Airships
Living on floating island presents many unique issues to man kind. First of all, without aeronautical travel humans where constrained to their individual islands. To fix this issue, people in The Void did various things. In Suberia, people ride on Galactors to travel from island to island, and in the world of Alefiea, men and gnomes flew on the void winds using gliders, but the most common solution to this issue was the airship.
An airship can take many forms, the earliest ones had a small rectangular basket that could hold 4-5 grown humans, held up by a large gasbag, filled with hydrogen. The technical issues with hydrogen relieved themselves quite quickly. Being highly flammable, they were quite easy to take down and very dangerous to use. Hydrogen was then replaced with helium, which was much less dangerous.
Discovery
The original discoverers of airship technology were dwarves. They discovered it by accident when they uncovered a large natural cave full of hydrogen gas while mining, the hole they dug was covered by a tarp, which was lifted when the gas was released. The dwarf that observed this, named Granbred Shpelt, perused this phenomenon further, seeing it all the solution to air travel. After years of work, he constructed a model balloon, which he used as a prototype for the first airships.Inventor
After his first invention, Granbred Shpelt went on to create bigger and better airships. Soon his would tribe realized the power of his invention that he call the SFR (Shpelt Flying Rig). He transformed poor miners into daring adventurers and void sailors. In 657 he died tragically in an airship accident. His ideas and bravery live on though. It was because of him that inter-world trade could be established and that the bonds of the community could spread far beyond a single island.Entry for Worldbuilding Summer Camp 2020
Answering: "Write about a technology from the history of your world - is it lost to the ages, or did it shape the world today?"
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