Graphene

Before airplanes crossed the oceans, gigantic gas-filled airships cruised serenely between Europe and North and South America. The horrific 1937 crash of the Hindenburg, the pride of Nazi Germany, ended that phase of passenger travel and more than 20 years passed before heavier- than-air passenger airliners could cross the Atlantic again. In Graphene Alexandra Shultz’s dream of reviving that lost age of air travel comes true when she enters a proposal for a Lighter-Than-Air (LTA) cruise ship into an entrepreneur’s contest and billionaire venture capitalist Max Brita becomes a believer. Together they take the LTA concept and the miraculous new material Graphene, into products and vessels the original dirigible designers never would have dreamt of.

I’ve have known about Graphene for more than 20 years. For many of those years various labs have reported almost miraculous properties of Graphene’s carbon structure. It is incredibly light, yet stronger than steel in the same configuration. It can store more energy than a Lithium battery, and recharge much faster. The inability to manufacture it in large quantities has always been the limiting factor that keeps it from becoming widely utilized. The first practical application of Graphene finally became available in 2023 (batteries for power tools and as power banks to recharge electronic gear (e.g. phones)

I read a book by one of the American engineers working in Germany in the early 1930s to learn dirigible technology for a possible subsidiary in the United States. This led to the idea that Graphene could be substituted for the metal skeleton of a dirigible and since it is so much lighter it would allow the development of a much larger ship that could even rival cruise vessels. The book’s main character’s grandfather was in the ground crew the day the Hindenburg crashed and burned in New Jersey and his stories of the event led to her obsession with developing a dirigible based on the latest technologies and materials.

She enters a technology contest, and her proposal is adopted by an entrepreneur who sees its potential and together they develop modern dirigible cruise ships that eventually adopt Graphene technology. This further leads to a myriad of new applications with Graphene (beginning with a Graphene cruise ship).