Rise of the 1630s South America

Chapter 220 New Industry

It's funny to say.When the war between the East Coast Republic of China and the British was at its most critical moment, the La Plata native white elite group headed by the Rodriguez family separated themselves from the East Coast people for fear of being linked with the British ships. hit.At that time, they not only closed the sea trade channel of Colonia, but even took the opportunity to drive up the prices of urgently needed materials on the east coast, and asked the people on the east coast to lower the prices of export goods.

After the East Bank signed a peace agreement with the British in March this year, seeing that the powerful East India Company had nothing to do with the East Bank, and finally just made a peaceful draw. The La Plata people completely knelt down .In order to make up for previous mistakes, when seeing the lack of funds for the development of the East Coast Republic, sixteen families headed by the Rodriguez Chamber of Commerce jointly provided a low-interest loan of 3 yuan to the China East Coast Republic.The annual interest is only a cheap one cent, which is a meaning.

Since these La Plata people are so knowledgeable, and in the future they will still ask for help from them, then the people on the east coast will naturally stop pursuing the bad things they did before, and the two sides reconciled on the surface.

Compared with the embarrassment of the La Plata people, the Almeida family in Brazil's San Vicente is much smarter.During the war, on the one hand, they got along well with the British and provided supplies to the British ships; on the other hand, they secretly passed on important information to the people on the east coast. In Hong Kong, it can be said that both ends sell well and take advantage of it.

Of course, after the war ended, they also saw the great potential of the East Coast Republic, and they did not forget to continue investing to maintain the relationship between the two parties.Several leading Brazilian families in San Vicente united to provide a low-interest loan of 15 yuan to the East Bank, with the same annual interest of one cent.

With these two loans totaling 35 yuan, the Executive Committee successfully paid the expenses of some immigrants from the Ming Dynasty.Then, after roughly estimating next year's fiscal revenue and expenditure, the executive committee boldly asked the Portuguese to double the number of immigrants transported from the Ming Dynasty in the next few years, and at the same time started to build two flute-shaped merchant ships and an escort gunboat .

The construction of these three ships sparked a battle between Dayuhe Naval Shipyard and Zhenhai Shipyard.In the end, it was the executive committee who made a balance. The order for the two merchant ships went to Dayuhe Shipyard, and the order for the escort gunboat went to Zhenhai Shipyard.After the order was issued, not only the two shipyards immediately started production preparations, but also some supporting manufacturers relying on the shipyards for their survival, such as anchor chain factories, rig factories, canvas workshops, barrel workshops, and cable workshops, etc., also began active preparations.

In order to ensure the smooth completion of the three ships, with the approval of the Executive Committee, the Government Affairs Council specially established a commercial bank, the United Industrial Credit Bank, to provide commercial loans to some domestic state-owned enterprises and small private workshops to promote domestic industrial development.The start-up reserve of United Industrial Credit Bank is 30 yuan, of which 24 yuan is contributed by the Ministry of Finance, and 6 yuan is contributed by Dongan Company.Compared with the Northwest Reclamation Bank, the United Industrial Credit Bank is a joint-stock commercial bank, and the East Coast Company's shares accounted for as much as 20%, which is a sign of the deepening penetration of the cross-country into the national economy.

After the establishment of the United Industrial Credit Bank, it immediately issued a number of loans, the most important of which was a loan of 3000 yuan to provide start-up funds for the newly established Northern Gunpowder Factory.

Speaking of this gunpowder factory, it has to be mentioned that now the executive committee is determined to get rid of the gunpowder trade dependent on foreign countries, and the self-production of saltpeter, one of the important raw materials of gunpowder, is quite crucial.There is a lack of natural saltpeter mines in the East Coast Republic of China, so they can only resort to manual methods to obtain them.

Although some people in the time-traveling people vaguely knew that nitrate soil could be extracted from latrines and cesspit, after all, no one studied it in depth.One is because there are very few people who know chemistry among the cross-travel crowd, and most of them were either transferred to study the important coal chemical and glass industries, or were transferred to Bingtuanbao to teach, resulting in no successors for this project; the second is because of this The project itself is also relatively dirty, tiring, bitter, and may get sick. In addition, the channels for purchasing gunpowder from Europe are still smooth, so no one has been too concerned about this project.It is not that no one has mentioned the need to produce gunpowder before, but these proposals have been submerged in the numerous other project applications, and have not received enough attention from above.

In the late stage of this war with the British, the East Coast Navy almost used up most of the country's gunpowder stocks, and the situation was once critical.It can be said that if the British persisted for a few more months to half a year, the situation might have been completely different.

After experiencing the gunpowder crisis, the people on the east coast finally learned how to behave. While vigorously hoarding gunpowder and increasing their inventory, they began to try to produce their own gunpowder in order to get rid of their dependence on gunpowder imports from Spain, France and other countries.The main components of black powder currently used on the east coast are potassium nitrate, sulfur and carbon.Among them, the problem of carbon is easy to solve, but potassium nitrate and sulfur are a bit more difficult, because neither of these has been produced on the east coast before.

The sulfur is the high-quality volcanic sulfur imported from Chile, and the nitrate (the main component is potassium nitrate) is purchased from France. Not to mention the high cost, the output is still limited.Therefore, the East Coast gave up after trying to make their own gunpowder for a while, and began to import gunpowder directly from Europe (mainly Spain).Of course, this kind of borrowing doctrine is definitely undesirable now, so there is the newly established Northern Gunpowder Factory.

As the name suggests, the main product of this factory is gunpowder, more precisely black powder.Sulfur, one of the two main raw materials for the production of black powder, can only be imported due to the lack of natural sulfur mines. Fortunately, Chile is not far away, and there has been a lot of sulfur flowing from La Plata to Colonia.It has been suggested before that the sulfur in the coke oven gas of the coking plant (mainly the sulfur in the hydrogen sulfide gas) can be recovered, which can not only avoid air pollution, but also turn waste into treasure, which is the best of both worlds.

The process of recovering sulfur is not complicated, but the processing of its production equipment still exceeds the current industrial capacity of the East Coast Republic.Perhaps only after the large-scale hydraulic presses, rolling mills, machine tools and other industrial weapons are complete can we get a glimpse of the mystery inside.However, at present, the industrial sector is also actively researching alternative methods, that is, how to use existing technologies to bypass these problems and realize the recovery of waste sulfur in gas when large-scale reactors and other equipment cannot be produced.

The problem of sulfur may not be solved for a while, but with the arrival of several new Ming Dynasty craftsmen, the production of nitrate has made great progress.The methods of these Ming Dynasty craftsmen are not new. They use the traditional composting method.That is, a large amount of animal excrement and corpses are crushed and spread on an open space with high soil moisture content and good ventilation, and then sprinkle a large amount of plant ash on it.If the temperature is suitable, after a period of nitrification reaction, a thin layer of white crystal-like substance can be scraped off on this piece of land, which is nitrate.After the scraped nitrate is sorted and purified, potassium nitrate with extremely high purity can be obtained.

The nitrification reaction is very simple to put it bluntly.Because animal manure and corpses contain a large amount of nitrogen acid, under certain conditions, they can react with nitrifying bacteria in the soil to produce nitric acid, and then nitric acid reacts with potassium rich in plant ash to produce nitrate-potassium nitrate, while artificial composting The Fa is nothing more than artificially providing such a suitable condition and place for this reaction to occur.

After this method was proposed, technicians in the chemical industry immediately carried out small-scale experimental production, and the results proved that this method is completely feasible.In fact, this is not surprising at all, because Europe and Ming Dynasty were doing this at this time.

Now that the method is feasible, the next step is to start mass production. On November 11th, when Guo Zili's exploration fleet was still drifting at sea, in the wasteland outside Jushu Village in the north of Ping'an Town, a large-scale factory building had been established.This is the nitrate workshop of the Northern Gunpowder Factory. A large number of doors and windows are opened on the walls of the factory building to maintain ventilation and ventilation; inside the factory building, a row of ten acres of nitrate fields has been opened up.The workers dug a ten-acre shallow pit on the ground. The bottom of the shallow pit was poured with concrete and covered with a thin layer of soil.

On November 11, the Nitro workshop started trial production.I saw workers crush animal feces and carcasses collected from nearby areas and spread them evenly on top of shallow pits and thin soil, and then sprinkled water into the soil to keep the moisture in the soil.The ventilation condition of the factory building is good, and a lot of glass is installed on the top directly above the nitrate field to allow sunlight to pass through.With such excellent conditions, the nitrifying bacteria in the soil should be able to gradually react these nitrogen-rich substances into nitrous acid and nitric acid.

In the next period of time, workers often sprinkle some plant ash on the top of the nitrate field, which provides an opportunity for the nitric acid gradually generated in the soil to react the potassium rich in plant ash into potassium nitrate.At this time, the east coast area began to gradually enter late spring and early summer, and both temperature and humidity were more favorable for nitrification.

On December 12, under the watchful eyes of many technicians from the chemical engineering group and factory workers, the first collection of nitrate in the nitrate workshop started.At this time, a thin layer of nitrate soil has formed above the nitrate field, which is the potassium nitrate mixture.The workers carefully scraped off this layer of nitrate soil and collected it in a container. After the collection, they continued to fill the nitrate field with soil, compost, and sprinkle plant ash to allow the nitrate field to continue to react.

The scraped nitrate soil was quickly taken for simple removal of impurities, cleaning, and purification, and then the obtained pure potassium nitrate was weighed and calculated. The final result was surprising—a total of 200 mu of nitrate field was scraped More than three tons of pure potassium nitrate.And if these three tons of potassium nitrate are mixed with carbon and sulfur, a full four tons of gunpowder can be produced, which is already amazing.You know, the "August 20th" class battleship only needs less than [-] kilograms of black powder for a salvo, and eight tons of black powder is enough for a war behemoth like the "August [-]th" class to fight more than [-] salvos. Shoot.

In addition to being used as gunpowder, these potassium nitrates can also be used as fertilizers and nitric acid. The value is huge!The production of the Nitrogen workshop was a big success!

PS: The idea of ​​installing glass on the top of the workshop and sprinkling plant ash above the nitrate field in this chapter comes from Pheasant Mulberry. Special thanks here.

(End of this chapter)