Grantville Gazette-Volume XIV

by Eric Flint

  Thermite welding is perhaps one of the least known and potentially most useful forms of joining metals. The process is achieved by making a mix of aluminum and iron oxide powder. This mix, oddly enough called thermite, is placed in a container above the metals to be joined, and ignited. Use black powder or potassium permanganate and glycerin. The aluminum during the reaction pulls the oxygen from the iron oxide leaving the iron to flow in to the mold around the pieces to be joined. The mix can be "salted" with a number of ingredients to provide the exact grade of steel or iron desired. This was the preferred way to repair large items. These could anything very large like a broken locomotive frame. It can be thermite welded and be restored to full function.

  The greatest problem is the powdered aluminum supply, as a limited amount will be available right after the ROF. It is possible to rework the aluminum oxide to aluminum with electricity and heat processing.

  Personal protection is another consideration. All welding demands some form of vision protection. Hammer welding is the least damaging to sight and electrical welding is the most damaging. Face-covering helmets with smoked or tinted glass windows are used to protect from spatter and intense light. Leathers are used to protect the body and arms, while gloves are used to protect the hands. Gas welds can often be made with tinted goggles only, and provide sufficient protection for the eyes.

  Now we come to the Grantville connection. Who in town knows how to weld? How many sets of welders are sitting around? What does Grantville do when the up-time supplies run out? I have never lived in Mannington, and so am falling back on the town my mother is from. It is a small community in Idaho of some 1800 inhabitants, it has a grain elevator on the UP main line, a small downtown area, a garage, a used car dealership and a Co-Op. Most of the local farmers come in to town to shop and resupply as needed, forming most of the economy of the region. Welding is considered a skill essential to the rural life style. Almost every male in town (and most of the ladies too) over the age of twelve can at least stick stuff together. Complex jobs tend to get passed off to a friend who has a better hand.

  In Grantville the "good hands" are relatively common, at least four or more at the mine, about the same at the power plant, one or two at each machine shop, and the instructors at the Vo-Tec. Of note is that the Vo-Tec has a comprehensive instruction string set up and should be able to pass on welding knowledge with no major problems. The majority of households have an arc welding set with a mask and a box of rods in the old fridge in the garage. Gas sets are a little less common with one household in three having one. Before the ROF, when tanks had to be filled, one would need a trip to the "City".

  Most of the sets are of home quality (think Harbor Freight ,or cheap-stuff-from-china grade). Industrial grade sets are more limited, with appropriate businesses having one or two sets of each, and the high school having three or four sets for instruction. This adds up to around 200 to 250 arc sets and maybe seventy-five gas setups of secondary quality, leaving fifteen to twenty sets of industrial grade equipment in town. Grantville has a power plant, a mine, and three or four machine shops, so add maybe twenty-five more industrial sets giving forty-five to fifty sets of the good stuff (arc and Gas) and a whole lot of lighter weight stuff sitting around.

  Welding supplies will take a dive after six months to a year, even if there is a welding supply house in town, and arc welders will be down to hand-drawn rod coated with glued-on sand or borax. Specialty rod (like stainless steel rod and High carbon) will be hoarded. Gas will run out in a year or so and will be unusable until the calcium carbide works are in operation, and some one is producing oxygen, either by electric means or by pressure distillation. If I had to predict it, I would imagine that initially gas will be produced by generators on site, for acetylene, and by large low pressure cylinders, for oxygen. As the steel industry develops, forged steel high pressure tanks will become available for oxygen storage, and acetone will be available to provide higher concentrations (pressures) of acetylene. The acetone is needed as acetylene compressed to more than 15 psi will self ignite in the same way that diesel ignites under compression.

  In summary, welding is available for Grantville in the short term, (twelve to sixteen months) and still possible after that time as supplies become more and more common. Dissemination of welding knowledge will happen as fast as the down-time community becomes aware of it. Just the knowledge of the possibility will cause the rapid development of the technology outside of the local Grantville area.

  Bibliography:

  Machinery's Handbook 11th ed pp.1546-1566 by Erik Oberg and F. D. Jones. The Industrial Press, New York. copyright 1942.

  Manual of Formulas: Recipes, Methods & Secret Processes. Edited by Raymond B. Wailes, B.S. Popular Science Publishing Company, Inc. copyright 1932

  Second Hand Help

  Written by Vincent W. Coljee

  In Grantville Gazette, Volume 10, vaccinations in the 1632 universe were discussed as something Grantville would introduce to early modern Europe and beyond. Vaccinations are an extremely useful and beneficial healthcare innovation both from the societal and personal perspective. Widespread use of vaccinations can prevent many different diseases which were the major killers in the early modern era and kept life expectancy down. However, they have one major inadequacy: they do not work once you are infected (the exception being rabies which can be vaccinated against after infection but before the onset of clinical symptoms).

  In our current modern era, we have found various means by which we counter disease even after infection. Bacterial diseases can be cured by use of antibiotics. Many viral diseases can be contained by various antiviral medications and most parasites have become so rare in the developed nations that people no longer know what they are like. Many of the diseases caused by parasites have effective remedies. With artemesium derived drugs against malaria, organo-arsenic drugs against trypanosomes (which cause sleeping sickness in Africa or Chagas disease in South America), parasites have mostly become a matter of inconvenience in the Western world, such as head lice in school age children, rather than life threatening. All in all, aside from cases of the sniffles, infectious disease has become relatively uncommon in the developed world. Even though many doctors are justifiably concerned about the emergence of multi-drug resistant bacteria, infections of all kinds are not the major killers they used to be because they are so effectively controlled by modern sanitation, inspection of the food supply and effective drugs.

  In our history, we have more extensively used something else to fight disease which just about everyone still recognizes by the word or action, but many of us do not know the origin of the concept. These are anti-toxins, anti-venoms and antidotes. Here, I would like to discuss and propose that together with making vaccines, introducing improved sanitation and making people familiar with the germ theory, the use of anti-toxins and antidotes would also be a vital tool in the battle against disease.

  What precisely are antidotes?

  An antidote or anti-toxin can be defined as any substance which can counteract a toxin. A toxin is a substance which causes bodily harm usually through poisoning. To differentiate a toxin from a simple poison, it is said that even though toxins come in a very wide variety of different molecules, they are often proteins and produced by living (micro) organisms. Likewise, antidotes are often antibodies which bind and neutralize toxins. The easy way to envision the action of an antidote is to think of different locks and keys. For the body to work correctly, different locks and keys (proteins called enzymes which do anything and everything from help you create usable energy in your cells to making new building blocks for your proteins or DNA) have to work perfectly together. If a toxin interferes with a specific key being able to fit in a lock, that process is disrupted. If this process is something essential, the toxin can be deadly. An antidote can work in different ways but usually it binds to the toxin and prevents it from interfering with the lock and key in question. Toxins we have commonly heard of are Tetanus, Botul
inum and Diphtheria. Although Botulinum toxin is the most deadly toxin known to man, it is currently more associated with the temporary removal of wrinkles than with death.

  Why should Grantville bother making these antidotes?

  These days everyone in the Western world and even most of the developing world gets immunized against tetanus and diphtheria. What we are actually immunized with are the tetanus and diphtheria toxoids, the inactivated forms of the toxins that are produced by the tetanus and diphtheria bacteria. In addition, when we go into the hospital for a tetanus shot when we have scratched ourselves on a dirty nail and we haven't had a shot for a decade or longer, the tetanus shot may come with some tetanus immunoglobulin, a concentrated antidote, in addition to the tetanus toxoid. Without these vaccinations, diphtheria and tetanus would manifest themselves widely as the very deadly diseases they are.

  The development of the first antidotes against these toxins during the 1880's was one of the first steps in modern medicine, together with smallpox vaccinations, that made a major impact on the childhood mortality rate. I believe this technique will be favored by the up-time medical staff because they could make such a large difference and most of all because they can be used and still be successful after someone is already infected.

  What are antibodies and how are they produced?

  Antibodies are the end product of one of the two major branches of vertebrate immune systems. These two are called the cellular and the humoral branches. I will not be discussing the cellular branch, aside to say that it provides for a massive amount of professional literature and still keeps a lot of research scientists quite busy. The humoral branch is so-called because the end product can be found in the humor "blood" and these are antibodies. They are proteins which evolve so that they can bind very many different kinds of molecules. The manner in which they are developed in the body is reminiscent of the theory of evolution. A type of cell called a "naïve B-cell" is stimulated to differentiate, i.e. to start to develop down the pathway to become an antibody-producing cell called a plasma cell. During this process, the cell is presented with an antigen, a sample of what the antibody is going to be binding to, the B-cell divides and of the offspring only those making an antibody with some capacity to bind to the antigen survive. Those cells that fail to make binding antibodies commit suicide. This process is repeated at least three times with increasingly higher hurdles for the binding. In the end, it results in a specialized cell producing lots of an antibody with strong binding to the antigen. This whole evolution can take as long as three weeks. The process in itself, of course, is much more intricate involving many different changes in the cells and requires interaction with other cells and their protein products which can stimulate or break off this process, called differentiation, from a naïve B-cell to a plasma cell.

  Once a plasma cell has been produced, it will now continue to pump out antibodies. These cells are terminally differentiated, which is to say they no longer divide and they no longer develop any further. They do, however, have a tendency to settle down in the bone marrow where some of them continue to pump out antibodies for sixty to a hundred or so years. Not all plasma cells are that long-lived, some survive for merely a few weeks, others months or years. That is why vaccinations for tetanus are repeated every 10 years but you only need two shots of measles vaccine. If you actually have a disease, you tend to have a very long lived memory of that particular form of the disease in the form of long surviving plasma cells churning out antibodies all day every day. This immunological memory is much enhanced by some of the progenitors of the plasma cells in the B-cell differentiation process called memory B-cells. In the process of producing the plasma cells, the intermediates have a step where the cells can already bind fairly well to an antigen, however these cells retain the capacity to divide and enhance their capacity to bind to the antigen. These memory B-cells also stick around, favored hangouts for them can be found in the spleen, tonsils as well as the appendix and other locations around the intestines. If you come across a particular pathogen again, after you are vaccinated or have had the disease, these memory B-cells can rapidly multiply and develop to become many more plasma cells that can produce an overwhelming quantity of antibodies to corral the disease in a much shorter period of time, a mere matter of days a compared to the few weeks it takes to develop immunological memory the first time. Since most diseases require more time than that to gain a foothold and to spread, the system works extremely well to contain diseases the individual already has encountered before or been vaccinated against.

  How can antibodies be induced against a specific disease?

  Vertebrates have evolved in an environment which is rich in bacteria and viruses as well as opportunistic parasites. Since these are so much smaller and simpler, these organisms have an advantage in that they replicate much faster. Vertebrates therefore cannot just accept getting infected without having mechanisms to cope with preventing these microorganisms from using our bodies as a food source. Many bacteria and viruses have co-evolved and instead of being harmful to us they can be beneficial. For example, much of our DNA consists of sequences which were introduced by viruses over many millions of years. We have yet to discover whether many of these sequences have any particular function, but for some of these we have identified specific beneficial and/or detrimental effects. Similarly, bacteria, which do not hop a ride on our DNA, have also evolved to become co-dependent. We have bacteria living on our skin, in our gut and all our body cavities. Most of these resident bacteria try to make certain that bacteria that can cause us harm do not obtain a foothold. Some of these bacteria produce nutrients from food we cannot digest, some produce vitamins, some actively suppress harmful bacteria and some function as friendly sparring partners for our immune systems to learn from.

  Bacteria have several features which the vertebrate immune system is particularly alert to. When bacteria enter the body, they often find it a very hostile environment, and they tend to break up frequently. This then spills their cellular contents which among other things contains the bacterial DNA. This DNA is something that a percentage of antibodies are naturally made against, and humans commonly make these kinds of antibodies with a high affinity to DNA. This is one of the reasons why we can have an inflammation reaction when we get a bruise. The cellular damage to ourselves, even when not exposed to outside microorganisms does cause the spillage of our own cells cellular contents among which is DNA. This DNA is then recognized by our antibodies which then help to recruit the rest of the immune system to come in and clean up the mess. This can cause the area to be inflamed, even though it is not infected. That is why it is beneficial to ice the bruise and perhaps take aspirin to reduce the inflammation so that the immune system doesn't go haywire and try to clean up more than just the damaged cells. Another common feature recognized by antibodies are the cell walls of bacteria, which frequently have a large amount of specific carbohydrates, different kinds of sugar-like molecules. These are relatively specific per bacterial species, but as molecules in general, they provoke a very strong immune response. Again, the human immune system naturally makes antibodies which bind these carbohydrates. Both the DNA and the carbohydrates can be injected in isolation and cause a very strong inflammation response. This is important since it attracts the immune system to a location with a big sign of "here is an invader." Substances which proverbially carry these signposts are called adjuvants and are used with most kinds of vaccines to enhance the response against a particular antigen.

  Thus, the two ways in which we can build up immunity against a disease are either having the disease and surviving or being vaccinated. For many diseases we don't have an option, we just don't know much about them or there is too much diversity in the disease. The common cold is a good example of a disease with large diversity. As there are so many different kinds of viruses that cause the common cold, having had one doesn't protect you against the next. Similarly, malaria can be very different from one round of infection to the n
ext. Although for this disease, if people are infected enough and survive they do build up a substantial degree of immunity, however, trying to get to that point is deadly for over 1 million children a year in the developing world.

  Historical uses and production of immunoglobulins.

  Going back to the early modern age where Grantville landed and the medical establishment of the time, we come across a particular mindset. Disease was perceived to be caused by an imbalance of humors, the bodily fluids. It could be onset by bad odors, but the disease in itself was thought to be an imbalance. The manner in which they attempted to re-establish these imbalances was by drawing out the various humors in many different ways, blood letting being a particular favorite. Strangely enough, some patients actually did get better after treatment. While most of this can be attributed to natural resilience in the human animal, sometimes drawing blood or making someone vomit can be the medically correct course of action. All this blood letting left a solid impression on western medical science and is not entirely without merit. Much about the health status of an individual can be discovered from examining their blood, at least we are able to do so in this modern day and age. Since the blood serves as the supplier of materials to the body, so it serves as the sewer by which waste from the various organs is brought back to be disposed of, usually by either the liver or the kidneys. By the time Pasteur and co-workers discovered that one can vaccinate animals and people by injection of dead or weakened micro-organisms, the fight was on to see which micro-organism caused which disease. A leader in this effort was a German by the name of Koch. In his laboratory, many people worked in the identification of these organisms. Diphtheria, tetanus, cholera and tuberculosis (TB) bacteria were a few that they identified. As a next step, Koch and collaborators infected animals with these organisms to create animals which had immunity to these diseases. This would be followed by periodic draining of some of their blood. This blood would contain antibodies against the disease in question. This worked very well for making antitoxins against several diseases, especially against the tetanus and diphtheria toxins. However, it also failed miserably in some instances, such as TB. Koch declared that he was able to make an antidote against TB, but was unsuccessful, resulting in the general and medical population doubting his theories and harming the development of future useful antidotes being available. The other large drawback from these antidotes was that it required injecting humans with blood derived products from animals. Some antidotes were made from human donors but those where not always available and almost never in sufficient quantities.