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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.
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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
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zanotowane.pldoc.pisz.plpdf.pisz.plcs-sysunia.htw.pl
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