The Stone Dogs (75 page)
Trevithick was in charge of the new operation, and recruited extensively in the British Isles for mechanics and engineers.
Improved products followed rapidly, particularly since Drakia was too remote for Boulton & Watt patent-protection lawsuits.
Pressures of up to 25 psi were quickly achieved, and smaller and more precisely-bored cylinders produced. Trevithick's next crucial innovation was the external feedwater condensor, which permitted recycling of boiler water (1799) and the uniflow valve system, which raised fuel efficiency another order of magnitude by separating the steam entry and exhaust areas of the cylinder.
By 1800, Trevithick high-pressure single-cylinder engines were being produced in some numbers and were replacing or supplementing the Watt engines then in use.
However, Trevithick was not content with fulfilling his original mandate. The new engines were now compact and rugged enough to be a credible power plant for locomotive purposes. In 1800-1801 Trevithick and his team of assistants (which included a number of instrument makers familiar with precision metalworking) produced working scale models of road-engines and rail locomotives, as well as an experimental paddle wheel steamboat. The backers of the embryonic Ferrous Metals Combine were sufficiently impressed to provide funding for prototype development. While slow and cumbersome by later standards, the resulting locomotives and "road autosteamers"
were an obvious and vast improvement on animal traction.
Capital from gold production and the export trades flowed into further investment, and the first production models were in use by 1803. Steam-powered gunboats on the Nile proved the military utility of the new engines, and were crucial to the rapid pacification of the province of Egypt after the uprising of 1803.
Steam dredges of Trevithick's design helped to build the Suez Canal in 1803-1810, and coastal steamers and harbor tugs.
Steam gunboats pushed Draka control up the eastern coast of Africa and into Madagascar. As early as 1810, "drags" (steam haulers pulling wagons) were being used to transport troops.
The next important innovation was in the fuel and boiler systems. Power-driven drills had been an early application of Trevithick's work, searching for underground water in the extensive arid regions of southern Africa. When Egypt was overrun, drilling teams began operating in its Western Desert—
and discovered petroleum in the deserts west of Alexandria,natural gas in the Nile Delta. There were no convenient coal mines in Egypt, and local engineers quickly modified their machinery to use at first crude oil, and then distilled products, as a fuel source. Once the greater convenience and heat-density of petroleum became apparent, most road-engines and an increasing number of nautical ones were converted to liquid fuels. At the same time, "water-tube" boilers (in which the furnace fire circulates around water-filled tubing to produce steam) were introduced, lowering the weight and bulk of boilers.
Power Distribution Systems
Meanwhile, Trevithick had not forgotten the special needs of his original Mining Combine patrons. The gold mines were quickly running deeper, and this was the hardest of hard-rock work. While unskilled labor was plentiful and cheap, costs still rose with depth. Trevithick and the team of apprentices and subordinates that grew around him experimented with direct-siting steam drills and borers, as well as with improved pumping and hoisting systems. However, piping hot steam without loss of heat (and therefore pressure) proved to be extremely difficult and dangerous, especially in underground situations.
Trevithick (and Edgar Stevens, his principal assistant) turned to compressed-air systems instead. The basic mechanical principles were already familiar, and local experiments with native rubber provided a solution to the problems of gaskets and flexible connectors. Large reciprocating double-action compressors were set up, enabling each mine (or later, factory) to have an efficient central power plant. Hegenerative systems (using the heat generated during the compression of the air to warm the feedwater of the steam engines) provided greater thermal efficiency. Compressed air was stored in central reservoirs, then distributed by iron piping to dispersed locations with only minor frictional losses; drills, pumps, winches, and crushers could be placed as needed and flexibly operated.
Once developed, this had obvious applications outside mining. Mobile compressors were developed to power rock drills and other equipment in road building and construction work; powered rock-saws drastically reduced the cost of masonry, despite the lack of trained masons and quarrymen.
Central-factory systems, particularly alter the development of the rotary-vane air motor in the 1820s, superceded the clumsy, friction-ridden and dangerous belting and shafting the British pioneers of the Industrial Age had used. Whole new categories of machine tool proved possible with the flexible and precise control which air motors could offer with a simple manipulation of valves, and powered equipment could now be used in locations—e.g., the home—where direct steam drive was out of the question. Air transmission systems had few moving parts and were easily centrally controlled, leading to low maintenance costs. Compressed-air auxiliaries greatly simplified the operation of autosteamers.
Technology and the Sociology of Industry
By the 1830s, most Draka mining-industrial plants were using centralized pneumatic transmission systems, operating at standardized pressures. Given the vastly superior efficiency of such systems, the question arises of why the other industrial countries, particularly Britain, did not follow suit to anything like the same degree. (For example, several of the larger Draka cities installed mains systems delivering metered compressed air via understreet tubes in the 1840s and 1850s; the first European city to do so was Paris, in the 1880s—and that system was installed by Draka engineers.) A digression into industrial organization is necessary to establish the causal links.
The overwhelming majority of European and American industrial firms—even in heavy industry—were organized on a family business basic until well into the twentieth century; corporations were closely held. Before about 1870, railroads aside, this was the only form of business organization in those countries. These firms, mostly small, were obstinately self-financing, which sharply limited their capital reserves; and they were almost pathologically averse to debt and the supervision by banks it entailed. This form of organization responded quickly and intelligently to shifts in consumer demand; it was matchlessly efficient at supplying a diverse and
"atomized" market.
In the proto-Domination, by contrast, industry developed to serve
production
rather than consumption; mines, heavy transportation, the armed forces, the Landholders' League and its agricultural processing plants, were the primary customers.
The primary demand was for metal goods, principally tools, rather than the textiles and other end-products which were the staple of British industry in the period. When consumer goods manufacture did become important, it was mostly as a part of the Landholders' League's drive to capture value-added by following its members' crops "downstream" through processing to final sale. Even here, orders were "lumpy" by contemporary standards; for example, the Combines bought standard products in immense quantity for their basic serf labor forces. After the League went into cooperative wholesaling/retailing for its members (at first by mail order), plantation demand was largely aggregated as well—the League bought uniform goods in bulk, e.g., agricultural machinery or cheap shoes for fieldhands, later canned goods and power systems. Thus markets were simple, and on the whole quite reliable, making it possible to utilize economies of scale with little risk. The production units were large, from the beginning, and operated by salaried mangers.
The government, and the especially the League, dominated the banking system, which served to funnel the surplus capital of agriculture into concentrated locations.
Thus Draka enterprises could afford to be of technically optimum size (indeed, sometimes larger); sales were reliable enough, and capital abundant enough, that long-term planning and research became a feature of their operation two generations before the Germans followed in their footsteps. The concentration of all money incomes in the top 4%-8% of the population kept the savings rate extremely high, usually in the neighborhood of 30%-50% of GNP, which meant an economy that was both awash with capital and furnished with abundant opportunities for productive investment. Land, unskilled and semi-skilled labor, and raw materials were all superabundant and cheap; the perennial shortage of managerial personnel led to an early emphasis on higher education—influenced by the German tradition of many of the early immigrants.
At the same time, this was not a pure command economy.
Prices were set by the market, which was completely open to world trade; the high export propensity exerted continual pressure on even the largest organizations. The consumer and service sectors that served the Citizen population were characterized by much smaller individually owned enterprises.
The ideology of the corporate State came later; in the early period, roughly to 1840, it was a matter of "sleepwalking"
through to a solution to a set of isolated problems. Only when the essentials were in place did the fact that a system existed become obvious.
The result was what the great classical-liberal economists of the 19th century regarded as an utterly perverse economy: one in which human beings and their food and clothing were intermediate production goods, and machine-tools and cannon end products. To function it required a militarized society regimented by terror. But for the sort of brute-force, quantitative, capital-goods intensive industrialization the Domination needed to power its relentless expansion, it was ideal.
Power System Development 1840-1910 Steam
Turbines:
The low operating efficiency of reciprocating steam
engines was obvious, both intuitively and from the
growing knowledge of thermodynamic and mechanical
analysis in the early 19th century. Even with pneumatic
transmission, the reciprocating action of pistons lost
efficiency every time it had to be transformed into
rotary action, and there were annoying limits to the
size, speed, and power-output of steam pistons.
Attempts at direct rotary engines (steam turbines) were
made in a number of countries, but the manufacturing
difficulties were many. A multi-stage tur-bine was
obviously essential if the expansive power of steam was
to be utilized, but this required precision machining of
unprecedented quality. Furthermore, for maximum
efficiency operating speeds and temperatures whole
orders of magnitude greater than the piston engine
were needed. Wrought and cast iron, and direct-contact
oil lubrication, had sufficed for Watt and even
Trevithick; they were not enough for the turbine.
However, the Draka did have one advantage in the
race to perfect a working steam turbine. Their extensive
use of pneumatic systems had led to an early interest in
axial-flow air motors, which is to say, air turbines.
While it was much easier to manufacture a workable air
turbine (operating temperatures were low, and for
most uses a relatively low degree of efficiency was
tolerable), the basic operating principles and problems
were quite similar. The development of roller- ball and
air-bearings from the 1840s was largely done in the
course of work on air turbines, and so was the
development of larger precision-machined steel alloy
rotor blades—especially for the large boring machines
used in heavy-artillery manufacture. By the 1860s,
materials technology had advanced to a stage where
steam turbines were a distinct possibility.
While industrial demand might have provided
incentive enough, it was a military-transport need that
provided the final impetus. Powered dirigible balloons
had been experimented with in Alexandria and
Diskarapur from the 1850s. During the Franco-Prussian
war, the besieged French garrison of Paris improvised
semirigid dirigibles powered by a Draka-made
industrial compressor (reciprocating type) and
propellers driven by air turbines. These were capable of
speeds of up to 60 kph for several hours, and were used
to ferry passengers and messages, and even to bomb the
Prussian artillery; during the Paris Commune, they
were also used to bombard Communard positions
before attacks by government troops.
This success resulted in desultory research in a
number of European countries (particularly the new
German Empire), and a crash project in the
Domination. Using a single-stage expansive steam
turbine, extensive construction with the
newly-available aluminum alloys, and pneumatic
transmission, dirigible airships proved to be an
expensive but practical weapons system during the
Anglo-Russian war of 1879-1882. Shortly thereafter
heavier models of steam turbine were used to generate
electricity, to power turbocompressors for large-scale
pneumatic systems, and to power ships through
mechanical and pneumatic gearing.
Internal Combustion Engines:
The possibility of using combustion gases directly in
the cylinders of a prime mover, rather than indirectly
by heating a working fluid such as steam, had been
theorized as far back as the 17th century. The
attractions—simplicity, since there was no boiler
system, and greater inherent thermal efficiency—were
obvious. Again, manufacturing limitations prevented
widespread use until well into the 19th century. In this
field, French and German researchers established an
early lead; the very efficiency of the central
engine-pneumatic transmission system in the
Domination inhibited research on alternatives. Andre
Charbonneau (1820-1887) and Rudolf Diesel