Joseph Spiess

Who was Joseph Spiess?

Joseph Spiess was a French engineer who filed a patent for a rigid airship in 1873, the year before Ferdinand von Zeppelin first outlined his own design. However, Spiess's machine was not actually constructed until 1913, and was the first and only French rigid airship.

Joseph Spiess was born on 10 September 1838, the son of a printer, in the city of Mulhouse, Haut-Rhin département, in the Alsace region of France. He served as a warrant officer in the Franco-Prussian War from 1870 to 1871, and when Alsace-Lorraine was annexed by the German Empire, Spiess opted to retain his French nationality.

Shortly before World War I, there was public pressure for France to emulate Germany's airship fleet, and construction of Spiess's airship, with state assistance, was started by Société Zodiac at the Aérodrome de Saint-Cyr-l'École. It had a framework of hollow wooden spars braced with wire, and was given the name Zodiac XII but had the name "SPIESS" painted along the side of the envelope. It was 113 metres long, with a diameter of 13.5 metres, powered by a single Chenu 200 horse power engine that drove two propellers. It first flew on April 13, 1913, but it became clear that it was underpowered and required more lift, so the envelope was extended to 140 metres to accommodate three more gas cells and a second engine was added. Spiess then presented the airship to the French government as a gift. After further trials it was not accepted by the French military, because their view was that smaller non-rigid types would be more effective. The Spiess airship seems to have been broken-up in 1914.