alternatehistory.com

As with many other (likely) over-obsessed AH-er's, I'm of the party that firmly believes in the eternal cool-ness of the airship.
However, in reading up a bit, I came across an interesting statement about the early days of the Zeppelin.
Evidently, the fourth ship to be built (the LZ4... not long on imaginative names :rolleyes:) crashed when making a demonstration flight for the German military on 5 Aug 1908.
As per Wiki:
Wiki on Zeppelin said:
This accident would have certainly knocked out the Zeppelin project economically had not one of the spectators in the crowd spontaneously initiated a collection of donations, yielding an impressive total of 6,096,555 Mark. This enabled the Count to found the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH (Airship Construction Zeppelin Ltd.) and a Zeppelin Foundation.

So, I was left thinking the opposite question to what a great many other threads have queried:
Let's say that spontaneous collection of donations never happened.
What if the idea of the airship had been killed off in its infancy, and had never developed into the monsters of WWI and the airliners of the interwar period?
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