plumnovel Chapter 33 Expanding the Scale of the Industry
Chapter 33 Expanding the Scale of the Industry
Britain is a commercial nation. Although the social atmosphere can foster the birth of various inventions, inventors can only conduct small-scale experiments with their own assets before receiving investment.
There is a very high degree of uncertainty as to whether new technologies will receive investment.
Especially for high-cost technologies, inventors may go bankrupt from conducting experiments themselves and may not receive sufficient investment.
Even with investment, investors typically wouldn't allow Da Han's research model.
They won't easily dismantle and rebuild experimental production lines.
In addition, the prematurely mature commercial patent protection system has created a honeycomb patent barrier that isolates different technologies within the same industry, making it difficult for them to be shared easily and quickly.
Therefore, although Britain was the first to initiate the First Industrial Revolution, the pace of technological innovation in Britain during the first two industrial revolutions was relatively slow.
By the time of the Second Industrial Revolution, many technologies had been surpassed by the United States and Germany.
The Han Dynasty did not have the restrictions of Britain, and it also had an ample supply of manpower and resources.
The traditional Celestial Empire had a naturally semi-planned economic system, which was very suitable for the rapid implementation and upgrading of basic technologies.
Technical personnel can freely update products, pursuing multi-line parallel saturation research and iterative updates.
The more work the scholars and craftsmen of the Great Han Academy of Natural Sciences did and the more achievements they made, the more they admired Liu Yulong.
They have realized that the current emperor is the one who values them the most among the three emperors.
Without them even asking, the emperor was already giving them specific responsibilities and expanding their directly administered grassroots organizations.
They were quickly transformed from an empty, theoretical institution supported by imperial power into a down-to-earth, essential functional institution.
Now, the number of memorials criticizing them from traditional bureaucrats has decreased, and the scope and intensity of the criticisms have also begun to decline.
The artisans at the Imperial Academy of Natural History preferred to work in frontier regions rather than traditional civil servants and bureaucrats.
The early development of the frontier regions relied mainly on the army, militia, and craftsmen.
Liu Yulong was aware of the state of industrial development in the world at that time, so he felt that the current steel industry was still very rudimentary, but he was quite satisfied with its current state.
Liu Yulong did not deny Zheng Fuguang's compliments, but he also didn't listen to any more compliments, and directly changed the subject to ask about other industries:
"What is the current situation regarding steam locomotives and railways?"
This time, it was Wang Lai who came forward to explain the situation:
"Your Majesty, the upgrade of the steam locomotives has also been ongoing."
"We disassembled the locomotives sent by the British and gained some ideas for improvement in the details."
"In the past few days, craftsmen have been testing the performance of the latest steam locomotives on the temporary railway from Kaiping to Luanzhou."
"The maximum speed of the empty car can reach 150,000 feet per hour (60 kilometers per hour), which is really faster than a galloping horse."
"With a total load of 2,000 shi, the train can reach a speed of 80,000 feet per hour (32 kilometers per hour).
"However, it is not stable enough at this speed, so it is currently being kept at 60,000 feet (24 kilometers)."
Two dedicated test railways have been built in the past few months connecting coal mines, iron mines, and steel plants in Luanzhou.
Initially used for various tests of steam locomotives, it was also used to transport raw materials and machinery between factories and mines.
In the unit system established by Liu Desheng, 10,000 feet was a commonly used large unit, roughly equivalent to 4,000 meters in modern times.
It is also one ten-thousandth of the Earth's circumference, a very cleverly chosen number.
One shi is equivalent to 64 kilograms in modern terms, and two thousand shi is roughly 128 tons.
The specifications of the latest steam locomotives in the Great Han Dynasty are basically at the level of Britain in the 1830s.
This is considered quite advanced on a global scale for this era.
After all, the Institute of Physics has not been idle over the years. Although it cannot widely use European steam engines, it has been continuously improving and upgrading its production and processing technology in order to continue to research and develop steam turbines.
Now that Liu Yulong has lifted the restrictions on them, they will naturally be able to reach a higher level very quickly.
The unit system proposed by Liu Desheng made Liu Yulong a little awkward, and he had considered changing to the modern metric system.
However, after gaining a deeper understanding, Liu Yulong abandoned the idea of making changes.
The Han Dynasty court and the Imperial Academy of Natural Sciences were already accustomed to this system of units, and forcibly changing it would require adjusting countless pieces of equipment and records.
But the more important reason is that this system of units is a scientific system of units, rather than a traditional system of units.
It is adaptable to modern scientific research and industrial production and construction, and does not need to be changed for the sake of development.
Units like feet, ounces, and gallons are considered "traditional units," which are units that naturally formed throughout history.
Each unit is formed independently, and there is no concept of conversion between them.
Even though they are all units of length, different units such as feet, inches, yards, and miles are formed independently.
In traditional societies, there was no need to convert between these units. No one would ask how many feet the distance between two cities was, or how many inches the height of a house was.
However, after entering the industrial society, scientific development and industrial construction both require unit conversion in order to obtain experimental and engineering data as accurate as possible.
The results obtained through such forced calculations are naturally not very appealing, and are basically in this form:
1 mile = 1760 yards = 5280 feet = 63360 inches.
1 cubic foot = 1728 cubic inches = 957.6192087 US fluid ounces = 7.4805072 US gallons.
The "scientific system of units" was a proactively designed and unified system of units designed to solve these problems.
The decimal system is used uniformly, and all units can be easily converted.
The modern metric system is a type of scientific system of units, except that there can only be one niche in this system.
The modern metric system has already secured this unique niche, leaving no room for other similar unit systems.
The system of units established by Liu Desheng is also a scientific system of units, only the scale and name are different.
Moreover, the scale of the two most commonly used units, jin and shi, is very close to the scale of the traditional jin and shi of the Han Dynasty.
The same units can be used in civilian life, engineering, and even scientific research, without the difference between using jin (斤) in daily life and kilograms in engineering.
If Liu Desheng's unit system is changed to a scientific unit system, it is only equivalent to changing the numerical label on a ruler; the underlying logic of the two is exactly the same.
Forcing changes will only increase costs and create chaos, causing already largely unified units to separate again.
The modern metric system that Liu Yulong used in his previous life has already appeared in this era, but it is only used in the French scientific research system and has not yet become widely popular worldwide.
If Liu Yulong were to forcefully promote this now, it would be essentially no different from Liu Desheng's organization, which would seem absurd.
Therefore, after understanding the situation, Liu Yulong decided to continue using Liu Desheng's work unit.
The more you use it, the more you'll gradually get used to it.
1尺就是40厘米，1万尺就是4千米，1两就是64克，1石就是64千克。
After listening to Wang Lai's brief explanation, Liu Yulong habitually said a few words of encouragement.
Information technology development requires the cooperation of employees from various departments; if they don't cooperate, the work cannot proceed.
Information technology will also change the work patterns of older employees, who often have a resistant attitude towards it.
However, after offering encouragement, Liu Yulong would immediately steer the conversation back to work, continuing to assign new tasks to the Institute of Physics:
"This performance metric is already ready for widespread application."
"Empty vehicles are used to deliver the most urgent military and political messages. In theory, it only takes one day to travel from Jingzhao to Jiangnan."
"Heavy-duty trucks are used to transport a certain amount of important supplies, and in the future, they can be used to quickly deliver weapons and ammunition to the front lines, thereby enhancing military strength in border areas."
"The railway can naturally begin full-scale construction. There is no need to build a separate railway from Jingzhao to Kailuan. A railway leading to Liaodong can be built at the same time, and the two railways can be started at the same time."
"I remember that in the Liaoyang area of Liaodong, there were both coal mines and iron mines in the surrounding prefectures and counties, so a steel plant could be built in this area."
"There are also iron mines in Ma'anshan, Anhui in the south, and coal mines at the foot of Bagong Mountain in Shouzhou. The two places can be connected by the Huai River, the Grand Canal, and the Yangtze River."
"A large steel plant in the south could be built in Pukou, on the north bank of the Yangtze River in Nanjing, to supply the steel demand in the south."
"A second railway will be built to connect Shouzhou Coal Mine and Pukou Steel Plant."
"The iterative upgrading cycle of steel smelting technology can continue, but we also need to start building more steel plants, more blast furnaces and converters to supply more steel materials needed for subsequent construction."
"The bigger goal for the future is to connect the north and south of the Yangtze River with railways, and even Guangzhou in Lingnan, as well as the grasslands beyond the Great Wall."
"You should take these as your goals, first develop an overall construction plan, and then implement it step by step in the future."
Wang Lai and the others verbally accepted the orders, wrote down all the requirements, and verbally promised to complete them as soon as possible.
Liu Yulong casually reassured him that there was no need to rush, and then continued to inquire about the steamship.
The application of steam engines on ships was much faster than their application on roads, because they could be used without the need to build special railways.
Existing ships can be directly modified by adding reciprocating steam engines and paddle wheels.
Low-speed reciprocating steam engines can even operate without reduction gears, directly driving the paddle wheel to rotate.
This design also avoids the most troublesome sealing problem, has a very low overall technical difficulty, and can be put into operation very quickly.
We can modify it first, use it directly for transportation while continuing to test and improve it, and then design a new steamship.
Now, on the Luan River between Qian'an and Luanzhou, there are already modified steam-powered sailing ships transporting iron ore.
The shipyard has also begun to build brand new inland steam sailing ships and ocean-going vessels.
Without these temporary steamships and testing railways, traditional horse-drawn transport would have been insufficient to support the ever-growing steel mills.