In 1910, various attempts began to achieve transatlantic airship crossings, with several European inventors and companies working on long-distance dirigible capabilities. Though successful transatlantic airship flights would not occur until the 1920s, these early attempts pushed the boundaries of airship technology and captured public imagination about regular intercontinental aerial travel.

Transatlantic airship ambitions inspired Edwardian and early modernist poetry exploring themes of global connection and the shrinking of geographical distance. Writers like Conrad and Ford Madox Ford engaged with the idea of regular aerial ocean crossings, while the technology influenced literary treatments of empire, commerce, and the compression of time and space in the early 20th century.