Conrad Starguard-The Radiant Warrior
Page 57
"We could tether it."
"And what if the battle moved, as they sometimes do? Anyway, you saw what happened to your last tether."
"What are you suggesting then?"
"Let's go the whole route and build aircraft! An airplane can be piloted up or down at will. You can fly them in any direction you want and you can outrace the wind!"
"But you said that aircraft were too complicated for us to build!"
"They will certainly not be easy. It will take us years, but think of the prize to be won. To fly like a bird!"
"If men can do it, Sir Conrad, we will! How do we start?"
"I think we will need to build a whole town dedicated to flight. We will need some of the best carpenters and seamstresses in Poland. And for our future pilots and designers, we should start with young boys. We will start with boys ten or twelve years old and have them build small model aircraft at first. We'll have to try a lot of things, and we can save time by building models first. As the boys grow, so will their models, and in a few years they'll be making full-sized aircraft."
"But why boys? Why not adults?"
The truth was that keeping tabs on a hundred boys would keep Count Lambert busy and safe, but I couldn't tell him that. "Young people have free minds, my lord. There's more work to be done than you and I can do in our lifetimes. We'll need help. But from where? Can you imagine a bunch of peasants trying to learn how to fly? The merchants? The priests? It's ludicrous! And the nobles are too involved with their own affairs to give it their full energies.
"But boys would, especially if we took them to a new town away from their parents and other distractions. It might be best if we restricted them to the sons of the nobility, because we'll need adults around to do the carpentry and so on, not to mention cooking and cleaning. It would be best if the boys had some authority over the common workers."
"You're right, Sir Conrad! What boy wouldn't jump at the chance to come?"
"I'll worry about designing the facilities. You should pick the land. We'll need about a square mile of it, most of it dead flat, but with one big hill on it. Do you have such a place on your lands?"
"Several. But I'm minded of the old tomb. At least they say it was a tomb, but it could be just a hill for all I know. You know Krak's tomb near Cracow? It's about the same, only it's bigger. It's also covered with trees, but we can make short work of that!"
"Excellent, my lord. Is it far from here?"
"About three miles. Have one of the other knights show it to you. Have your plans ready for just after the spring planting. I can get you a thousand workers then."
"A thousand, my lord?"
"Two thousand, if you can use them. I'll have each of my knights send me a dozen peasants for two months. I can pay them in cloth. That should be enough to get us started, anyway. We'll call the town Eagle Nest!"
"Yes, my lord."
Going back to Three Walls, the more I thought about the project, the more I liked it. Of course we wouldn't get decent aircraft in the foreseeable future, but having a bunch of bright kids in what amounted to an engineering school could be great! Those were my future engineers!
Furthermore, it would give Lambert something to spend all his spare energy on. Keeping up with a few dozen youngsters will wear down any man!
On the other hand, it meant one hell of a busy spring and summer. I had two major installations to put together at the same time, when peasant manpower was available between the planting and the first hay harvest.
When things get hairy, the magic word is KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid! Do what you've done before. Actually, the structures needed first were housing, just as at Three Walls.
I'd start by ordering the same tools I'd had made last summer, with only minor changes where experience had shown a better way. Only now I'd order two sets, one in Count Lambert's name and one in the duke's. I'd go to the same craftsmen as before and demand the same prices.
The apartment buildings would be the same as at Three Walls, except I'd bend them into hollow squares instead of a straight line as at Three Walls, because they would stand in the open instead of closing off a box canyon. But the hard parts, the kitchen and bathrooms, had all been designed. What's more, my people already had experience making and installing them.
I would put together two teams of experienced carpenters and masons and have them be my leaders during the construction phase, with peasants hired temporarily to do the grunt work.
I was tempted to go straight to Cieszyn and start ordering stuff, but all my drawings and notes were back at Three Walls. My head was bubbling with my new plans and I didn't stay long. At dawn the next day I was on the road again and in an hour I was talking to the Krakowski brothers.
A year had made quite a difference in both them and the brass works. Twelve months earlier they had been literally starving to death, and each had lost a child during the winter. Now they were solid, prosperous citizens. They and their families were healthy and each had added a new member, with more already on the way.
Their factory was booming, with over fifty workers and twelve pouring ovens. They had back orders for the brass parts for twenty-three windmills as well as a lot of other things.
I told them that they now had four more windmills on order, and these took precedence over other work. Also, I needed all the plumbing we'd used at Three Walls duplicated twice, and had some other things besides.
They got upset at having to delay their other customers, but when I told them that half of the stuff was for Count Lambert and the rest was for Duke Henryk himself, they quieted down. Nobody was going to object strongly about being bumped by the duke. It wasn't healthy!
Finally, I told them about the copper mine I'd discovered. That got their interest! They were all angry about the prices they'd been paying and the idea of digging and smelting their own copper appealed to them.
Thom said that when he was a journeyman he worked at a smelter for a year, so I asked him to supervise the works the next summer. It meant leaving his wife behind for a few months until the housing was up, but that didn't bother anyone. It wasn't as though they were newlyweds. And I hinted that if the Legnica installation worked out well, we'd move the brass works from Cieszyn to there to cut down on transportation costs.
We talked a bit about having an entire city devoted to the mining, smelting, casting, and machining of brass and copper and I could see the lights going on in their eyes.
I gave Thom half of the ore I'd brought back, and he was suddenly depressed. It wasn't any kind of copper ore he'd ever seen. The ore he was used to was red-colored, and a little heavier. I told him that it had to be roasted over an open fire before it could be smelted, and he said that he would try it. But I could see that he had grave doubts about the project.
I'd make a believer of him. I hoped.
I was lucky in that Tadeusz was back in Cieszyn from successfully starting a Pink Dragon Inn in Cracow. It had already paid for its construction cost and was generating healthy profits.
He was absolutely delighted that the duke himself had requested a Pink Dragon Inn in Wroclaw, and vowed that within the week he would leave for that city no matter what the weather was like. I gave him a letter of introduction to the duke, sealing it with my big seal ring. I also told him about needing another small inn at the copper mine near Legnica by the end of the summer. No problem!
Then I spent two days haggling with blacksmiths and carpenters to get the tools I needed. The duke's name impressed everybody, and I got done in two days what had taken me two months last summer.
I also looked up the cloth merchant that I'd contracted with last summer. We made arrangements for delivering the two thousand yards of cloth agreed upon. He wasn't happy about the deal, because the price of cloth had dropped since we had agreed on the price, and he would lose money by honoring the agreement. I wouldn't let him off, though. I never told him to be a capitalist!
Then back to Three Walls where people still weren't too clear about what
had happened. It took a full day with my foremen to settle out who would be going where to do what.
And besides all of the above, work was going on at Three Walls, and we had to agree on a schedule to keep things going even though we were losing two-thirds of our best men and having to hire a bunch of rookies. Most of those going to Eagle Nest would be coming back, but the transfers to Copper City would be permanent.
I was having a wonderful time!
I had the new buildings drawn up in four days, largely because of Sir Vladimir's help. He was becoming a good draftsman, and I'd make an engineer out of him yet.
But looking at the amount of wood that had to be sawn in a few months, it would take three of our walking-beam sawmills to do the job at each of the new installations.
The quality of the work turned out by the brass works had been steadily increasing. It was time to try our hands at a steam-powered sawmill.
We were casting pipes. A tubular boiler wouldn't be difficult. We were machining bearings and bushings. Cylinders, pistons, and rods wouldn't be that much harder. We were making high-pressure water valves. Steam valves should be possible.
The only hang-up was how to fasten the end-caps to the cylinders. I didn't see any way to do that except with steel machine screws. The few screws we had made so far had been filed by hand, which was expensive and not nearly accurate enough.
I needed an engine lathe to accurately cut screws and to make good taps and dies. And an engine lathe needs accurate screws to feed the tool along the stock. I had to have a screw to make a screw!
I laid the problem aside, hoping my subconscious would come up with something, and worked on the rest of the engine. We had to cut huge logs, two and three yards thick, so a circular saw would have had to be six yards across. This was beyond our capabilities. We could probably make a big bandsaw blade, but such a blade has to be very flexible, and I doubted the quality of our steel. I sketched up a big enough bandsaw and it was huge, difficult to move, hard to make, and expensive. KISS.
Then I took one of our four-yard ripsaws and sketched a three-yard-long cylinder at each end of it. By alternately pressurizing the rod ends of the cylinders, they would pull the saw blade back and forth. I set the cylinders horizontally, so the machine wouldn't have to be built in a pit. A manually operated screw pulled the log into the blade, and a mechanism for holding the log at the proper angle was straightforward.
A tubular boiler, a pressure gauge, and a safety relief valve came off my board within a day, and finally I put the whole thing on wheels. It might take a dozen mules to move it, but at least we wouldn't have to disassemble it to move it. In five days flat I had a complete set of drawings.
The world's first steam engine!
But I still hadn't figured out how to make a good screw. Finally, I just drew up a simple engine lathe, even though I didn't see how we could possibly build one. By this time, we had pretty much duplicated the machinery from the brass works at Three Walls, complete with pigs in huge hamster cages turning the lathes, so I gave the drawings to Ilya and told him to make me one.
Ilya was a good man at a forge, but he didn't have the machining experience of the Krakowski brothers. I gave this difficult project to him because the Krakowski brothers were reasonable enough to ask questions until they understood something, and I didn't have the answers to match their questions.
Ilya, on the other hand, was never reasonable. His ego was such that he would never admit that there was anything that he didn't quite grasp. He was belligerent, intolerant, and bullheaded, but he wasn't stupid.
The engine lathe would be the most complicated piece of equipment we owned, but I gave the project to him as casually as if I was asking for an axe head. I simply explained what it did and why, and asked to have it done as soon as possible. He stared at the drawings for a few moments and then said that if I wanted the silly thing, he'd build it.
For the next five weeks, it was hard to get anything else out of the blacksmiths, and repair work was done only grudgingly. I finally had to step in and split the section into a forging group and a machining group, just to keep the carpenters and masons in tools.
At one point I was walking through the plant and saw Ilya carefully wrapping a woman's bright red ribbon around a smooth brass rod, and carefully scribing on the brass where the top of the ribbon came to as he went along. I didn't say a word.
Another time I saw him deliberately pouring fine sand on a set of running gears, while on another machine one of his assistants was running an iron nut back and forth on a long brass screw. The nut was in two halves and clamped back together, and it too was dusted with fine sand. The assistant said that he had been doing this boring work for two weeks, but I didn't want to get involved. If Ilya somehow did the job, great. If he fell on his ass, the humiliating experience might make him easier to live with.
But Ilya did it. The engine lathe worked better than I had expected, and Ilya's ego was so monstrous that he wouldn't even accept praise for it. He pretended that he could do that sort of thing every day. So I put him in charge of making the steam-powered sawmills, and told him not to take so long this time.
Most modern factories are built on flat, level land. My material-handling equipment was limited to men with wheelbarrows, and the coal came out of the mountain several hundred yards above the valley floor. I used the slope of the valley walls to help out.
From the tunnel mouth, loads of coal were dumped in a pile almost at the door. Below that was a cleaning and sorting area and the tops of the coke ovens were lower still. I built the top of the blast furnace lower than the bottom of the coke oven, about level with the entrance to the boys' cave, where the iron ore came out.
It was still wheelbarrow work, but at least we didn't have to push stuff uphill.
Ilya was vastly skeptical about using anything but charcoal to make iron, but I bullied him into it and with our coke and our iron ore, he eventually turned out decent wrought iron. He insisted that charcoal was better than coke, especially for the cementation process of making steel, but that last took very little charcoal.
As soon as the weather broke, the masons were busy assembling the blast furnace. They had been cutting sandstone blocks for it all winter long, and we had good supplies of coke and iron ore.
After five days of steady burning, we made our first pour, knocking in the clay plug with a long iron rod, and getting out of the way as a long stream of molten iron sprayed out. After that we tapped it four times a day.
Chemical engineers often refer to themselves as "bucket chemists," as opposed to the "test tube chemists" who work in laboratories, because they often do their experiments with large quantities of chemicals. Reaction rates and sometimes even the end products can vary depending on the quantities used, so these people mix things by the bucketful.
I was a bucket chemist of vast proportions. I got the blast furnace going by building a full-size blast furnace and experimenting for months with the quantities of coke, ore, and limestone required. What little iron we turned out in those first months was simply tossed into a pile for later refining, because it wasn't worth much in its present state.
It was simply that there was no way of doing things on a smaller scale, not without some way of measuring temperatures. Brute force had to substitute for finesse.
Did we need more air in the furnace? We didn't know. Build more bellows, put more people to pumping them and see what happens!
At first, all we could do with the pig iron was to cast it in long troughs formed in the sand, but we could always melt it down later by throwing it back into the furnace. I had Mikhail Krakowski come down and set up our casting operation for us. He used the system he knew, pouring into hot clay molds rather than the sandcasting used in modern foundries. But it worked, and I saw no need to change things. If anything, he got a much better surface finish using clay than I had ever seen using sand.
So the stench and dirt of a blast furnace was added to the stink of the coke ovens.
Ilya was proud of that bloomery, and worked it at a fine peak of efficiency. But he hated the blast furnace. He could see little use for cast iron, which was made at much higher temperatures, had vastly more impurities and was so brittle that it had to be cast into its final shape, because you couldn't bend it without breaking it. What use was a piece of iron if you couldn't beat on it?
I finally had to put another man in charge of the blast furnace, since Ilya considered it a waste of good ore and coke.
But cast iron is a useful material. Before too long, we were producing a line of consumer goods from it, potbellied stoves, pots and pans, and large kitchen ranges that my great grandmother would have been proud of. And cast iron is the best material for making large machine bases. It is rigid, dimensionally stable, and the fibrous crystalline structure absorbs vibrations. If you look at cast iron under a microscope, it looks like a pile of needles—not that we had a microscope.
Furthermore, cast iron is the starting material for making large quantities of steel, and it was going to take large quantities to beat the Mongols.
But try convincing Ilya of that!
Chapter Seven
In the twentieth century, there are many racial stereotypes, and most of them are derogatory. You know the sort I mean—Englishmen are all stiff, formal, and supercilious. Frenchmen are all drunkards and hung up on illicit sex. Germans are all warmongers who spend their off time making ridiculously complicated toys. Blacks are all lazy criminals. Americans are all loud, boorish, and rich. Jews are all sneaky shysters. Poles always do everything backward.
Everybody knows that these statements are mostly nonsense. The people of any group are diversified. Some of them are good and wise, some are bad and stupid, and most are indifferent.