Herald of Steel



When Alexander presented his lucrative plan to Mean, instead of taking and running with it, the girl instantly turned it down while waving her hands dismissively, "Alex, I know how to use pots and pans and knives. Doesn't mean I know how to make them. And besides, I'm already too busy as is. Give it to somebody else."

Mean very clearly was not interested.

But Alexander was unwilling to see this.

Because the shop he was about to set up was not only extremely lucrative but also very secretive.

And his heart would be at ease putting someone he really, really trusts.

But what was so lucrative about making pottery out of iron?

One word- Casting.

Casting to the untrained eye might not seem like much, just a technique of metal fabrication where liquid metal was simply poured into a mold, it took that shape and then solidified, thus making the product.

But it was much, much more complex than that.

There were large, complicated formulas regarding casting, and it was a very technical, and specialized job.

Without these mathematical formulas, making beautiful casting required immense talent and it was almost equivalent to an art.

It was also because of that those artisans who were proficient in the art were revered.

Because they had the sixth sense and intuition to know how the liquid metal would flow into the mold, how quickly it would spread to the corners, and how quickly it would solidify, and then could make designs and molds accordingly.

But this feeling of how a metal worked was a natural ability, and so it would take people literal decades to understand how the liquid metal worked.

Whereas Alexander could replace all that work with maths.

He was taught formulas in a 4-credit course that could accurately describe how to design a mold to get the best casting for various shapes, and because of this precise calculation, Alexander would be able to make his products almost identical in dimension, something not even the best artisans in the world would be able to do consistently.

So it could be seen how he would want to let Mean have these formulas.

This was because Alexander would not have the time to be 24/7 in Zanzan, and so, if there was a new design or a similar one with different dimensions, he could let Mean design the mold.

But since Mean was currently uninterested, he decided not to pressure her right away.

Alexander was of the mind that since setting up all the production facilities and hiring enough labor would take a lot of time, he would have plenty of time to convince Mean in the meantime.

And he replied as such, saying, "Okay. If that's what you feel like, then so be it."

Alexander then stayed on the kitchen premises till afternoon, visiting and talking to the various staff, finding out little tidbits like the uniform for the staff in the manor would take a bit longer, and decided to have his lunch there, consisting of a flatbread topped with chess and vegetables, as a kind of poor version of a pizza, some buns filled with fish and vegetables, and heavily diluted wine.

"Well, I will come to show you some new recipes tomorrow. Then see you at supper." Alexander gave a very informal goodbye and then decided his next destination would be the cement plant.

And why was it the cement plant?

Because he had asked Jazum to have something additional joined to the ball milling machine.

And Alexander wanted to inspect it today.

Alexander approached a part of the Cisrian hills where the cement plant had been relocated and found a few huge, waterwheels rising into the horizon.

These gigantic spinning structures were made of wood and iron, and as they rotated by the rapid descent of mountain springs, they produced a very distinct creaking noise muffled by the crashing of water down below.

All around the site there were busy, busy workers, all purposefully walking, shouting, and working, endeavoring to produce and transport the all-important white powder.

This grinding part of the cement plant worked all day, all night, everyday all throughout the year, with workers given a weekday off on rotation.

So unlike Thursday being a weekend for everybody, some would have their off days on Sunday, some Monday, and so on.

Alexander then looked up to see that three huge hills had been taken over to build the milling plant, and many man-made structures were placed on them.

There were the obvious waterwheels, huge sheds where the grinding occurred, log houses for the soldiers, warehouses, latrines, and many miscellaneous structures, all connected by large, wide, stone-paved roads.

The layout was almost identical to the steel-making plant.

Alexander spent a bit of time looking around to observe the workers' day-to-day operation, finding the place to be functioning properly.

He had arrived unannounced, and because he and his bodyguards were plain clothed, wearing a simple tunic over their armor, they did not draw any attention from the common workers and could observe the mill incognito.

After a while of this, satisfied, Alexander decided to go on to the next site, though he had no plans to meet Jazum today because he just wanted to see inside the mills.

So noticing a large of workers who were transporting the finished clinkers from the kiln to the mill, Alexander picked an opportune moment and silently joined them.

And then simply followed them up through the slopping paved road until he found himself in front of one of the many grinding mills.

'Well that was easy,' Alexander said to himself, commenting about the security here.

But as he looked around and observed the bustling workplace filled with who knows how many workers, he quickly understood policing such a large number of people would be very difficult.

If he were to issue them ID cards like in his manor, then the number of people he would need to employ to enforce this document would be a significant part of the employed labor force.

This would make the entire point moot because people would spend more time stopping cement recipe from being stolen than actually making cement.

And the only reason it worked in Alexander's manor was because of its relatively small size and workforce, and because the workers were all slaves or forced to live on his land.

But the cement grinding plant's inability to enforce strict quarantine did not truly hamper its security.

Because one could learn little from just watching what was happening.

The actual recipe was known to only a handful of them, and except Alexander, none knew the complete one.

Even the workers there only knew what they were supposed to do, but not why.

Alexander marveled seeing the waterwheel up close and then peeked inside to see observe the operations of the grinding mill.

And they were almost identical to how the coke crushing worked.

With only one caveat.

Attached to this ball-grinding machine were two huge, gear-like structures.

Made of thick solid wood, these gears almost looked like miniature waterwheels themselves.

One of the gears, larger and with more teeth, the body made from dried oak was attached to the spinning wheel of the waterwheel, while the other smaller, but with fewer teeth were attached to the ball milling wheel.

In this way, when the large gear rotated once, the smaller gear had to rotate multiple times.

Alexander had to design this mechanism because the grinding mill worked by rapidly spinning, which would cause the solid balls to fall and smash into the clinkers many times per minute, thus breaking them into powder.

But the problem was that the waterwheel did not spin very fast, at best obtaining 3 rotations per minute (rpm).

Whereas the milling machine required around 20 to 25 rpm.

And this number was not something Alexander made up.

He calculated this figure using mathematical formulae, taking into account the average diameter of the ball, the size of the machine, and the density of the material to be crushed.

So, to get his desired rpm, Alexander could do two things.

One- make the waterwheel smaller, because things with small diameters rotate faster.

But this would reduce the energy a waterwheel could convert from gravitational potential energy (GPE) to kinetic energy (KE) and so reduce Alexander's production capacity.

So it would be the same as having a 3 rpm billing machine.

Or two, Alexander could build a gear mechanism, which could make the milling machine spin much faster than the waterwheel.

Gears worked on the principle of conservation of energy, which very simply meant that when a large spinning object was attached to a smaller object, that smaller object would also spin at a much faster speed so that the angular momentum and energy of both objects were conserved.

By this same principle, because the waterwheel wheel was of a much small diameter than the waterwheel, then with the appropriate number of gears were used, the milling machine would spin much faster to expend all the energy of the much larger waterwheel.

While without the gears, this energy would remain untapped and be wasted.

And this was the additional 'something' Alexander had said that the waterwheel needed to Jazum all the way back when he had asked the stonemason to first create a prototype of the waterwheel.

Satisfied with the proper installation of the gear system, and after observing how it was being lubricated with oil and water, Alexander then moved to oversee the other facilities, all of whose operations were up to the mark.

And so Alexander retired for the day while thinking of what recipes to teach the cooks tomorrow.