designated iron and coal mining sites, Empangeni and Dundee. He envisioned both sites eventually being developed as large, all-encompassing centers of a metals industry, incorporating mining, smelting, and manufacturing. This would minimize transportation requirements. Having accounted for eight forges, he then proposed that the final two should be located respectively in Ulundi and Engineering Village, thus providing a convenient facility for each of the two main population centers.
Each of the forges was to be staffed by fifteen men, the skilled smith plus workers to load the fuel, stoke the fires, pump the bellows, and assist in handling the iron.
“We have already begun to stockpile wood at the various sites,” Nagasaka announced. “And construction of the forges is scheduled to begin immediately.”
“You’ve been busy during our five days of public hearings,” Alf Richards noted.
“Yes,” Ichiro agreed amiably. “I have persuaded the lumber people to cooperate by promising them axes and adzes for shaping timber, as well as an expedited schedule for hand saws and blades for sawmills. I have promised the leaders of Shaka Enterprises nails, which they are, you might say, desperate to acquire. In addition to these agreements, I have pledged to provide metal implements to the farmers, the miners, the wagon makers, and a few others in dire need of such tools.”
“Just how the hell—” Alf Richards had to pause to control his hot temper. He started again, “How, may I ask, Dr. Nagasaka, do you intend to meet each and every one of these commitments?”
“It will not be easy, Richards-san. This is why I am recom mending ten separate smithing operations, and urging that they get underway as quickly as possible.”
“We can’t make these forges operational overnight,” Alf sputtered. “I doubt that you bothered to tell the people with whom you made these deals that there will be a slight delay while the smiths make tools for themselves.”
“It is true,” Ichiro confessed, “that we must start by finding or manufacturing those implements you will see in any typical blacksmith shop—hammers, anvils, tongs, chisels, pincers, rounding tools (to make bars into rods), and much else. Here again is our intriguingly paradoxical problem: needing a tool in order to make the tool you need.”
He smiled enigmatically, ignoring Richards’s reddening face, and then continued: “How can we forge tongs in a fire without having tongs to work with? Well, somehow it will get done, making provisional tongs out of green wooden branches soaked in water, plus odd scraps of this and that.”
“Aren’t you being overly optimistic?” asked Millie Fox. “I’ve seen new blacksmith shops established, and even when adequate tools are available, they don’t start humming efficiently on day one.”
“Leave the efficiency to our talented artisans,” Ichiro said. “Just be sure that we supply them with materials and facilities—and most of all with that critical element we must never forget, an adequate amount of food and water.”
On this count, there was no need to caution the members of the subcommittee. They had been seeing to it that every day, caravans of porters, plus ox-drawn wagons and sleds, carried life-sustaining provisions to various food distribution centers. This operation was monitored closely, and the subcommittee received detailed reports of food stores as they were accumulated in designated warehouses. The bounteous land, as if trying to make amends for the cruelty that had been visited upon the survivors, was good to the crops and livestock. Or perhaps it was the skill and enterprise of the people who did the backbreaking agricultural labor. In any event, everyone—so far—was receiving adequate nourishment. On this basis, a modern industrial enterprise could be launched with an element of confidence.
And blacksmith shops were just the beginning. Nagasaka next addressed the need to start smelting their own iron.
“We must begin,” he said, “in a fairly primitive way. We may know a lot, but we do not have a lot to work with. We have no electricity or pure oxygen, both essential elements of a modern steel mill. We don’t even have steam engines to blow air into a furnace. So we shall have to get into our time machine and travel backwards. Not all the way to the beginning of the Iron Age, but certainly back to the early eighteenth century. Running water must be our source of power for the bellows, and we’ll have to use charcoal as our fuel and reducing agent, even as we start mining coal and look forward to converting to coke.”
“And just what is a reducing agent?” asked Stephen Healey. “You know that not everyone on this subcommittee is an engineer.”
“So sorry, Mr. Healey,” Ichiro said. “The concept is simple. Iron ore is mostly iron oxide, and our problem in smelting is to break the chemical bonds between the iron and the oxygen. If, in a fire—a very, very hot fire—we burn the ore together with charcoal, which is mostly carbon, the carbon combines with the oxygen and takes it away in the form of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, leaving the precious iron behind. So the charcoal serves as both fuel and extractor of the oxygen; we call it the reducing agent.”
Healey nodded to show that he got the general idea and motioned for the presentation to continue.
Dr. Nagasaka’s plan was to start with four smelting furnaces, two at each of the planned ironmaking centers, Empangeni and Dundee. Calling upon a number of experts for advice—including specialists from the living museums of bygone technology—he had prepared a design based upon the old Backburrow furnace which was built near Windermere, England, in the early 1700s.
This venerable structure, which operated with charcoal fuel for more than two hundred years (until it was adapted for the use of coke in 1920), was eighteen feet high and eight feet square, built against the side of a steep hill. This was so that workers could climb up the slope with baskets full of iron ore, charcoal, and limestone—the key ingredients—and tip the contents into the top of the furnace. The bellows were made of cow hides and were powered by a waterwheel. When the water flow in the adjoining river was inadequate, the wheel was used as a treadmill operated by the foundry crew. Nagasaka proposed that this design feature be modified to make the fallback a horizontal wheel powered by oxen rather than human drudges. Fifty workers were to be assigned to each of the four furnaces, about double the number that were needed to operate the original model from three centuries ago.
The selected experts had evaluated every aspect of the plan: size, shape, and materials. The slope of the interior walls was crucial since the dropping and mixing of the raw ingredients had to be just right. It was important to avoid a descent that was too speedy, or even worse, a jamming of the materials at an intermediate level. In the end, the designers placed their faith in the craftsmen of a bygone age, a faith that proved well rewarded when the furnaces were eventually put into operation.
A vocal minority called for a taller structure, closer to the thirty-five feet in height that was typical of American charcoal furnaces in the latter half of the nineteenth century. By way of compromise, it was decided to build one of the four furnaces to the larger pattern. This also ultimately proved to be functional, although with a few more glitches than the smaller model.
It was now the last day of January, and detailed design drawings could be completed, and the sites cleared and leveled, in about a month. But actual construction of the smelting furnaces could not begin until perhaps the end of April, when suitable brick and mortar were expected to be available. However, even the towers themselves were not a key item on what the construction people called the “critical path.” This honor went to building the dams for the mill-ponds, assembling the waterwheels, and fabricating the wooden-geared mechanisms for powering the bellows.
All in all, the project would probably take the better part of six months. This meant that the operation would be ready to go in early August, just about the time the blacksmiths’ sources of scrap metal were expected to be running short.
Ten blacksmith forges and four smelting furnaces. That seemed like an enormously challenging enterprise. But Ichiro Nagasaka had much more to propose. He answered a few questions, waited for the group to indicate tacit assent, and then resumed.
“Yes, we need hand-forged tools. But that is only the beginning of our industrial revolution. There then remains the crucial business of making machines.” He stopped talking for a moment and rocked on his heels, hands behind his back, giving his audience time to absorb his meaning.
“You may say, okay, let’s start making steam engines, internal combustion engines, turbines, and the like. We have the necessary materials, and we have designs ready to go—plans of classic machines from earlier times and even a few improvements that our mechanical engineers have worked on. Good. And you tell me that there will be fuel for these wonderful contraptions—for the steam engines, wood and coal, and for internal combustion
