Ferdinand von Zeppelin

In 1853, Count Zeppelin left to attend the polytechnic at Stuttgart, and in 1855 he became a cadet of the military school at Ludwigsburg and then started his career as an army officer in the army of Württemberg.

By 1858, Zeppelin had been promoted to lieutenant, and that year he was given leave to study science, engineering, and chemistry at Tübingen. Würtemberg's mobilising for the Austro-Sardinian War interrupted this study in 1859 when he was called up to the Ingenieurkorps (Würtemberg engineering corps) at Ulm.

In 1863, Zeppelin took leave to act as an observer for the Union's Army of the Potomac in the American Civil War in Virginia. Later, he travelled to the Upper Midwest with a party that probably included two Russians. Led by Native American (probably Ojibwe) guides, they canoed and portaged from the western end of Lake Superior up the St. Louis River and across to Crow Wing, Minnesota, on the Upper Mississippi River. On reaching Saint Paul, Minnesota (via stagecoach and hired carriage), Zeppelin encountered German-born itinerant balloonist John Steiner and made his first aerial ascent with him from a site near the International Hotel in downtown St. Paul on 19 August. Many years later he attributed the beginning of his thinking about dirigible lighter-than-air craft to this experience.

In 1865, Zeppelin was appointed adjutant of the King of Württemberg and as general staff officer participated in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. He was awarded the Ritterkreuz (Knight's Cross) of the Military Merit Order of Württemberg. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 a reconnaissance mission behind enemy lines, during which he narrowly avoided capture, made him famous among many Germans.

From 1882 to 1885, Zeppelin was commander of the 19th Uhlans in Ulm and was then appointed to be the envoy of Württemberg in Berlin. In 1890, he gave up the post to return to army service and was given command of a Prussian cavalry brigade. His handling of this at the 1890 autumn manoeuvres was severely criticised, and he was forced to retire from the Army, albeit with the rank of generalleutnant.

Ferdinand was the scion of a noble family. Zepelin, the family's eponymous hometown, is a small community outside the town of Bützow, in Mecklenburg.

Ferdinand was the son of Württemberg Minister and Hofmarschall Friedrich Jerôme Wilhelm Karl Graf von Zeppelin (1807–1886) and his wife Amélie Françoise Pauline (born Macaire d'Hogguer) (1816–1852). Ferdinand spent his childhood with his sister and brother at their Girsberg manor near Konstanz, where he was educated by private tutors. Ferdinand married Isabella Freiin von Wolff in Berlin. She was from the house of Alt-Schwanenburg (located in the present-day town of Gulbene in Latvia, then part of Livonia). They had a daughter, Helene (Hella) von Zeppelin (1879–1967) who in 1909 married Graf Alexander von Brandenstein-Zeppelin (1881–1949).

Ferdinand had a nephew Baron Max von Gemmingen, who volunteered at the start of the First World War, after he was past military age, to become general staff officer assigned to the military airship LZ 12 Sachsen.

Count Everhard von Zeppelin, Second Lieutenant in the German Lancers, married November 1895, Mary "Mamie" McGarvey, daughter of Canadian magnate William Henry McGarvey, owner of the oil wells of Galicia and his wife, Helena J. Weslowska. A former Count von Zeppelin married a granddaughter of the 1st Earl of Ranfurly.