Part 7 (1/2)

I had the new buildings drawn up in four days, largely because of Sir Vladiood draftsineer out of hi at the amount of wood that had to be sawn in a few - 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 stea pipes A tubular boiler wouldn't be difficult We were s

Cylinders, pistons, and rods wouldn't be that h-pressure water valves

Stea-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 scree 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 ine lathe needs accurate screws to feed the tool along the stock I had to have a screw to, and worked on the rest of the engine We had to cut huge logs, two and three yards thick, so a circular saould have had to be six yards across This was beyond our capabilities We could probablybandsaw 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 Ainto the blade, and a htforward

A tubular boiler, a pressure gauge, and a safety relief valve came offon wheels It ht take a dozen mules to move it, but at least ouldn't have to disassemble it to s

The world's first steaood screw Finally, I just drew up a sih I didn't see hoe could possibly build one By this time, we had pretty much duplicated the machinery froe has to Ilya and told hie, but he didn't have the ave this difficult project to hih to ask questions until they understood so, 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 adrasp He was belligerent, intolerant, and bullheaded, but he wasn't stupid

The engine lathe would be the ave the project to hi 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 , he'd build it

For the next five weeks, it was hard to get anything else out of the blacksly I finally had to step in and split the section into a forging group and a roup, just to keep the carpenters and h the plant and saw Ilya carefully wrapping a woht red ribbon around a s on the brass where the top of the ribbon ca I didn't say a word

Another ti fine sand on a set of running gears, while on anotheran iron nut back and forth on a long brass screw The nut was in two halves and claether, and it too was dusted with fine sand The assistant said that he had been doing this boring work for teeks, but I didn't want to get involved If Ilya soreat

If he fell on his ass, the huht ine 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 hi the stea this time

Most modem factories are built on flat, level land Myequipment was limited to men heelbarrows, 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 du 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 wheelbarroork, 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 ce steel, but that last took very little charcoaL As soon as the weather broke, thethe 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, weiron rod, and getting out of the way as a long stream of molten iron sprayed out After that we tapped it four tiineers often refer to themselves as ”bucket chemists,” as opposed to the ”test tube chemists”

ork in laboratories, because they often do their experie quantities of chemicals

Reaction rates and so on the quantities used, so these people s by the bucketful

I was a bucket che by building a full-size blast furnace and experi for months with the quantities of coke, ore, and limestone required What little iron we turned out in those first , because it wasn't worth much in its present state

It was sis on a s temperatures Brute force had to substitute for finesse

Did we need more air in the furnace? We didn't know Buildthem 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 alwaysit back into the furnace I had Mikhail Krakowski co operation for us He used the syste into hot clayused in e things If anything, he got aclay 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

The bloomery we built next to the blast furnace was less experiht iron the saer scale One of the first steam-powered machines built after the steaht iron blooms, taken from the furnace, into iron rods It worked on waste heat fro been built in the chimney

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 her 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 e of the blast furnace, since Ilya considered it a waste of good ore and coke

But cast iron is a usefula line of consue kitchen ranges that randmother would have been proud of And cast iron is the best id, 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 aoing to take large quantities to beat the Mongols

But try convincing Ilya of that!

Chapter Seven

In the twentieth century, there are atory You know the sort I lishmen are all stiff, for up on illicit sex Ger 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 stateroup are diversified

Soood and wise, some are bad and stupid, and rain of truth in many of the stereotypes The British are more formal than htening, enough so that any person froe would be considered an alcoholic And historically, the Gerto ad backward, I will ads frole thanwith a concept like the square root of a negative one, for exalishularly used in electrical design, and in America, where there has been a tendency for different nationalities to gravitate into specific trades, perhaps half the electrical engineers claim Polish descent In the same manner, many of the architects and construction workers are Italian, and the Arabs have started to dominate the mercantile trades

It's not that any of these nationalities forces the others out of their bailiwick It's that an individual tends to work at what he can do best What I ah smokestack, sideways