Chapter 438 (2/2)

Lucia quickly found them. They were a crude stone and a bag of elementary particles, both sealed in plastic bags.

Roland thought he recognized this crude, black stone from somewhere else.

“Wait, isn’t it the same as the black stone sent to my office earlier? I gave it to alchemists and then totally forgot about it. I’ve never thought twice about it since then.

Could it turn out to be the mineral that has the highest melting point on the North Slope Mountain?”

Anna could not measure the exact temperatures at which the materials melted, so she described them roughly by words such as “normal”, “high” and “relatively high”. Only the melting point of No.12 testing sample was described as “extremely high.”

The elementary particles in the bag were silvery white, similar to most of the other metallic elements.

He thought, “Is it wolfram?

Whatever, as long as it is difficult to melt.”

Roland let Anna make the particles into very fine wire, twisted the wire into a spiral and fix it onto a glass shelf which was then put into a glass bulb. The main part of an electric lamp was completed.

To make it a stable light, there were two more steps which were also considered to be the most difficult part in making electric bulbs. The first one was to evacuate the bulb, preventing the filament wire from reacting with oxygen. The second was sealing it to ensure that the air could not enter the bulb.

Without a doubt, only witches could realize those two steps.

Roland soon thought of Agatha.

The filament would become extremely reactive at high temperatures. It would easily oxidize, produce new oxides, and eventually melt down. That was why the bulb needed vacuum inside, but filling the bulb with inert gases could achieve the same or an even better effect.

Pure nitrogen was an excellent choice for this.

As nitrogen was lighter than the air, using a simple downward exhaust method, the bulb could be easily filled with nitrogen. It was much simpler than the vacuuming process. When the other end of the exhaust was also pure nitrogen, Soraya quickly sealed the bulb. A simple incandescent lamp was made successfully.

Looking at the electric bulb as small as his palm, Roland felt all sorts of emotions welling up in his mind. It was something outdated but now represented the most advanced manufacturing skills of the town.

The following night, he summoned all the members of City Hall to gather in front of the castle and ordered his guards to put out all the torches in the courtyard.

In this dark, snowy night, Roland switched on the circuit.

All of a sudden, at the center of the courtyard, an orange light lit up. It would not sway and extinguish in the wind like the light of a candle and it never flickered like fire. Though it could merely light up within a radius of a few meters, a stable light in the wind was something that the people had never seen before.

At this moment, everything was self-explanatory.

The fixed look on everyone’s face and the silence of the scene told everything.

He had brought electricity to this world.