"I'm thinking in particular about the precise metal instruments and glass lenses that made it possible for Galileo and Newton and company to do their thing. I suppose we ought to say that the relationship between engineering and science is one of mutual benefit. But my father has a fit when he hears engineering defined simply as applied science. That isn't the way things work. And the story of iron is a case in point."
All of a sudden, Herb stood up and made a gesture of annoyance. He turned to Tom Swift and spoke in a loud voice: "I've heard more than enough about iron and steel. You're making it sound as if we're talking about the Holy Grail."
"Maybe more important than the Holy Grail," Tom replied.
"No need to be sacrilegious, sweetheart," Mary said. "We can make our point about technology without blaspheming."
"You know," Sarah said, "some scholars suggest that the legend of the Holy Grail—the cup that Christ drank from at the Last Supper—was inspired by Celtic myths about the horn of plenty, the source of never-ending abundance. So, artistically at least, the search for salvation is related to the search for material well-being."
"I like that," Tom said; "but I think that the development of iron goes beyond just 'searching' for anything. This was not a treasure hunt. The iron was always there—in the stone—and we had to devise a way to get it out."
"Oh," said Sarah. "Then let's change our fable. What we want is the sword of Arthurian legend, driven through the anvil and into the stone. That's apt. The most powerful knights in the kingdom were unable to dislodge it. But along came young Arthur, virtuous and noble, and drew it forth as nicely as you please."
"That's a really wonderful story," said Roxy. "But I could never understand why anybody would want to go to so much trouble to pull out a sword that's stuck so tight in such a place."
"Because," Sarah said, "of what was inscribed along its blade. In Thomas Malory's words, 'Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of all England.' I guess Tom wants us to believe that whoso wrenches iron from the stone becomes a prince and saviour of his people."
"No offense, Sarah," Herb cut in, obviously about to say something offensive, "but don't you feel a little foolish coming up with these high-falutin' quotations all the time? We're going to have to start calling you Madam Bartlett."
Sarah flushed, but then gave back as good as she got. "No. I'll tell you what makes me feel foolish, Mr. Attorney. Tarty of the first part' makes me feel foolish. 'In consideration of the mutual covenants herein contained' makes me feel foolish. All legalese, accounting jargon, and technocratic gobbledygook makes me feel diminished as a human being. Also stupid clichés: 'Have a nice day,' 'No problem,' 'Whatever.'
"But the beautiful, insightful words of our creative geniuses— they make me feel the opposite of foolish. They make me feel inspired and exhilarated. Particularly at a time when most of humanity's literature, music, and art seems to have been totally obliterated, with only a precious remnant being carefully preserved in our small library."
It had been a long day, starting with a gala parade and ending with an engineering seminar that apparently had lasted too long. For the moment, there was not anything more to be said—about iron and steel, or anything else.
Herb, as a token of an affectionate truce, asked Sarah if he could give the final quote of the day. Sarah smiled and nodded consent.
"From the diaries of Samuel Pepys," Herb said. " 'And so to bed.' "
11
When the Joint Planning Subcommittee reconvened the next day, there were many smiles and sighs of relief. After five days of doubt and second-guessing, they had come through with their plans practically unscathed. A feeling of positive energy was palpable in the air. They were ready to proceed with their industrial revolution, and it was high time to turn their attention to metals. As Ichiro Nagasaka took the floor, he wasted no time on preliminaries.
"There is a most pressing need," Ichiro began, "most pressing indeed, as we all know, for metal tools—especially tools for farming and building. Therefore, it is essential to get blacksmiths working at the earliest possible moment. It shouldn't take long to construct simple forges, little more than a barbecue pit plus a hand-operated bellows. And I don't doubt that we'll be able to gather enough fuel to get these rudimentary shops operative. We can start by burning wood. At the same time, we'll get busy making charcoal. In a month or two the miners should have some coal for us.
"We also need iron to work with; but we can't afford to wait until we start smelting our own. Fortunately, the Scavengers are already bringing in lots of scrap metal, and I'm sure they'll find enough for our immediate requirements. What we need most of all is competent blacksmiths, and here I think we're in luck."
Ichiro had inquired among the hobbyists, museum specialists, and Inlander metalworkers, and had found enough skilled or semiskilled artisans to operate ten forges. At least that was his hope and expectation based on hasty interviews with the selected smiths. He had decided that four forges should be located at each of the two designated iron and coal mining sites, Empangeni and Dundee. He envisioned both sites eventually being developed as large, all-encompassing centers of a metals industry, incorporating mining, smelting, and manufacturing. This would minimize transportation requirements. Having accounted for eight forges, he then proposed that the final two should be located respectively in Ulundi and Engineering Village, thus providing a convenient facility for each of the two main population centers.
Each of the forges was to be staffed by fifteen men, the skilled smith plus workers to load the fuel, stoke the fires, pump the bellows, and assist in handling the iron.
"We have already begun to stockpile wood at the various sites," Nagasaka announced. "And construction of the forges is scheduled to begin immediately."
"You've been busy during our five days of public hearings," Alf Richards noted.
"Yes," Ichiro agreed amiably. "I have persuaded the lumber people to cooperate by promising them axes and adzes for shaping timber, as well as an expedited schedule for hand saws and blades for sawmills. I have promised the leaders of Shaka Enterprises nails, which they are, you might say, desperate to acquire. In addition to these agreements, I have pledged to provide metal implements to the farmers, the miners, the wagon makers, and a few others in dire need of such tools."
"Just how the hell—" Alf Richards had to pause to control his hot temper. He started again, "How, may I ask, Dr. Nagasaka, do you intend to meet each and every one of these commitments?"
"It will not be easy, Richards-san. This is why I am recommending ten separate smithing operations, and urging that they get underway as quickly as possible."
"We can't make these forges operational overnight," Alf sputtered. "I doubt that you bothered to tell the people with whom you made these deals that there will be a slight delay while the smiths make tools for themselves."
"It is true," Ichiro confessed, "that we must start by finding or manufacturing those implements you will see in any typical blacksmith shop—hammers, anvils, tongs, chisels, pincers, rounding tools (to make bars into rods), and much else. Here again is our intriguingly paradoxical problem: needing a tool in order to make the tool you need."
He smiled enigmatically, ignoring Richards's reddening face, and then continued: "How can we forge tongs in a fire without having tongs to work with? Well, somehow it will get done, making provisional tongs out of green wooden branches soaked in water, plus odd scraps of this and that."
"Aren't you being overly optimistic?" asked Millie Fox. "I've seen new blacksmith shops established, and even when adequate tools are available, they don't start humming efficiently on day one."
"Leave the efficiency to our talented artisans," Ichiro said. "Just be sure that we supply them with materials and facilities—and most of all with that critical element we must never forget, an adequate amount of food and water."
On this count, there was no need to caution the members of the subcommittee. They had been see
ing to it that every day, caravans of porters, plus ox-drawn wagons and sleds, carried life-sustaining provisions to various food distribution centers. This operation was monitored closely, and the subcommittee received detailed reports of food stores as they were accumulated in designated warehouses. The bounteous land, as if trying to make amends for the cruelty that had been visited upon the survivors, was good to the crops and livestock. Or perhaps it was the skill and enterprise of the people who did the backbreaking agricultural labor. In any event, everyone—so far—was receiving adequate nourishment. On this basis, a modern industrial enterprise could be launched with an element of confidence.
And blacksmith shops were just the beginning. Nagasaka next addressed the need to start smelting their own iron.
"We must begin," he said, "in a fairly primitive way. We may know a lot, but we do not have a lot to work with. We have no electricity or pure oxygen, both essential elements of a modern steel mill. We don't even have steam engines to blow air into a furnace. So we shall have to get into our time machine and travel backwards. Not all the way to the beginning of the Iron Age, but certainly back to the early eighteenth century. Running water must be our source of power for the bellows, and we'll have to use charcoal as our fuel and reducing agent, even as we start mining coal and look forward to converting to coke."
"And just what is a reducing agent?" asked Stephen Healey. "You know that not everyone on this subcommittee is an engineer."
"So sorry, Mr. Healey," Ichiro said. "The concept is simple. Iron ore is mostly iron oxide, and our problem in smelting is to break the chemical bonds between the iron and the oxygen. If, in a fire—a very, very hot fire—we burn the ore together with charcoal, which is mostly carbon, the carbon combines with the oxygen and takes it away in the form of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, leaving the precious iron behind. So the charcoal serves as both fuel and extractor of the oxygen; we call it the reducing agent."
Healey nodded to show that he got the general idea and motioned for the presentation to continue.
Dr. Nagasaka's plan was to start with four smelting furnaces, two at each of the planned ironmaking centers, Empangeni and Dundee. Calling upon a number of experts for advice—including specialists from the living museums of bygone technology—he had prepared a design based upon the old Backburrow furnace which was built near Windermere, England, in the early 1700s.
This venerable structure, which operated with charcoal fuel for more than two hundred years (until it was adapted for the use of coke in 1920), was eighteen feet high and eight feet square, built against the side of a steep hill. This was so that workers could climb up the slope with baskets full of iron ore, charcoal, and limestone— the key ingredients—and tip the contents into the top of the furnace. The bellows were made of cow hides and were powered by a waterwheel. When the water flow in the adjoining river was inadequate, the wheel was used as a treadmill operated by the foundry crew. Nagasaka proposed that this design feature be modified to make the fallback a horizontal wheel powered by oxen rather than human drudges. Fifty workers were to be assigned to each of the four furnaces, about double the number that were needed to operate the original model from three centuries ago.
The selected experts had evaluated every aspect of the plan: size, shape, and materials. The slope of the interior walls was crucial since the dropping and mixing of the raw ingredients had to be just right. It was important to avoid a descent that was too speedy, or even worse, a jamming of the materials at an intermediate level. In the end, the designers placed their faith in the craftsmen of a bygone age, a faith that proved well rewarded when the furnaces were eventually put into operation.
A vocal minority called for a taller structure, closer to the thirty-five feet in height that was typical of American charcoal furnaces in the latter half of the nineteenth century. By way of compromise, it was decided to build one of the four furnaces to the larger pattern. This also ultimately proved to be functional, although with a few more glitches than the smaller model.
It was now the last day of January, and detailed design drawings could be completed, and the sites cleared and leveled, in about a month. But actual construction of the smelting furnaces could not begin until perhaps the end of April, when suitable brick and mortar were expected to be available. However, even the towers themselves were not a key item on what the construction people called the "critical path." This honor went to building the dams for the mill-ponds, assembling the waterwheels, and fabricating the wooden-geared mechanisms for powering the bellows.
All in all, the project would probably take the better part of six months. This meant that the operation would be ready to go in early August, just about the time the blacksmiths' sources of scrap metal were expected to be running short.
Ten blacksmith forges and four smelting furnaces. That seemed like an enormously challenging enterprise. But Ichiro Nagasaka had much more to propose. He answered a few questions, waited for the group to indicate tacit assent, and then resumed.
"Yes, we need hand-forged tools. But that is only the beginning of our industrial revolution. There then remains the crucial business of making machines." He stopped talking for a moment and rocked on his heels, hands behind his back, giving his audience time to absorb his meaning.
"You may say, okay, let's start making steam engines, internal combustion engines, turbines, and the like. We have the necessary materials, and we have designs ready to go—plans of classic machines from earlier times and even a few improvements that our mechanical engineers have worked on. Good. And you tell me that there will be fuel for these wonderful contraptions—for the steam engines, wood and coal, and for internal combustion engines, methane and eventually petroleum from coal. Excellent. But still I am unable to move ahead. Why? Because you have not given me the ability to manufacture the splendid machines you have designed.
"Ah, you say, see how our blacksmiths become daily more proficient. Bless them. They can make tools which we urgently need, and which serve to augment the strength of our arms and help us harness the power of wind and water and the beasts of the field. But give me a thousand highly skilled blacksmiths and I am still unable to make these wonderful machines that you have designed. Why?" He paused again for effect, and there was total silence in the thatch-roofed meeting pavilion. Then: "I will tell you why. Because blacksmiths are human. What we need is a precision that transcends the human. Transcends the human. I look out on the promised land of the industrial revolution, but I do not have the means to enter. What is missing?"
He paused once more, and then, barely whispering, said: "Machine tools. Tools that achieve precision through geometric verities rather than an artisan's skill."
Wil Hardy looked up from his writing. Machine tools had been his area of special interest, the topic of his never-to-be completed Ph.D. dissertation. He had chosen the subject when he read about how radically James Watt was able to improve his steam engine once he was able to replace crudely cast cylinders and pistons with parts that were accurately machined. The new tools, little remarked in conventional history books, played a crucial role in the Industrial Revolution.
Ichiro then intoned gravely the names of what he called "the heavenly ten": lathes for precise circularity; shapers and planers, which scrape flat metal surfaces, much the way a carpenter planes a piece of wood; milling machines, which use teethed wheels to cut grooves of diverse shapes; drill presses, which cut holes, and ream, and countersink; grinding machines, with abrasive materials, which finish off metal parts with accuracy and smoothness; power presses for shearing, bending, squeezing, and hammering; punch presses to stamp out metal parts from sheet metal and form the parts to a desired shape; metal-cutting saws; and gear-cutting machines.
Next, he revealed his plan for developing a machine tool workshop, a scheme that seemed to some rather arbitrary, even capricious; though the same could be said of many of the schemes they had agreed to already.
For each of the ten basic machine tools, a leader wa
s to head up a development team of twenty people. Several of the proposed leaders were highly respected members of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. A few were Inlanders who made up in practical experience what they lacked in professional credentials. The "troops" to go with these generals consisted of engineering officers and engine-room workers from the Queen of Africa, plus experienced mechanics from among the Inlanders. There was an abundance of talent.
Suddenly Lucas Moloko, who had been pacing back and forth in the rear of the group, turned abruptly and stepped forward. "I don't understand," he said. "You haven't explained how you're going to make these machines without having machines to make them."
"A fair question," Ichiro responded. "We must design these machines with great cunning, and make them with great care. Some of the parts can be formed by our blacksmiths with hammer and tongs. Others will be cast in molds, using the molten iron that will be produced by our smelters. We will make the molds from sand, with a binder of clay and water. The patterns for the molds will be meticulously crafted from wood. The castings will be carefully filed, and critical surfaces will be carbonized for added strength. Remember, we will make these parts using geometric principles—the screw, the circle, the inclined plane, the toothed gear. Then these devices will help us make future machines with less effort and more precision."
"What will make these marvelous contraptions run?"
"We will start with water wheels turning large shafts; the shafts will drive leather belts that will power the machines."
"Just like those fantastic photos of eighteenth century factories," Wil Hardy murmured almost soundlessly.
Nagasaka bowed to his audience, indicating that his presentation was complete. The subcommittee members appeared to be mesmerized.
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