The early impact of the steamship was greatest within the technological and economic heartlands of Europe and North America. Glasgow saw one service every ten minutes in the 1830s, while a regular service between Vienna and Budapest, inaugurated in 1826 and taken over in 1829 by the famous Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft (one of the longest words in the German language), had a fleet of seventy-one ships by 1850 for a trip lasting roughly fourteen hours.
Jürgen Osterhammel The Transformation of the World: a global history of the nineteenth century Princeton University Press 2009, English translation by Patrick Camiller 2014
Since the German spelling reform of 1996, “Schifffahrt” is written with three “f”s; however, since the name belongs to a company that existed before the spelling reform, the old form of the name is used when referring to the company.
The name of the company is well known in German-speaking countries as a starter to humorously construct even longer compound words. Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze is such a word, which potentially might even have been used, but probably never actually was. It means a “DDSG captain’s hat”. Another common example is Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänskajütenschlüssel which means “DDSG captain’s cabin key”.
Happily, abbreviations have now been invented.
As they used to say in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In “vairrry interesting’
Showing my age now