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drained the water, covered the tower with straw and circulated hot coke oven gas through it until the crust
of ice was melted. Then we started over.
This time the lamp got to a fairly bright orange after an hour or so, and I declared that to be good enough.
Other things were going on while I was playing with lights. Zoltan's people started doing us some good.
Their pottery man came up with five colors of glazes made from local materials, and we went into
production making tableware, at first for ourselves, but then for sale as well.
Their papermaker was in limited production turning our old linens into very nice rag paper.
And their sword-maker was screaming at the top of his lungs at Ilya, who was naturally screaming back at
him, both men being of the opinion that sufficient volume could make up for their lack of a mutual
vocabulary. The workers had a betting pool going on which one would kill the other first, and at what time
of the day this happy event would take place.
The two smiths went on screaming for over a month with nothing accomplished, so I had to step in and
demand that the sword-maker demonstrate to us his methods. They surprised me, being nothing like the
Japanese method I'd told Ilya about two years before.
He collected up a pile of wrought iron and beat and cut it into small pieces, about the size of a ten zloty
piece, or an American quarter. He put a measured amount of this iron into each of a dozen round bottom
clay flasks and packed them full with raw wool, Then he sealed the flasks and took them up into the hills
where it was quiet. He built a fire around the flasks and after a day of burning he started gently shaking the
flasks and listening carefully. When the metal inside "sounded wet," he let the fire go out. On breaking
open the flasks, there was a fused blob of steel inside he called "wootz." This he worked at relatively low
temperatures -never red hot-until it was shaped like a sword or knife. Then he hardened and tempered it in
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the usual manner. The result was watered steel that looked just like the steel in my sword, and kept a fine
edge.
It wasn't quite as good as my sword, however. I pared the edge off one of his knives with my blade, which
had the swordsmith staring goggle-eyed. None the less, it was better than anything Ilya had done using the
method I'd told him about, so we went into production using the wootz method.
The glassmaker started to make glass out of sand, lime, and wood ashes. After having him make a very
fancy drinking glass as a Christmas present for Count Lambert, I had him make a chimney for the gas lamp,
to conduct the fumes away. The chimney made a great improvement in light output, and it took me a while
to figure out that the glass was transparent to visible light, but opaque to infrared, which was reflected back
to the lime, making it hotter.
All of which shows that it isn't necessary to know what you're doing in order to be able to accomplish
something. It's only necessary to be sufficiently persistent. Sort of like the infinite number of monkeys at an
infinite number of word processors who wrote everything in existence.
Anyway, we now had good light source, and I gave orders to plumb the factories and furnace areas, and
had two gross of the lamps made. By spring, we had light as long as we wanted it, by which time there
were eighteen hours a day of sunlight, and we didn't much need the lights.
But next winter...
The shops weren't idle either. We made a rolling mill to make sheet brass, and some small punch presses to
use the sheetmetal. I designed some simple door locks and padlocks, and they looked to be a profitable line.
Our reinvestment rate was over ninety percent. That is to say, most of the things we made were for use in
our factory system. But we still needed to buy a fair amount of stuff from the outside, and additional cash
was always welcome.
Transportation costs were very high in the Middle Ages, especially for land transport. The best mules can
only carry a quarter of a ton, can only go thirty miles a day, and must be loaded and unloaded by hand
twice a day. Expensive.
This meant that the most profitable products would be small, light, and valuable. Locks, glassware, pottery,
cast-iron kitchen products, plumbing parts, and clocks were all being made by spring, as well as our older
brass works' lines of church bells, windmill parts, hinges, and other hardware. I wanted to add paper,
printed books, and cigarette lighters in the near future.
We expanded the paperworks from a two-man outfit to one where a dozen men worked, and added power [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]