War Palace and Knee Pillow, Austria’s Destiny

From a profit perspective alone, heavy industry cannot be compared with light industry. Take clothing and cosmetics, two daily necessities, for example. It is no joke for manufacturers to earn exaggerated profits of tens, hundreds or even thousands of times.

But suppose we completely remove the value and role of heavy industry from the process of a country's industrialization, what will be left?

In a word, industrialization without heavy industry is like a castle piled on the beach, with gold and jade on the outside but ruins on the inside. It can be said that it will fall down at a touch.

Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, Americans have engaged in deindustrialization for decades. In the end, they can only rely on exaggerating the so-called external threat theory to divert the attention of the people, and save their country through more crazy plunder. Decline.

The role of heavy industry is that it can process industrial raw materials into semi-finished products and then provide them to light industry factories.

In addition, the former can also produce a variety of parts and hardware equipment through mechanical manufacturing to deliver supplies to the supply chain.

In general, only when a country has truly established a relatively complete heavy industry system can it complete the first step of not getting stuck.

The outbreak of the First Austro-Vietnam War meant that Austria entered the door of industrialization with both feet.

Over the years, as the boom in railway construction and industrial development continued to deepen, a large number of steel mills thrived in the empire like the sleeping earth coming to life after the spring rain, and steel production also continued to rise.

But for the ever-expanding demand gap, this scale is still a drop in the bucket. Facing the snowflakes of letters from factory owners, businessmen, and capitalists, the senior officials of the imperial government had to consider whether to Countries such as Luxembourg and Prussia imported steel to fill domestic shortfalls.

The amount of capital required for the development of heavy industry has always been large, and the long return cycle and slow results have extremely tested the patience of the rulers.

This is why most of the countries in Europe that first started to industrialize relied on colonial plunder to accumulate their first pot of gold. The most typical of them are Britain and France.

Of course, countries that cannot take the path of external colonial expansion have to rely on squeezing internal resources to obtain valuable funds, such as the woolly bears of later generations.

However, with the development of industrialization and the increasing demand for capital, the modern financial industry has been born and expanded to help finance heavy industries, such as Belgium, Luxembourg and the United States.

(The Americans are very cheating, but they are also the first country to harvest European capital in reverse.)

Historically, the U.S. government and its local consortium have frantically sought financing from Europe on several occasions, and have repeatedly insisted that their potential is much higher than that of Belgium.

Then they invested in some projects, and the remaining resources were invested in real estate.

Later, when a series of economic crises broke out, these projects went bankrupt in turn. At this time, European capital tried to withdraw from North America. However, in order to pass on the economic crisis, the cunning Americans adopted various means to limit and refuse capital outflows, and then also took the British with them. Into a trap.

The British, unwilling to be left alone, certainly would not sit back and watch themselves suffer while other countries watched this happen. As a result, almost the entire Europe was dragged into the water invariably and became victims of economic crises of varying degrees. This is the tip of the iceberg of this economic crisis that was discussed in the previous book, so I won’t go into details here.

But in any case, the ultimate beneficiary is the United States, and these capitals finally fell into their hands, and our protagonist Franz just took the opportunity to get a share of the pie because he knew about this past event.

Anyway, Europe was suffering from capital surplus at that time, and the leek would not be cut until it was cut. And this debt will not be placed on the Austrians. After all, it was the Americans who directly introduced a bill to forcefully keep the wallets of those Europeans.

Furthermore, no one in history had ever retaliated against them, and not even a symbolic sanction had been issued, so Franz felt comfortable taking advantage.

There is also a fourth way, which is to slowly promote industrialization through the country's own market, such as Prussia and Austria.

However, the future Prussians successfully counterattacked with the help of the British. Even though they later received huge war indemnities from the French, their inherent shortcomings of being a cripple still did not change.

Compared with their northern neighbor, the Austrians' path to industrialization was much more miserable. Because it has not received help from foreign capital and domestic capital has been flowing crazily to Prussia and France, its industrialization has progressed extremely slowly.

(Historically, there was a French consortium that planned to support Austria, but was stopped by Napoleon III.)

In this life, due to the sudden emergence of Franz, a man from heaven, Austria gained some overseas colonies to help it expand its trade circle. However, it is too wishful thinking to expect that these few areas can complete the industrialization of a big country. .

In addition, due to the twists and turns of this butterfly, foreign capital can be said to have basically no chance of Austria. Neither John Bull nor Gallic Chicken wanted a Central European empire to become powerful due to the resurgence of its power.

Countries such as Prussia and Belgium that are still in the process of industrialization have no spare capacity to help. As for the huge furry bear in the east, he really wanted to lend money to this important ally of one of the three northern palaces, but he was really unable to do so.

Now, both domestic and external markets can be said to have expanded to the limit. If you want to expand further, you can only rely on war or colonial means.

But for Franz, who has always been prepared, Austria's confidence lies in having the two major markets of Germany and the Apennines.

However, in addition to the four paths that have appeared in history, as a time traveler, you can also choose a fifth path, which is technological innovation.

"Technology is the primary productive force." Franz is convinced of this.

The current mainstream steelmaking method in Europe is still the crucible method invented in the 18th century. This method is to cut the carburized iron material into small pieces and place them in a closed clay crucible. When heated outside the crucible, the iron material continues to absorb the carbon in the graphite and melts into high-carbon molten steel. It is cast into small ingots and then forged into various shapes. required shape.

This was the first method of producing liquid steel in European history, but the disadvantage was that the content was small and the cost was quite high.

In addition, there is also the bubble steel method; that is, a good iron rod is placed in a furnace and heated with charcoal for ten days to increase the carbon content. After reaching a certain hardness, bubbles appear on the surface, which is called "bubble steel." If you want to improve toughness and strength, you need to work hard on heating and beating.

Although there were already "foamed steel" methods that carburized wrought iron and "cast steel" methods that made steel in crucibles, the production of "foamed steel" required a 10-day carburization process, and the primary output of "cast steel" Just a few dozen kilograms.

Moreover, both methods have the disadvantages of high cost, unstable quality, low efficiency, and limited output. A large amount of scrap steel flows into the market and is made into inferior steel cannons. It seriously hindered the development of military technology at that time. After all, every test of artillery may be the last one in life.

At this time, the output of steel was less than one-fortieth of that of iron, and the price was very different. At that time, the price of steel was around 60 pounds per ton, while the price of pig iron was only 3 pounds and the price of wrought iron was only 9 pounds.

At that time, in order to cope with the shortage of steel production, Europeans invented a third steelmaking method, which was the stirring method.

This method has even been praised by great teachers, saying it is a great progress in human history. However, this is just an old road traveled by the East for two thousand years. The stirring method is just an upgraded version of the Han Dynasty steel-frying method, and it does not fundamentally improve the efficiency of steelmaking.

In this magical era of the 19th century, there is nothing that this group of people cannot do unless you can imagine it. The magical steel-making method that has spanned thousands of years has once again become the mainstream of society. People can't help but marvel at the wisdom of the ancients and feel sorry for the people at that time.