During the post war era of the late twentieth century two inventions/discoveries changed the very course of the Empire and made it into what it is today.
Heliumite
Originally hydrogen was used as the lifting gas of airships however even before the advent of the second war it was known that the gas is highly flammable and easily set off from a little spark. At the end of the war a Welsh scientist Tomas Connah who had originally been working on deep sea diving and the use of other gases to breath at greater depths, had an accident occurred at his lab at Southampton navel docks where a diver lost her life (she was married to Tomas). The resulting gas became known as Heliumite. Helium itself is quite rare and expensive to produce in large quantities but the process that Connah discovered was cheaper and seemed to create more gas from less gas.
The exact process is a state secret and the Empire has the monopoly on the sale of Heliumite.
Heliumite has the same atomic weight as its cousin but does not expand in high altitudes and has a greater lifting power than hydrogen which seems to break the laws of physics. There is however much that the Empire keeps from public regarding this unusual gas.
GrapherIron
Technically not actually made of iron in anyway, the actual material is Graphene and an epoxy resin which when bonded together becomes the hardest and lightest material known to man. Its uses range from the very small (paint to generate electricity on tall buildings) to the very large (skyscrapers and the superstructure of airships and spaceships).
GrapherIron when used as a envelope for an airship creates a frictionless surface that significantly decreases drag and thereby increasing velocity close to 160mph although that is dependent upon the class of airship.
This allowed the Empire to build virtually indestructible airships for the military and commercial use.
Without these two inventions our world would be very different today.
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