Part 18 (1/2)

The next year saw our first printed books, our first poured concrete, and our first lass

It also saw our first cannon

There are so the first time You can set your own standards

When it ca, there were a lot of simplifications I could introduce, for no other reason than because no one had ever seen anything different All the characters were the same width, as on an old-style typewriter The use of lowercase letters was not coes, so we didn't have any

The width of a column was standardized at twenty-four characters, and our rule was that any word could be hyphenated anyplace, so all lines were the same width and no space asted AH books were printed on paper that was a third of a yard high and a quarter yard wide, since that was the width that our papere Always

Once you were used to it, it was easy enough to read, and almost everybody was used to it because all the schoolbooks were printed that way It was the way you learned in the first place For those who learned by reading handwrittennew Up until then, every book had been in a different forreat si h with two dozen long iron sticks in it, set up so the sticks could be slid back and forth The top of the sticks were square cut to look like a castle wall, and on top of each merlon was stamped a letter, number or punctuation mark

The operator slid these sticks until the line he wanted was under the casting apparatus A second operator slid a mold on top of the line of sticks and poured a molten lead alloy into the mold and over the row of stae-shaped bars of type and fit them into a drum that went to the printer, once the drum had been turned on a lathe to make sure that all the characters were of exactly the sa press was also a simple affair There was a cast-iron pressure roll on the botto rolls on the top There was no paper feed required since orked only froe continuous rolls of paper, and always the sa the other side of the paper required a good deal of skill on the part of the printer, keeping the paper tension proper, so that the back of the sheet matched up with the front Paper stretches with moisture, and sometimes print runs were delayed because it was necessary to print the second side on a day with the same relative humidity as when the first side was printed But it couldn't be the same day because our ink took a day to dry

But despite the above, a twelve-man crew could print and bind six thousand copies of a fair-sized book in less than a week, whereas hand-copying a single book could take a month, or six months in the case of a bible

What took a year of developht and finding the right lead alloy that would cast properly and always shrink in exactly the same way, and so on

The leather ink rollers were a probleether showed up on the printed page, no matter how carefully it wasa tubular piece of leather,of a bull's penis! Privately, they called the rollers ”Lamberts,” but I don't think he ever heard about it

Making concrete required far less finesse and a lot more brute force Mortar iscarbon dioxide out of the air and turning itself back into calcium carbonate, the lis, but mostly calcium silicates It hardens by polymerization With concrete, you have real cheether, which is what roundin a rotary kiln until it ain The machinery to accomplish these small tasks took over fourteen thousand tons of cast iron, because ere only h a pair of crushi+ng wheels as wide as a man is tall, and three tih three sets of progressively finer ball e cement mixer filled with cannon balls and limestone, you understand a ball mill

The rotary kiln was a cast-iron tube two yards across and three dozen yards long, lined with sandstone bricks and turning once athings It gives you a Godlike feeling of power! Mere money doesn't colass is pretty easy if you know the trick, and I did You just pour the glass onto a pool of lass This won't ith glassteh-you vaporize the tin, I found out the hard way But with our soda glass, it worked just fine Our rig was fairly narrow, since none of our outside as more than a quarter yard wide

Within three laze everyin every building we'd put up in four years, except for the churches Learning how to er, and then only because I was able to hire a French glassmaker to show us hoas done

He kneo lass and then piecing bits of this together in a lead frame, but it was the second ular cast-iron fra the colors and designs wanted on the glass, then baking it until the glass softened enough to absorb the colors Easy enough once you kno to ood enough craftsman, he wasn't much of an artist He did onefor the church at Coaltown, and I didn't like it It was trite, and I wanted soot the services of an artist friend ofhi hiive the printing outfit to hi business

The deal wehis, and we sold the over my requirements that they wanted, sell it as they saw fit and keep the e that money as my donation to the Church My work, mostly schoolbooks, was to be done at the cost of materials

Actually, much of their other work turned out to be my work as well, since we le book published for every single one of the schools, to build the libraries We got those at cost, too

And there were two other strings attached The first was that everything printed e and Polish culture as a leader in Europe, and having the only printing presses in existence gave us a big edge In the twentieth century, a Polish boy has to learn English or Russian if he wants to stay at the forefront of engineering and most sciences and German besides if he wants to keep up with che to happen in the world I was building I'd e! That can be done byyourself culturally and technically ahead of everyone else What's more, once you're ahead, you tend to stay ahead, because while your kids are studying science, their kids are studying your language

Not one person in a hundred in Ae They don't have to! But everybody else has to speak English just to keep up with thehtly different from that used in the rest of western Europe, so it wouldn't have been easy to do foreign stuff in the first place

The second string was that I wanted hieneral purpose fa that would have sections on current events, household hints, agriculture, medicine, and construction

There would be a ser eachcommercial announcements, for a price

The abbot was astounded at the idea of writing a book every estion that an initial print run of six thousand copies would be appropriate But once we discussed how each of a dozen people would be writing only a few pages a h I think that it was the thought that six thousand fa his sermons that made him take on the task

As it turned out, I had to write half of the first few issues ular contributors to fill it out I had to write a s consistent, and I had to talk Abbot Ignacy into assigning four friars to the task of writing a dictionary

The first three issues had only ads froe myself from the project, except for the occasional article

The long-ter Up until then, the only source of news anybody had was hearsay and gossip Now they had a source of information about what the duke said in Wroclaw, and how the Palatine of Cracoered him

Within two years, we had correspondents in most of the major cities of Europe, and were the first news service And the reat way to tell , and food supplies

So it was a profitable trip, but I'd ridden to Cracow to get an artist

Friar Roman had never made a church , but that didn't matter We had craftsmen who could do the actual construction What I wanted was the artwork

An engineer is probably not the person to choose as an art critic, but I was also the boss and I had definite ideas about what I wanted I wanted to ious statement, and I didn't dare do it in words

The Church in the Middle Ages depended far too o to pray, I don't want to be surrounded with representations of tortured hue of love Love for God and love for one another I read nothing in the Serlory of God!

For the Church of Christ the Carpenter, our church at Three Walls, I wanted a si Saint Joseph in his carpentry shop On another wall, I wanted Christ with the little children The third was to have Christ with the lilies of the fields and the last was to be Christ with the ers in the temple, because Christ wasn't a wimp

So I put Roman on the payroll and set hilass works was located It had big s on the north side, a drawing board, and a big stack of paper I told him what I wanted and let him alone for a feeeks Then I told him what I didn't like about what he'd done, and had hiain

It was fourwhat I wanted, and I had to teach hihtat Three Walls Then I got hi on my other four churches

It was not only iols, it was also i!

There was a bad harvest in 1235 The fall rains had come much earlier than usual, and much heavier Yet we barely felt the effects of it