It’s me again, Ferdinand. I know I’ve already said a lot about myself and my airships, but now I’m going to talk to you about someone else – a pupil of mine, sort of. His name was Claude Dornier.
He started to work for me as a young man and soon had many good ideas, for example, a hangar for Zeppelins that you can spin around! I really liked the idea and knew that he would just continue to come up with more. So I built him his own workshop and gave him the opportunity to build aeroplanes and carry out research.
Claude Dornier was soon very successful and opened his own company. He was the first to build planes completely out of metal, and with it, set record after record. For example, he built the biggest aeroplane of his time – the Dornier airship Do X. A polar researcher, Roald Amundsen, even explored the North Pole in a plane built by Dornier – the Dornier Wal. That’s how Claude Dornier and his workshop came to be famous and known by the whole world.
By the way, his workshop is located today next to the museum and is called "DO.labor". Children can experiment, research and build great things.
Claude Dornier died in 1969. The Dornier company was later sold and today is part of another well known aeroplane manufacturer – Airbus. Do you know it? But now go and have a look at the Dornier Museum, where you can find out about over 100 years’ worth of air and space travel history. It’s near the airport, here in Friedrichshafen, in a big, modern building, with many of Dornier’s original planes. Go inside and look – it’s well worth the visit!
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