Chapter 438: Electricity and Light
The workroom Roland had set up for the Tee Project held everything the system needed: a steam engine, an electric motor, a power supply unit, a boiler, and two water tanks. Together with the water tower outside, they formed the complete working mechanism.
The steam engine pumped water up into the tower and into the first-level tank. The tower supplied the residential communities with domestic water. The first-level tank supplied the heating system. Limestone and washing stones in the tank precipitated the magnesium and calcium ions from the water—softening it—before it passed through a filter membrane Soraya had fabricated and into the lower second-level tank below, cleared of floating matter. The boiler drew from that second-level tank, regulated by an electric motor linked to a ballcock: when the water level fell below threshold, the motor activated and refilled it automatically. More stable than manual watching, more stable than a secondary steam loop.
Water supply and heating: tested, ready to build. The power supply was the frontier.
Karl Bate and the Mason Guild had no conception of electrical systems. Neither did Roland, beyond the secondary-school level he’d retained—which was enough to know that building at small scale first, understanding what actually happened before explaining it to anyone, was the correct approach. A model in the courtyard. If that worked, he could talk to the Ministry of Construction.
And the first object to power off that system, the proof of concept, the symbol everyone in the world would be able to read without any explanation—was a light bulb.
He had the filament already: the spiral of silvery-white wire Anna had drawn from Sample 12, the material with the highest melting point in the North Slope Mine’s entire inventory. Mounted on a glass shelf. Set into a glass bulb. The structure was simple.
The difficulty lay in everything around the structure.
A filament glowing white-hot became violently reactive. It would oxidize, form new compounds, and burn out—fast, and completely. The bulb needed protection from oxygen. The obvious solution was a vacuum, but creating and holding a vacuum in this environment was a complex problem. Inert gas was better. Nitrogen was lighter than air; it could be introduced through a simple downward exhaust, pushing the oxygen out before the other end was sealed. When the exhaust side was held at pure nitrogen, Soraya closed the glass in one smooth motion.
A simple incandescent lamp. It sat in his palm, compact and light.
Roland looked at it for a long moment. Outdated. Obsolete by any standard I grew up with. The world he’d come from had replaced this technology twice over. And yet: in this room, in this town, this small glass object represented the highest precision manufacturing anyone on the continent had achieved. The filament inside it was Anna’s work; the sealed atmosphere was Soraya’s; the nitrogen was Agatha’s contribution, indirectly, through her analysis of inert gas behavior. The witches had made this possible in a fraction of the time the historical development had required.
He called the Ministry of Construction’s engineers to the courtyard the following night. He sent word to City Hall. He had his guards extinguish every torch in the courtyard until the only light source was the sky, which gave nothing—overcast, a faint grey luminosity swallowed by the falling snow.
He waited until everyone had assembled and their eyes had adjusted to the dark.
Then he closed the circuit.
At the center of the courtyard, the light came on.
It was a small thing—an orange glow, stable within a radius of a few meters. In daylight it would have been unremarkable. Here, in the dark, in the snow, in a world where every light source guttered and swayed and could be killed by the wind—it simply held. Motionless. Indifferent to the gusts coming off the North Slope.
Karl Bate made a sound he had not planned to make.
The engineers stood with their notebooks at their sides, forgotten.
Roland looked at the faces—the absolute stillness that came over people when they encountered something that did not fit any category they possessed—and felt the weight of what he’d carried from his other world press against the limits of this one, then push through.
He let the light stay on for a long time before he said anything.
There was nothing that needed saying. The light said it.
Chapter 438: Electricity and Light
Translator: TransN Editor: TransN
Based on the construction plan, Roland set up a workroom with all the equipment to build an efficient Tee Project system.
The complete set of equipment included a steam engine, an electric motor, a power supply unit, a boiler, and two water tanks. Together with the water tower outside the room, they formed the workings of the Tee Project system.
The steam engine pumped the water up into the water tower and the water tanks. The former was to provide the residential communities with water for domestic needs. The latter was the water supply for the boiler and the heating system. The first-level water tank was higher. Limestones and washing stones which were used to soften the water by precipitating magnesium and calcium ions in it were put inside the tank. The water in it would then flow into the lower second-level tank through a filter screen specially made by Soraya, which would stop the floating objects in the water from entering the secondlevel tank.
The boiler’s water supply was controlled by an electric motor. When the water level inside the boiler was too low, the ballcock inside would start the electric motor to bring water in until the water level got back to normal. This process was more stable than both the manual control and the steam engine system, saving the trouble to arrange someone to observe the site all the time.
The water supply and heating systems had already been successfully tested. Roland was confident that their construction would go smoothly. His current focus was on the power supply. It was a brand new thing for the town. Neither Karl nor other members of the Mason Guild had any idea of electricity. Given that Roland did not know much about electricity himself either, and that all his knowledge of electronic circuits remained at the high-
school level, he decided to build a model in his courtyard first. If he succeeded, he would explain it to the Ministry of Construction.
Once he had a stable power supply, the first step then was to create that traditional emblem of electrical power: a light bulb.
With that in mind, Roland put on a thick coat and set out for his courtyard on the North Slope Mountain.
It normally would take a quarter of an hour to walk to the courtyard, but with the help of Nightingale’s mist, they arrived in scarcely four minutes.
When the wooden door was pushed open, Anna and Lucia immediately noticed Roland. Anna, busy with her work, just nodded to him. Lucia happily ran to him and said, “Your Highness, good morning.”
“Good morning,” Roland nodded with a smile and then walked to Anna. “What’re you busy with?”
“The new gun barrels and locking mechanism.” She pointed to several long steel pipes on the desk with a serious look on her face, “Some aspects of your drawings don’t make sense. I think it’ll be better this way.”
“My amazing Anna,” Roland thought and could not help stretching out his hand, trying to touch her head but she refused it by rocking back and forth. “Well… this scene seems familiar.” He coughed, banished his thoughts of Anna and said, “Good, do whatever you want.”
Roland did not mind her questioning his designs. He knew and would naturally have mistakes and shortcomings based on his minimal design experience. He felt like Anna was not only more talented but also had a keener eye for fine detail and he was convinced that one day she would surpass him in skills.
After a while, Anna finished her work and put down her tools . She walked to Roland and lowered her head a little.
“Eh? Is it to make up for the touch just now?” Roland thought in surprise.
He ruffled her soft hair. Anna looked up in satisfaction, “What are we making next?”
“Ah… yes.” The prince turned to Lucia. “How did your separation work of ores from the mines go?”
“Almost done and here are the results,” Lucia gave him a stack of books and said, “but I’m afraid it’ll take a long time to test on the mixtures of them and rolled steel. There are just too many individual elements.”
“It’s already pretty good,” Roland encouraged her.
This was part of his material improvement plan. He had already improved the rolled steel quality by reducing carbon content and eliminating impurities, and now all the elements in the North Slope Mine area could be utilized. They had to try one by one. There was no shortcut.
Roland glanced over the books, looking at the features of the elements separated from ores in the mines. He soon found the element with the highest melting point. He poked his finger at the testing sample marked with No. 12 and asked, “Where are they?”
Lucia quickly found them. They were a crude stone and a bag of elementary particles, both sealed in plastic bags.
Roland thought he recognized this crude, black stone from somewhere else.
“Wait, isn’t it the same as the black stone sent to my office earlier? I gave it to alchemists and then totally forgot about it. I’ve never thought twice about it since then.
Could it turn out to be the mineral that has the highest melting point on the North Slope Mountain?”
Anna could not measure the exact temperatures at which the materials melted, so she described them roughly by words such as “normal”, “high” and “relatively high”. Only the melting point of No.12 testing sample was described as “extremely high.”
The elementary particles in the bag were silvery white, similar to most of the other metallic elements.
He thought, “Is it wolfram?
Whatever, as long as it is difficult to melt.”
Roland let Anna make the particles into very fine wire, twisted the wire into a spiral and fix it onto a glass shelf which was then put into a glass bulb. The main part of an electric lamp was completed.
To make it a stable light, there were two more steps which were also considered to be the most difficult part in making electric bulbs. The first one was to evacuate the bulb, preventing the filament wire from reacting with oxygen. The second was sealing it to ensure that the air could not enter the bulb.
Without a doubt, only witches could realize those two steps.
Roland soon thought of Agatha.
The filament would become extremely reactive at high temperatures. It would easily oxidize, produce new oxides, and eventually melt down. That was why the bulb needed vacuum inside, but filling the bulb with inert gases could achieve the same or an even better effect.
Pure nitrogen was an excellent choice for this.
As nitrogen was lighter than the air, using a simple downward exhaust method, the bulb could be easily filled with nitrogen. It was much simpler than the vacuuming process. When the other end of the exhaust was also pure nitrogen, Soraya quickly sealed the bulb. A simple incandescent lamp was made successfully.
Looking at the electric bulb as small as his palm, Roland felt all sorts of emotions welling up in his mind. It was something outdated but now represented the most advanced manufacturing skills of the town.
The following night, he summoned all the members of City Hall to gather in front of the castle and ordered his guards to put out all the torches in the courtyard.
In this dark, snowy night, Roland switched on the circuit.
All of a sudden, at the center of the courtyard, an orange light lit up. It would not sway and extinguish in the wind like the light of a candle and it never flickered like fire. Though it could merely light up within a radius of a few meters, a stable light in the wind was something that the people had never seen before.
At this moment, everything was self-explanatory.
The fixed look on everyone’s face and the silence of the scene told everything.
He had brought electricity to this world.