This made for great simplifications in our type-casting machine. It was a carefully machined iron trough 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 stamped letters.
A third operator trimmed the wedge-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 same height.
The printing press was also a simple affair. There was a cast-iron pressure roll on the bottom, then the type roll, and finally some leather-covered inking rolls on the top. There was no paper feed required since we worked only from large continuous rolls of paper, and always the same kind of paper.
Printing 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 development time were all the details. Getting the ink right 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 problem because the crack where the leather was sewn together showed up on the printed page, no matter how carefully it was made. They solved this one by using a tubular piece of leather, made from the covering 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 is made from calcium hydroxide. It hardens by absorbing carbon dioxide out of the air and turning itself back into calcium carbonate, the limestone it was made of. Concrete is made of a mixture of things, but mostly calcium silicates. It hardens by polymerization. With concrete, you have real chemical bonds holding things together, which is what makes it so strong.
To make it, you heat a finely ground mixture of coal, limestone, clay, sand, and blast furnace slag in a rotary kiln until it melts together into clinkers. Then you grind it up again. The machinery to accomplish these small tasks took over fourteen thousand tons of cast iron, because we were only making a small one.
The limestone went through a pair of crushing wheels as wide as a man is tall, and three times that diameter. Then the chips went through three sets of progressively finer ball mills. If you can imagine a huge 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 a minute.
I loved it, but then engineers love to make big things. It gives you a godlike feeling of power! Mere money doesn't come close!
Once you have the materials, making plate glass is pretty easy if you know the trick, and I did. You just pour the glass onto a pool of molten tin and slowly draw off window glass. This won't work with glass made of wood ashes and sand because the melting temperature of that mixture is too high-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 windows was more than a quarter yard wide.
Within three months, we made enough glass to. glaze every window in every building we'd put up in four years, except for the churches. Learning how to make stained glass took a few months longer, and then only because I was able to hire a French glassmaker to show us how it was done.
He knew two methods of doing it. One involved adding dyes to the molten glass and then piecing bits of this together in a lead frame, but it was the second method that we used, for then we could use standard rectangular cast-iron frames.
This involved little more than painting the colors and designs wanted on the glass, then baking it until the glass softened enough to absorb the colors. Easy enough once you know how to make the paints, and this guy did.
But while he was a good enough craftsman, he wasn't much of an artist. He did one window for the church at Coaltown, and I didn't like it. It was trite, and I wanted something glorious.
So I got the services of an artist friend of mine, Friar Roman, from Abbot Ignacy by giving him a thousand prayer books and offering him his very own printing press. Actually, I'd wanted to give the printing outfit to him anyway, since I didn't want to get into the publishing business.
The deal we made had my people training his, and we sold them paper and ink at cost. They could print anything over my requirements that they wanted, sell it as they saw fit and keep the money, but they had to acknowledge 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 made it a practice to buy a copy of every single 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 must be in Polish. I wanted to establish the Polish language 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 chemistry.
That wasn't going to happen in the world I was building. I'd make everybody else learn our language! That can be done by making yourself 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 America speaks a foreign language. They don't have to! But everybody else has to speak English just to keep up with them.
Anyway, the Polish alphabet is slightly 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 him to turn out a monthly magazine, a general purpose family-oriented thing that would have sections on current events, household hints, agriculture, medicine, and construction. There would be a sermon written by Abbot Ignacy and there would be something each month for the children. In addition., we would be accepting commercial announcements, for a price.
The abbot was astounded at the idea of writing a book every month, and even more so at my suggestion 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 month each, he came around, although I think that it was the thought that six thousand families would be reading his sermons that made him take on the task.
As it turned out, I had to write half of the first few issues myself, until we got enough regular contributors to fill it out. I had to write a manual of style, to keep things consistent, and I had to talk Abbot Ignacy into assigning four friars to the task of writing a dictionary.