26th April 1574Waking up in the morning, I hoped that I could once again sneakily craft some concrete from the limestone blocks, only to realise that rather than waking up by myself, it was one of the workers shaking my arm.
"What"s g-goin on…"
With my mind still trying its best to return to the sweet dream in which I was spending quality time with Elia in the modern world, showing her all the wonders of the civilisation, it took me a while to shake the sleepiness off and realise that I couldn"t see any sunlight from the small opening between the side of the tent and its pulled opening cloth.
"Sir, they finished the furnace!"
Only when hearing those words did I manage to push my sleepiness aside, shake my head to clear it from the remnants of the dreaming state and properly move out from the bedding made by placing several blankets directly on the hard ground.
While I could easily organise some better sleeping place for myself, I still decided to keep my own tent as spartan as every other sleeping place was in the entire camp. For this small cost of my own comfort at sleeping, I gained quite a lot of sympathy from the workers, allowing me to drive them even harder while they were working.
"Sure, I will be there right away. Go and tell them to prepare everything."
With how some of the workers offered to work through the night to finish laying down the last layers of the bricks, finis.h.i.+ng the blast furnace was only to be expected. Outside of the simple, brick structure of the entire building, all that was changed from the commonly known blueprint was the air intake.
Rather than using standard bellows, we mounted a set of three sets of fan blades mounted on a simple, thin pipe, that was later connected to the flywheel powered by the steam horse right beside it. With this done, as soon as the basic fire would start burning inside and lodge itself in the charcoal, we could turn the fire under the steam horse on and start pumping crazy amounts of fresh air right inside the burning chamber, supplying more than enough air for the burning process to reach greater temperature than ever achieved elsewhere!
As I moved out of my tent, rather than going directly for the furnace, I took a swing by the stockpile, where ten different clay forms was waiting for their first use. Since I wasn"t going to make a proper pressure steam engine right away but rather it"s cut in a half prototype that would allow me to measure the distance and lengths of the required parts, and adjust everything before going for the real thing.
The moment I came back, the workers finally received the signal they awaited for and started throwing iron ore and charcoal in turns, slowly but steadily filling the entire thing almost all the way to the top.
With a simple, wooden structure placed inside, as long as the entire furnace would remain idle, all the ore and charcoal would remain above the firing place. Only when the fire would properly start below the wooden construction, would the flames reach this bonus fuel, turning it into even more charcoal while allowing the entire thing to properly start.
Due to the fact that the amount of ore we had was limited rather than allowing us for a continuous supply of it, this furnace would work only for as long as both the fuel and the iron ore would be supplied to it, forcing my people to waste a lot of time cleaning it after it would be extinguished.
That"s why, rather than doing a test run and wasting quite a lot of resources, all kinds of moulds, forms and stacks were prepared to let the liquid metal form into the desired shape rather than forming a nice, metallic pool right beside the furnace itself.
"Start the fire!"
With my forms already placed beside all the other ones prepared by the workers, all I really had to do was to witness the process of the furnace heating up before I would be able to go back to sleep. After all the overtime work that those people put into finis.h.i.+ng it if I were to ignore this important moment when the steam horse would for the first time supply the furnace with fresh air!
Yet the reality turned out to be really boring.
Thanks to my own additions to the steam horse, outside of constantly throwing more and more wood under the belly of the boiler, its swinging beam made sure that all the valves would open and close in the perfect timing, turning the rod with fan blades on it with a constant speed.
In just a few moments, as soon as the charcoal properly lit up, the entire process started, slowly but steadily leading to the first drops of molten metal pouring out of the special hole at the bottom of the furnace… Or rather would do it, if something like this could happen in a matter of just a few minutes!
Bored to no end, I couldn"t tell that I wasn"t enjoying the sight of my inventions turning into a reality, yet when thinking about standing in front of this h.e.l.lishly hot furnace and just watching as nothing would happen for hours, I would much rather prefer just going back to my bed!
"Sir, we finished the shed! Now we only need the blades and we will be able to connect the entire thing to the steam horse!"
Just before I could turn around on my feet and head back to the sweet wonderland of dreams, another group of workers approached me just as enthusiastically, forcing me to stay awake for even longer.
"Okay, let"s go see it."
Yet rather than letting me deal with yet another mundane tasks of seeing how the efforts of the workers under my guidance were coming to the fruition, one more report reached my ears.
"Sir, there are s.h.i.+ps coming our way!"