded by Burney for his board on the advice of Barnes Wallis), to develop the R.101 at the Royal Airship Works at Cardington. This resulted in an unhealthy race between the two projects that eventually ended with the crashing of the R.101 on 5 October 1930 at Beauvais in France, killing forty-eight of the fifty-four people on board, including Lord Thomson, the secretary of state for air who had instituted this project, and the design team. This destroyed the British rigid airship programme for all time. During the Second World War Burney was employed by the War Office on secret experimental work, the scope of which can be seen in a large number of patents that began to appear in the early 1950s relating to, among other matters, aerial gliding bombs and marine torpedoes with gyroscopically controlled aerofoils, gun-fired rocket projectiles, and a non-recoil gun. After the war, he became interested in improving fishing trawlers. He designed a catamaran trawler, apparatus to facilitate trawling and landing the catch, an otter or ‘porpoise’ (a kind of paravane) incorporating sonar to detect fish shoals, and plants for freezing fish either on board or ashore. In all, Burney took out more than one hundred patents during the period from 1915 to 1962. Among these were six with Barnes Wallis and one with Wallis and Nevil Shute Norway on aspects of airship design. Burney died in Hamilton, Bermuda, on 11 November 1968.