The Medieval Heretic King is Too Good at Developing - Chapter 88

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Ceaseless

◈ The Medieval Heretic King is Too Good at Developing ◈

Chapter 88: The Steel Cannon (2)

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Sternberg Royal Steelworks.

It was late autumn in November, with sleet drifting through the air, yet the works were hotter than the height of summer.

Hissss!

Bang, bang, bang!

The heavy water-powered hammer shook the ground with every blow.

Thick coal smoke covered the sky, while the blast furnace spewed red heat.

This was the birthplace of an industrial revolution, completely divorced from the idyllic scenery of the fifteenth century. There was nothing here but heat and the smell of iron.

I stood in the open space before Blast Furnace No. 1, at the heart of that heat.

Before me, three craftsmen stood side by side, supporting this massive industrial fortress.

Hanuš, head of the Royal Steelworks.

Johannes Gutenberg, head of the printing house and a metal expert.

And Tomáš, the Technical Officer (Meister) responsible for the blast furnace.

They were the men in Bohemia who knew iron and fire best.

"I'm sorry to call you away while you're all busy."

Hanuš removed his oil-stained gloves and smiled warmly.

"Think nothing of it, Your Highness. If Your Highness summons us, we'd climb out even if we were inside the blast furnace. Besides, I hear you're making something very interesting this time."

Gutenberg's eyes gleamed beside him.

"You're making a steel cannon, aren't you?"

"That's right."

An ordinary blacksmith would have waved his hands and called it madness.

Everyone knew cannons were made by casting. You melted cast iron and poured it into a mold.

Steel was for making swords and armor, not cannons the size of houses.

Yet there was no doubt or distrust in their eyes.

Only pure curiosity about what sort of magic I would show them this time.

"Before that, I want to review exactly how we're making steel now."

Hanuš tilted his head.

"When you say review, do you mean you wish to see how the current process works?"

"Yes. A tower can only be built on a solid foundation. I want to see for myself how we're making steel and cannons."

Hanuš paused, then laughed heartily and nodded.

"Ha ha, very well. Socrates said that recognizing one's ignorance is the beginning of knowledge. We recently improved the efficiency of the puddling process as well. Please, this way."

Following Hanuš, we entered the sweltering interior of the works.

Hissss!

Hot steam burst forth, and crimson flames danced before us.

The first thing we saw was a massive Coke blast furnace.

Tomáš proudly pointed toward it.

"As Your Highness instructed, we use Coke, made by baking coal, as fuel. The heat is far more powerful than anything charcoal can produce. Iron ore that barely melted even after we fired the furnace all day now flows down like soup."

Orange molten iron flowed from the bottom of the furnace through a channel.

We followed it to the next stage.

Muscular craftsmen stood there, thrusting long iron rods into the furnace and stirring the molten iron as sweat poured down their bodies. It looked as though they were cooking an enormous pot of porridge.

This was the puddling process.

It was a decarburization process that burned away the carbon from pig iron, which contained so much carbon that it broke easily.

"Push harder! Stir it! Stir it harder!"

Every time the rods churned the molten iron, oxygen in the air combined with the carbon in the iron, sending sparks flying.

As the carbon burned away, the iron gradually took on the properties of wrought iron or steel.

There was a problem, though.

Chemically, as the carbon content decreased, the melting point of the iron rose sharply.

Pig iron melted and flowed at around 1,200 degrees, but steel needed temperatures above 1,500 degrees.

Current furnace technology could not maintain that temperature.

That was why the scene inside the furnace changed over time.

"Look. It's beginning to clump together."

Hanuš was right.

The molten iron had initially sloshed like water, but as the carbon was removed, it grew thicker and thicker before gathering into lumps like sticky dough.

It was changing from liquid to solid.

This was a mass of steel called a loup, or bloom.

"Take it out!"

At the foreman's shout, the workers used enormous tongs to pull the red-hot mass from the furnace.

Hissss!

A huge lump of metal dough radiated heat.

It was solid, not flowing.

"Once we take that to the hammer and beat it, the impurities trapped inside will be squeezed out like dross. Its structure will become denser, turning it into strong steel."

I nodded.

"Excellent. Every stage of the process has been mastered exactly as I first taught it, if not beyond that."

Hanuš rubbed his nose, looking embarrassed.

"It's all thanks to Your Highness. If Your Highness hadn't taught us the principles of Coke and the reverberatory furnace, we'd still be cutting down trees in the forest to make charcoal. We never could have dreamed of producing steel of this quality in such quantities."

The puddling process certainly was revolutionary.

Even as I nodded, though, I coldly faced its limits.

'Yes, it's improved. But it's still solid.'

The result of the puddling process was ultimately a lump of iron.

It was not flowing water, but heated clay.

To shape it, it had to be hammered or pressed through rollers.

In other words, casting it into a mold was impossible.

"Good. We've confirmed the steelmaking process, so let's go to the cannon factory next."

"Yes, Your Highness."

We left the steelworks and headed to the foundry next door.

The scene there resembled the steelworks, but there was one decisive difference.

There was no sound of hammers.

Instead, there was the sound of molten iron flowing and the tense silence of workers handling molds.

Huge clay molds had been buried in the ground at the center of the factory. Workers carefully tipped ladles of molten iron into them.

"Pour it!"

Whoooosh!

Thick orange liquid rushed into the molds' inlets.

"Look, Your Highness. They're filling ladles with molten iron fresh from the blast furnace and pouring it in."

That molten iron was pig iron.

Its carbon content was as high as four percent, which lowered its melting point and allowed it to flow as smoothly as water.

Once it flowed into every corner of the mold and cooled, it would become the massive cast-iron cannon we knew.

It was called cast iron because it was made by pouring it into a mold.

"Very clean work."

Gutenberg spoke with admiration.

"Pig iron truly is the best for casting. Even when making movable type, it's difficult to fill such fine gaps unless we use a tin alloy."

Tomáš nodded in agreement.

"That's right. Pig iron sloshes around like water, so it's easy to work with. But..."

"But?"

"The trouble comes after it cools. It's so hard that it shatters when struck."

Exactly.

Pig iron flowed, but it was weak. It broke like glass.

It could not be trusted to withstand the tremendous pressure created by exploding Gunpowder.

The only way to keep it from bursting was to make it absurdly thick.

That was why the cannons used by our army had become so horrifically heavy.

The limits of the material.

I stopped walking and turned to Hanuš.

"Now, Hanuš. We've just seen two things."

I folded down my fingers one by one.

"One is strong, tough steel that must be hammered. The other is cast iron, which can be poured into molds but is weak and breaks easily. If I ordered you to make a cannon from steel, what would you do?"

"A cannon from steel?"

"Yes. From that dough-like lump of steel we saw earlier."

Hanuš's eyes wavered.

He seemed to be running through every bit of experience he had gained as a blacksmith.

Frowning, Hanuš stroked his beard.

"Hmm... It isn't impossible in theory. I've forged small cannons before."

"How did you make them?"

"I would flatten that lump of steel into a long plate, wrap it around a log, weld it together, then tighten iron hoops around it. Much like making an oak barrel."

That was a forged cannon.

A method that had briefly become popular in the late Middle Ages.

Yet Hanuš immediately shook his head.

"Still, that only works for small cannons. The large field cannon Your Highness wants would be impossible."

"Why?"

"The seams would burst. Even if we hammered and joined them hundreds of times, the bond would inevitably be weaker than a single cast piece. If we used too much Gunpowder, the welded sections would almost certainly tear apart and kill all the artillerymen."

That was the limit of welded forged cannons.

No matter how well they were joined, they were weaker than a single cast piece.

"What if we carved one out of a solid block of steel? We could make a huge steel block and drill a hole through the middle."

Hanuš recoiled and waved his hands at my suggestion.

"Your Highness, that would kill people! Hundreds of drill bits would snap trying to bore through steel that hard. It would take a year just to make one! Besides, making a steel block that large is impossible in itself. We couldn't hammer it evenly all the way through."

Hanuš let out a sigh and gave his conclusion.

"I'm sorry, Your Highness. In my humble opinion... making a cannon from steel is impossible. A small one might be possible, but not a large one. Steel cannot be melted and poured."

Gutenberg added from beside him.

"That's right. Even movable type cannot be made from steel. You must melt it to pour it into a mold, but steel does not melt..."

"Exactly."

I smiled and nodded.

"You're right. Steel does not melt. It clumps together like dough in the furnace. That's why it can't be poured into a mold."

With the technology of the fifteenth century, and indeed until the nineteenth century, steel was a metal humanity made by hammering.

Remove carbon, and its melting point rose until it solidified.

Add carbon to lower its melting point, and it became brittle cast iron.

That dilemma was a curse that had tormented blacksmiths for centuries.

But as always, humanity searched for an answer.

And chemistry held that answer.

"Hanuš, what if steel could be melted like water?"

"Pardon?"

Hanuš's eyes widened.

"What if we could make molten iron that is tough and strong because all its carbon has been removed, yet still sloshes around like water?"

"I-If that were possible..."

Hanuš swallowed.

"It would be a revolution. We could simply pour it into a mold. There would be no seams, and without any drilling, a perfect steel cannon would be made in an instant."

Tomáš tilted his head and spoke up.

"But, Your Highness. Melting steel requires tremendous heat. As you saw earlier, even inside the hot reverberatory furnace, steel does not become molten iron. It only turns into a lump of dough."

Tomáš gestured toward the heat of the steelworks.

"The only thing we have capable of producing that much heat is the Coke blast furnace. But if we put steel back into the blast furnace to melt it..."

"Then it would be pointless."

I finished Tomáš's sentence.

"The iron would absorb fuel again. All the carbon we worked so hard to remove would return, turning it back into cast iron."

"Exactly!"

Tomáš slapped his knee in frustration.

"The Coke Your Highness taught us to make is full of carbon. But if we use Coke, the iron changes into cast iron. It's a contradiction. How can we raise the temperature enough to melt a lump of iron without fuel? It would be impossible unless we borrowed a dragon's flame."

It was a logical objection.

Coke was needed to raise the temperature.

But if Coke touched the iron, the steel would turn back into brittle cast iron.

If we did not use Coke, the temperature would be too low to melt the iron.

"That's right. We don't have a dragon's flame. But Tomáš, what if there were a fuel hotter and cleaner than Coke?"

"Fuel hotter than Coke? Does such a thing exist?"

"It does. Right there."

I pointed at the red-hot molten iron flowing toward the molds.

"Inside that molten iron."

"Pardon?"

All three of them looked toward the molten iron at once.

"If iron won't melt because there isn't enough heat..."