And get the water back by forcing the water to a tank above the steam generator, close the access, let in steam from the boiler, and all the water would fall in when the pressure equalized.
In principle, this looked like it could be done! The first thing to do was to draw a diagram of what it might look like, drawing boxes for the parts he was not so sure of, and see what he could get made.
Even pipes were not that easy. Pipes were made of lead, but that would be too soft. What he needed was someone to make pipes for him, out of. . Out of what? Copper? Bronze? It had to be something from which he could make long pieces of pipe. How long could pipe sections be made? He should find out, because that might determine how the layout of this device would be. There could be no point in drawing something that could not be made, simply because available pipes were too short.
Then there was the question of how much pressure the system could take, safely, and how to control it. There was only one answer to that. He must get a boiler made, and gradually add weights to the valve and see what happened. And, remembering the problems of other scalded workers, watch from behind protection at a safe distance. Perhaps first get a bigger version of the little machine made. See how big they could make it?
He would hire some workers.
* * *
Timothy began serving the meal. He had taken upon himself the task of overseeing food preparation because, as he pointed out, Gaius seemed to be too busy to take a proper interest in food. Gaius smiled at this: he felt the real reason was that Timothy wanted to eat as well as he could while Gaius was paying, but he accepted the situation because Timothy did seem to have a knack of finding sources of really interesting food, and also he had to admit that Timothy seemed to be able to acquire this food more cheaply than Gaius would ever have managed. Timothy certainly had this ability to find bargains. Timothy placed the plate in front of Gaius and asked, "So, have you finally decided to admit that Aristarchus was wrong?"
Gaius looked up, grinned, and replied, "No!"
"Hoping I'll die of old age before you'll admit it?"
"I'm certainly not hoping you'll die in the reasonably near future," Gaius said. "I'm still thinking."
"So where have you got to?"
"This business of things coming to be and passing away. I think Aristotle, the Greek, was wrong, and I'm going to take the Roman view."
"There is one?" Timothy gave a look of forced puzzlement.
"According to Lucretius, no thing is ever produced by divine agency out of nothing," Gaius offered.
"That view, of course, came from Democritus, a Greek," Timothy pointed out.
"So, in a sense, I win a bet," Gaius said, and turned over a wax tablet on which was written, 'Timothy will point out that Democritus was a Greek.'
"Glad to make your day," Timothy added sourly.
"And you didn't offer to show anything coming from nothing, nor have you ever seen anything totally destroyed either."
"How about wood burning?" Timothy asked.
"As Aristotle correctly said," Gaius smiled, "the fire is an agent of change. I think Democritus was correct. Everything is made of atoms, and as Lucretius noted, what you see is how they are arranged. Air is presumably atoms with a lot of space in between them, so the atoms of wood are split apart by the fire and end up as air."
"So?"
"Suppose you say the same thing for energy? When you throw the stone in the air, suppose the energy doesn't pass away, but goes somewhere."
"Well?"
"If you think of lifting something, and the energy being stored somehow, then it must take so much more energy to lift the Sun from the Earth-centre than the Earth from the Sun-centre. That gives at least two problems."
"Two?" Timothy asked in surprise.
"Yes, two. The first is why doesn't Aristotle's system revert to the Aristarchus system, which seemingly needs less energy, and secondly, why does the amount of energy depend on how you look at the problem? That can't be right."
"So," Timothy pointed out, "logic says your analysis must be wrong."
"Not at all," Gaius countered. "The alternative is a premise might be wrong. The problem only arises because in Aristotle's system, the Earth is in a very special place for no good reason."
"Aristarchus has the Sun in the centre," Timothy pointed out.
"For the good reason that it's the biggest," Gaius pointed out. "Small falls around large, because with the same energy, light moves faster than heavy. The stars are so far away they're irrelevant to this discussion, and for all I know, they may have their own planets. The main point is, there's no reason for the Earth to be at the centre of anything, except it just seems so because we're on it. And there's more. The sun is so much more massive, and so far away, to give us our heat, it must be extremely hot."
"So?"
"Why doesn't it melt whatever its sphere is made of, or, if the spheres have holes, as you put it, why doesn't it melt and flow through those holes, or, if the spheres have no holes, why doesn't it just smear itself out along the sphere?"
"I don't know," Timothy shrugged. "It just doesn't."
"It just doesn't because everything's falling to the centre of it," Gaius pointed out, "and as Aristotle noted, it then has to be a sphere, which as far as we can tell, it is. No, Timothy, I do not concede. Everything I think of points to your being wrong. The only trouble is, I still can't see what's wrong with your one point."
"You're taking this very seriously," Timothy said. "Maybe I shouldn't have. ."
"Not at all," Gaius slapped him on the shoulder. "This is much better than dealing with some of these Roman snobs around here, and I can't wait to see your face when I solve it! Now, how about a cup of wine?"
Chapter 23
His next move was to hire the staff of a metal workshop. He was fortunate to find one such foundry in temporary financial trouble. A quick bailout acquired willing and skilled workers, and, he found that by arranging for more of the local legion's work to be done there, he quickly recovered his investment. However, somehow nothing progressed the way it should. They built what they thought he wanted, but usually it was not. It was then he realized that to make progress he had to be around to explain what he wanted.
He soon found that foundries were messy dirty places, and soon he began to dress more like the workers, at least on the site. He also needed somewhere else to assemble what he made, because while that was being done the foundry could be doing useful work, earning money, and keeping the workers employed.
Progress seemed to take forever. It took over two months to make a small steam turbine with greater size, and another six months to make one that did not fly to pieces when extra weights were put on the safety valve. If nothing else, he learned a little about safety precautions, and the value of a safety wall. During this period Gaius also managed to have some bronze bearings made, and he assembled a wheel attached to a stationary axle through his new bearings, the wheel being turned through gears from a windmill, and made to lift a heavy weight. He tried various mixtures of olive oil, lime and fat until eventually he came up with a mixture that seemed to allow the bearings to last. Mixing oil, fat and lime made him really filthy, and to his general annoyance, it took a long time to clean up.
Timothy watched these events with a mixture of admiration and dismay. The admiration was for the persistence, the dismay was because nothing seemed to be being built. But as Gaius told him in a tired voice one evening, if there were no solutions to certain problems, there was no point in continuing.
By now the local social elite had ceased sending Gaius invitations to events, and he was gradually becoming an outcast. His explanation was that he did not have the time, but the real reason was he did not enjoy their company. Timothy suggested that he should make peace with Flaccus, and eventually Gaius gave in. He held an evening and he put on entertainment by some Egyptians he had come across. As he expected, this was something of a novelty to some of the Romans. As he remarked bitterly, they would live in a country for years, and they might as well have stayed at home.