Free Web NovelChapter 275: 3 Machines
The Carlson Family was over 500 years old, its origins dating back to before they migrated from the Black Tiger Kingdom along with the Rockwell Family to escape that Large-Sized Kingdom’s constant civil strife.
At that time, the Carlsons were just a minor clan that specialized in the mining and smithing, but after 5 centuries of development, they had now become one of the largest producers of metals and metalwork in the Rockwell Kingdom.
Their mines, from which they extracted a variety of valuable ores like iron, copper, salt, gold, silver, and even Spirit Crystals, were not only easily accessible, but also highly productive.
As for refining and forging metal products, there were few places in the Rockwell Kingdom where there were more smithies and workshops than in the southern districts of Iron Rock.
Lucas was well aware of this before he arrived in Iron Rock, and his recent stay in the city had only reinforced the image in his mind of the Carlsons being a major player in the metals space.
Although the Carlson Family’s blacksmiths produced all kinds of goods, Lucas’ had noticed that they were primarily focused on forging weapons and armour, with household goods being more the domain of the other smiths in Iron Rock.
Audrey, Lucas’ new friend and tour guide around Iron Rock, couldn’t provide him with an answer about this when he asked her, and the higher-ups of the Carlson Family seemed reluctant to provided a detailed explanation for this obvious bias in manufacturing output.
It might be a simple case of natural specialization over time, or it might involve some sensitive topics the Carlson Family didn’t wish to discuss with outsiders, but the truth didn’t really matter, so Lucas didn’t press the issue.
More likely than not, this was just a matter of what was most profitable; after all, if the reason behind a person or group of people’s actions wasn’t immediately apparent, the simplest explanation was often the best.
The Rockwell Kingdom wasn’t at war with any other nation at the moment, with even the nation they had the worst relations with, the Darr Kingdom, only engaging in small, infrequent border skirmishes.
However, that didn’t mean that there wasn’t a constant demand for weapons.
Swords chipped, spears cracked, arrows were consumed, armour wore out, and any other number of routine occurrences kept the need for repair and replacement steady.
On top of that, soldiers needed to continuously train, Wild Beasts were a constant threat, and criminals and bandits were impossible to eliminate entirely, resulting in many, many people needing weapons on a regular basis.
In short, producing and repairing weapons was a big business with high profit margins.
Thinking about it like this, it made sense that the Carlson Family would try to establish a monopoly when it came to arms dealing.
The fact that one of Count Mathias’ conditions for participating in the evacuation plan was that the soldiers stationed in Iron Rock purchase all their new and replacement weapons from his family further supported this notion.
There were all kinds of ways Lucas could think of to improve the efficiency of the weapon production in the Rockwell Kingdom, like introducing industrial-scale furnaces and smelters, applying advanced formulas to create stronger alloys, using better techniques to remove impurities, setting up assembly-line style factories, and so on and so forth, but he never once seriously considered doing that.
For one, he wasn’t sure of many of the specifics, but more importantly, doing so would probably be dangerous.
Count Mathais Carlson seemed like a good man who treated his subjects fairly, but Lucas wasn’t about to entrust someone he had just met and had barely talked to with techniques and technology that could dramatically re-shape the balance of power on the continent. freeωebnovēl.c૦m
No, Lucas had decided long ago that any form of dangerous technology from his inherited memories would only be brought into existence in an environment where he and those he most trusted could, at least at the beginning, supervise and control it.
While epoch-leaping weapons technology was out of the question, though, Lucas didn’t think sharing some innovative inventions for civilian industries would be a problem.
With that in mind, Lucas had been slowly putting together a few blueprints for some simple machines he felt would be both useful and profitable for the Carlson Family to produce.
Some of these blueprints were completely fleshed out, like the hand-pumps Lucas and his father Drake had installed around Redwood Town to make pulling up water from the local wells easier.
Other designs were a bit less complete, like a waterwheel-powered pump Lucas had tried to build to lift water from the river up to a height of 10 metres for farm irrigation purposes.
However, these small inventions, while able to provide a lot of utility, were just the appetizers; items Lucas felt the Carlson Family wouldn’t need to invest much time or resources to further develop before they could begin producing and selling them.
The real lynch-pin to Lucas’ plan to gain the Carlson Family’s unconditional support was a set of 3 machines intended to revolutionize the kingdom’s agricultural sector.
Even before his accident last year, Lucas had found farming both tedious and difficult. That feeling increased by an order of magnitude after gaining his inherited memories where images of fully automated farms churned out enormous quantities of high-quality food without the need for any physical labour at all!
In Redwood Town, during planting and harvesting seasons, the demand for workers on the various farms was so great that practically everyone, from the young orphans to the Town Lord himself, were dragged into the fields to help.
Land needed to be cleared, then plowed, then seeded.
After that, plants needed to be watered, tended to, and protected from beasts and pests.
All this ultimately leading to harvesting and processing before any food could be eaten.
Floods, frosts, droughts, and any number of other natural disasters could wipe whole farms from existence or kill entire fields of crops, so even during the ’off-season’, the farmers had to remain vigilant.
Experiencing all this backbreaking work first-hand, and knowing there were better, easier, and more efficient ways to do it all, Lucas had invested a considerable amount of time over the past year-and-a-half to implement such methods.
Although there was no way in the short term to realize the dream of fully automated farming, just introducing a few advanced tools would surely be possible!
At least, that’s what Lucas originally thought.
Even when drawing on all the knowledge he had access to, the boy found it quite difficult to actually design even the simplest of farming machines.
The deeper he dove into the subject, the more Lucas realized how little the one he inherited his memories from understood about farming.
That wasn’t surprising, of course, seeing how farming was essentially a hands-off process in the other universe, one that involved very, very few people.
In the end, Lucas realized he had to start with the most basic of basics.
When it came to farming, the overwhelming majority of crops grown were grains. In the Redwood Kingdom, this essentially meant wheat and barely.
Obtaining grain and turning it into edible flour was, in Lucas’ mind, a six-step process.
Field preparation, planting, harvesting, threshing, winnowing, and finally milling.
When it came to preparing fields to grow crops in, animal plows were already quite common in the Rockwell Kingdom; however, most small family farmers still tilled their land by hand.
Whether producing more animal plows and selling them would be a profitable venture, Lucas wasn’t sure, so for the moment, he decided not to introduce any innovations to this step in the process.
Planting seeds, however, was something Lucas felt confident he could improve markedly upon compared to the common practices of the Redwood Kingdom.
From what Lucas understood, the way farmers planted their fields was simply by hand sprinkling seeds. Some would turn the dirt over to bury these seeds afterwards, but many would simply let nature decide which seeds grew and which ones didn’t.
This horribly wasteful method could be replaced entirely by seed drills, which would not only drastically reduce the total number of seeds needed for planting, it would also keep the fields much more organized, which would be helpful both for tending to and eventually harvesting them.
Next up, after the wheat had fully grown and matured, instead of using sickles and scythes to cut the crops, Lucas intended to introduce mechanized harvesters.
These wheeled carts filled with spinning blades could chop and gather together stalks of wheat at a pace 10 times faster than any human could. Using a good draft-horse to pull such a harvester would also greatly reduce the need for manpower during the time-sensitive harvest season.
Unfortunately, while the concept of a harvester was relatively straightforward, Lucas actually had a lot of difficulty designing one, so of all the blueprints he put together, this one was the least complete.
Oh well, I can let the Carlsons experiment and figure out the rest themselves, Lucas thought to himself before moving on to the final piece of technology he was planning to share, a powered thresher.
Currently, wheat was threshed mainly by beating it, or by drawing it through large metal forks. Not only was this painfully slow though, it also resulted in flour that needed a lot of sorting and sifting to extract the remaining plant debris, dirt, and rocks.
A threshing machine, one that was either hand-cranked or powered by a waterwheel, could speed up this process many times over. The high-speed rotation of such a machine would also generate enough wind to winnow the grains at the same time.
By combining the threshing and winnowing processes, even more time and effort could be saved, and a superior end-product flour could be obtained.
As for milling, Lucas didn’t see a need to change anything in this particular process as both waterwheels and windmills already existed in the Rockwell Kingdom, both of which could turn grain into flour easily enough for now.
In summary, Lucas was going to give the Carlson Family half-completed blueprints for a seed drill, mechanical harvester, and rotating thresher.
While it would likely take a substantial investment of time and money to complete these designs, once working prototypes were assembled, these 3 machines would be able to increase the amount of wheat a single farmer could grow and process by at least 5 times, assuming they had enough fertile land.
While this kind of mechanization might not help small, independent farmers, the wealthy land-owners who had vast tracks of farmland would surely go crazy for these machines and would undoubtedly pay an enormous price to acquire some for themselves.
This would spark a revolution in the kingdom’s agriculture and earn the Carlson Family, as the sole producers of such machines, a huge fortune.
