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 experimental. It produced wrought iron the same way Ilya had back at Okoitz, only on a far larger scale. One of the first steam-powered machines built after the steam saws was a steam hammer to beat the wrought iron blooms, taken from the furnace, into iron rods. It worked on waste heat from the furnace itself, a tubular boiler having 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 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.
Yet there is a grain of truth in many of the stereotypes. The British are more formal than most people. The French per capita consumption of wine is frightening, enough so that any person from another country who drank what they average would be considered an alcoholic. And historically, the Germans have started an awful lot of wars, losing most of them.
While I am not going to admit that Poles do everything backward, I will admit that we are very good at looking at things from a different angle than most other peoples. The typical Pole has no difficulty dealing with a concept like the square root of a negative one, for example, a thing that can make a tightly logical Englishman catatonic.
That particular concept is regularly 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 am trying to lead up to is why I built a milehigh smokestack, sideways.
I suppose that I could claim that structural limitations in the materials available and the absence of certain types of machinery necessitated building the stack against the side of the mountain, but that's not the way it happened.
Besides setting up to produce cast iron, wrought iron, and lime for mortar, I wanted to produce bricks, tiles, and clay pipes. I'd once read about an ancient Chinese invention called a dragon furnace, a long kiln built up the side of a mountain. You filled the kiln with unfired products and started a fire at the bottom. The rest of the kiln functioned as a chimney, and the bricks farther up were at least warmed up and dried out as those on the bottom were being fired.
Then you started another fire farther up in the furnace. Air coming up the furnace was heated by the hot bricks near the bottom, so it took less fuel to bake the bricks farther up. As time went on, you kept starting new fires farther and farther up, letting the old ones die out. It took a week to fire all the bricks in the furnace, at which time you took out all the baked bricks and put in green ones. The system had a lot in common with the modem reverse-flow system.
We soon added a second furnace along side the first so that we could keep working continuously.
One of the coke oven workers was being ragged by his wife because of the stench he spent all day generating. He came to me with a proposal for a set of flues to take the coke oven fumes to the dragon furnaces and so get them out or," the valley. He even had a well thought out set of drawings showing how this could be done. With only minor changes, we tried it and it worked. The stench was reduced and the valley became a good deal more livable."
Furthermore, the fumes contained a fair amount of unburnt gases which were ignited in the hot dragon furnace, and fuel consumption in the dragon furnaces went down. As time went on, we made the dragon furnaces longer and longer until they reached the top of the highest mountain there. Then we built a smokestack at the top, and everything noxious went up it.
I made the man the guest of honor at the next Saturday night dance, publicly gave him three hundred pence as a bonus, and promoted him as soon as possible after that.
This got me the damndest collection of weird suggestions you could ever imagine. I'd wanted to encourage thinking on the part of the workers, but I hadn't expected to be inundated by dumb ideas. I finally had to set up a review system, where suggestions had to filter up through channels, and pay additional bonuses to workers' bosses so that they wouldn't squash everything.
But the system worked. Not only did it result in a lot of useful devices, but it singled out workers who could benefit from further engineering training. As the years went on, I had to do less and less of the design work myself. This was good, because management work was taking up more and more of my time.
Eventually we got notice that the duke would be arriving the next morning, so ' I had the band ready. They had collected or had made seven brass instruments, mostly trumpets, and I had taught them a few fanfares. That is to say, I whistled the tunes and they figured out how to make them come out of a horn. Their wives had improvised some gaudy band uniforms, and they made a fairly impressive display, along with their drummers, playing the Star Wars theme from the balcony as the duke rode in.
Duke Henryk arrived with his son, his armorer, and twenty men. Since I'd promised them two complete suits of plate armor, I put the girls to making each of them a suit of parchment armor, as they had done for me.
A few months before, at my Trial by Combat, my helmet had been bashed around and jammed at a right angle from where it should have been, so I could only look over my right shoulder. It darned nearly was the death of me. Naturally, I had redesigned the helmet. Instead of a clamshell affair that split down the middle and required a helper to put on, the new version looked sort of like a "Darth Vader" helmet with the bottom edge fitting into the ring around my collar. A separate piece, called a beaver, fit into the front half of the ring and covered the bottom of my face. Two easily removed pins fastened the beaver to the rest of the helmet, and a visor could be flipped down to protect the eyes at the price of decent visibility. The big advantage was that you could put it on and take it off by yourself, even if it was bent.