1900 in Germany - Transport

Transport

• 10 January - The Deutschland, operated by the Hamburg-American Line and promising to be the fastest passenger ship to that time, was launched from the shipyards at Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland).
• 16 June - In Lübeck, Germany, the Elbe-Lübeck Canal, 41 miles (66 km) in length, was formally opened by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. The canal took five years to build at a cost of nearly six million dollars at the time, and joined the Elbe River to the Trave, which in turn provided ocean access at the Baltic Sea.
• 30 June - At Pier 8 in Hoboken, New Jersey, cotton bales and barrels of turpentine and oil caught fire around 4 o'clock in the afternoon. In less than 15 minutes, high winds spread the blaze a quarter of a mile along the port and on to the four German steamships moored there. The Saale and the Main, each with 150 crew on board, were destroyed, and the Bremen was heavily damaged. On the Saale, the portholes were too narrow for the men inside to escape, and most on board burned to death. The huge liner SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was saved by being towed into the Hudson River. Despite the best efforts of the Hoboken and New York fire departments to save the piers and the ships, respectively, 326 people were killed.
• 2 July - Starting at 8:03 pm, the first rigid airship flew from a floating hangar on Lake Constance near Friedrichshafen. Luftschiff Zeppelin 1 (or LZ1), with Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin and four others aboard, flew at an altitude of 1,300 feet (400 m), going 3.75 miles (6.04 km) in 18 minutes before being forced to land due to a broken part.
• 12 July - A German cruise liner, the SS Deutschland, broke the Blue Riband record for the first time with an average speed of 22.42 knots (41.52 km/h).
• 16 December - The German training frigate Gneisenau, with 450 naval cadets on board, sank in a storm during exercises off of the Spanish coast at Malaga, drowning 136.