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An Electrifying Experience

Written by Jack Carroll

Somewhere in the eastern Harz mountains, 1635

Something's burning! Stefan Leichtfuss stopped in his tracks to sniff, and began slowly scanning his eyes all around. There! A wisp of smoke was rising out of that new wooden cabinet mounted on the post! Before he could move, there was a loud humming, and then a rising screech from the machine on the floor. He was halfway across the mill before the two sacks he'd been carrying hit the floor and spilled. He paid no attention to that—in one fluid motion, he snatched up the grain shovel leaning against the wall and swung it at the leather belt. It popped clear of the pulley and hung down. He shouted out the door, "Herr Hartmann! Stop the wheel!"

****

The first thing Gerd Hartmann heard was a howl like an outraged cat. He was already moving when Stefan yelled. In three fast strides he reached the headrace gate, seized the lever in both hands, and slammed it shut. The flow over the spillway rose, while the wheel rumbled to a halt. As Gerd ran through the door, Stefan stuttered, "I-I'm sorry, Herr Hartmann, I know it's not my place to give orders."

"Never mind, I stopped it because I trust you. I would have anyway, I heard it too. Now . . . what happened?"

Stefan pointed to the box. "I saw smoke starting to come out of there, and then the belt started slipping on the pulley. I knew something was wrong."

"The generator pulley?"

"Yes."

Gerd unhooked the latches on the side of the cabinet and swung the front cover open. He didn't know what the insides were supposed to look like, but it surely wasn't this. The pivoted copper bars with the wooden handle were tarnished, almost black in places, and the metal was still hot—he could smell it. There was some kind of covering over some of the wires, looking frayed and charred. Something black had dripped down to the bottom of the case, and there were tiny flames dancing on the liquid pool, licking against the wood at the back.

"Quick! A bucket of water!" He pushed the cover shut to contain the flames.

The only bucket handy was full of freshly ground flour. Stefan dumped it back in the bin at the foot of the grindstones, and ran outside to the brook. He was back in seconds. Gerd opened the box again and started tossing the water in, a little at a time, until the black stuff hardened and the charred wood was damp.

****

When Theodor Dränitz heard the call from down the shaft to try it again, he'd gone outside the mine entrance, and waved to Hartmann down by the mill. Hartmann waved back and started the wheel.

Theodor went back in with his lantern and climbed down the upper shaft. He'd gone twenty feet along the tunnel, when there was a strange snapping and hissing sound, and an orange glow appeared between the boards of the wooden covering over the wires. Then he smelled smoke, and flame blossomed at one spot.

He took a short-handled pick and started to knock loose the burning board, before the fire could spread. Flaming fragments and splinters rained down on his left hand. He shook them off and kept swinging. Suddenly the dull orange glow from two of the newly exposed wires faded to black, and the noises stopped after a few seconds. He stamped out the burning wood, and looked to make sure no other pieces were on fire.

He went back up as fast as he could with his burned hand, and ran outside—Hartmann wasn't in sight. He hurried down the hillside to tell him not to start again, until they could figure out what had gone wrong.

****

All the way up at the house, Marta Seidelin heard the shouting. This scheme of Winkler's had her a little nervous to begin with. She rushed down to the mill to find her husband Gerd and his apprentice Stefan looking into a ruined-looking complicated thing on the post, along with Theodor Dränitz from the mine. There was a big puddle of water on the floor. Then she saw the condition of Dränitz's hand. There were raw, red patches, blisters forming, and dirt all over it.

"Theodor! That looks terrible! It must hurt!"

"Oh, it's not so bad."

"Well, it will be if it gets infected. The newspaper had an article about burns. Come up to the house with me and I'll take care of it."

Stepping back outside, she looked up to the house, and saw her daughter at the door. "Frieda! Frieda! Take two cups of boiling water from the pot and set them to cool!" Frieda waved and went inside.

****

Stefan was unlacing the belt when old Winkler arrived from down in the mine. "What's your apprentice doing over there, Hartmann?"

Can't even call Stefan by his name. Gerd snorted. "What does it look like, Horst? He's taking down the belt from that generator of yours."

"Hah? What about the test run? I'm certainly not going to pay you if you don't turn it."

"I'd like to get paid, all right, but I haven't the least desire to have my mill burned down. Take a look at this. Take a good look. This thing was on fire when we stopped it."

"The switchboard? On fire? What did you do?"

"We started the wheel when your foreman Theodor signaled. Then we stopped it when the pulley started screeching and this thing caught fire, and we put out the flames. Enough, Winkler! I'm through letting you and your men just try things in my mill with this new machinery when you obviously don't know what you're doing. Get somebody up here who understands this." His voice rose to a roar. "And by God, no more 'quick tests' without a proper belt release lever!"

The shouting match went on for ten minutes while Stefan finished taking down the belt and stowed it behind the generator.

****

"Well? What's wrong here?"

Winkler was standing with his arms folded and a scowl on his bewhiskered face.

Gerd silently fumed. This was just typical. What a way to speak to a man who came all this way to help!

The young Dutchman—he'd introduced himself as Jan Willem Bosboom, a "field engineer" from American Electric Works—straightened up from examining the insides of the switchboard. He just shook his head. "Quite a lot, Herr Winkler. Quite a lot. But this —" He pointed at a large porcelain block. "—is why the damage went so far. These load wires are supposed to be connected to the bottom end of the fuse holder. They're connected to the top instead."

"We tried that. Those little pewter ribbons on it are too weak. They kept melting."

"Well, I should hope so! That's what they're there for. They're supposed to disconnect the circuit when the load is too great, so that this—" Bosboom gestured open-handed toward the remains. "—doesn't happen. The instruction sheet explains all that. You did read it, didn't you?"

"No," Gerd said in a dangerous voice. "Herr Winkler has that. His men did everything, except for adding a pulley and belt to my main shaft."

"Oh? I see. Well, others are selling the services of their water wheels to generate a little electricity, and there's no reason you shouldn't do the same. But this . . . Well, I'll go over the owner's manuals later with both of you, but for now, let's finish the initial inspection before the day gets any further along. I'll get my hand lamp. We can follow the wiring down into the mine, and then we'll see what the pump looks like."

Gerd took a deep breath. "I think I'd better come along and see all of it for myself."

Winkler looked up sharply. "Eh? As you wish. Mind your head in the tunnels."

Bosboom reached down to his tool case and took out a small varnished wooden box. They started up the hillside to the mine entrance, Bosboom looking speculatively at the line of poles as they went.

Meanwhile he flipped out a crank on the side of his lamp, and with a skkrrrk spun it for a minute or so. Finally he flipped a little lever. A soft whirring noise started up inside, and a narrow beam of yellowish light sprang out through a window on the front. Gerd looked curiously at the thing. "Is that one of those marvelous portable lights I've been hearing about?"

"An up-time electric flashlight? Not quite. They can't duplicate those yet, but somebody found a good use for the half-million or so Christmas tree bulbs they have."

"Christmas tree bulbs? What are they?"

"Well, during the Christmas holidays, they decorate their houses by bringing in a small fir tree and stringing colored ornaments and tiny electric lights all over it. Supposedly it was originally a German custom, but they used little candles in the old days."

Winkler looked blank. "German? Not from around here. What a strange habit!"

"Oh, I agree," he laughed. "A street full of houses with Christmas trees in the windows is a sight to treasure forever, though."

****

The boss was coming up the hill. Gerd Hartmann was with him, looking like he was ready to spit thunderbolts. The stranger behind them must be the foreign expert to figure out what was wrong with this new pumping machinery . . . what was he supposed to be again? Some new kind of mine engineer? Theodor Dränitz picked up the lantern at his feet and lit a second one from it. He handed it to Herr Winkler as they reached the entrance, but it was Hartmann who performed the introductions.

Theodor led the way to the shaft head, and began descending the ladder. The miller followed him down, and then the visiting engineer. Finally the boss started down. The engineer was still ten feet up on the ladder when a sudden realization struck Theodor. "Herr Bosboom, wait!"

Crack! There was a clatter and a muffled exclamation. The beam from the odd-looking lamp swung around wildly.

"Hold on, I'm coming back up. Here, I'll guide your foot to a solid rung."

He braced himself between the ladder and the opposite side of the shaft, and lifted. The light steadied above him.

"Are you all right?"

"I think so," came out with a hiss. "It feels like I strained my left shoulder. I should have let the lamp fall and grabbed on with both hands."

"I'm sorry about this. I've been meaning to replace that weak rung. All this confusion . . . Can you make it down the rest of the way now?"

"Yes, but give me a moment."

Bosboom slowly descended the last few feet. Herr Winkler came down, and Theodor led the party off along the tunnel. By now the whirring from Bosboom's lamp was slowing down, and it was starting to get dim. Hartmann asked, "Herr Bosboom, would you like me to wind that for you?"

"Thank you, yes. I wish I had some ice for this shoulder."

Theodor replied, "The water in the flooded shaft is almost as cold as ice. I can dip a rag in it for you when we get there, if that will help."

"It's worth a try."

Bosboom stopped when he saw the charred fragments lying on the tunnel floor. "What happened here?"

Theodor said, "One of the cover boards caught fire when all this happened. I knocked it off so the flames wouldn't spread. That's when I got this burn."

Bosboom looked down at the bandage on Theodor's hand, then turned and raised his lamp. Herr Winkler didn't seem to notice when the engineer stiffened. Hartmann did. He asked, "What do you see there, Herr Bosboom?"

"These wires here look like iron. They should be copper. That's one major problem right there."

Herr Winkler snapped, "There's no copper wire made around here. We were told that iron could be used to carry electricity."

Bosboom looked over his shoulder at him. "That's a common mistake, unfortunately. Our instruction sheets warn against it. Besides all the other reasons not to use it, iron wires would have to be at least two and a half times this diameter to carry the current. That's why they got so hot and started a fire."

Winkler waved his hand at the wires. "The smith charged me enough for the iron wire. Copper would have been unbelievable. That would have to come all the way from Saalfeld!"

"Actually, no. We have plenty of it at the sales offices in Halle and Magdeburg, and there are others selling it too. That's not the worst problem I see here, either. Well, let's continue the inspection."

Theodor answered, "This way, then, Herr Bosboom," and stepped forward.

As the party moved through the tunnels, Bosboom kept looking around at the bends, the drain channels, and the wooden covering over the electrical wiring.

Finally they came to another shaft, filled with water almost to the top. Theodor reached down into the water with a rag, and handed it to the engineer. Bosboom clapped it to his shoulder, and began examining the equipment lying on the tunnel floor, moving his lamp around as he did.

There was a cast iron pump secured to a hoisting rig, connected to a long canvas hose stretched out along the tunnel, and a loose coil of electrical cable running down from the end of the wooden raceway. The engineer looked it all over. Then he knelt down and took a close look at the pump.

He sniffed at it. "What on earth? Ohhhhh."

The boss snapped, "What now?"

"Just a moment, while I make certain." Bosboom took the rag off his shoulder and wiped the nameplate clean. He brought his lamp up close.

"Well. To start with, this isn't a mine pump. It's for a village water supply system, and it's only meant for clean water with no muck in it. If the length of that discharge hose is any indication, it can't possibly force water up from anything like the depth of this shaft, and I don't see the pressure relief valve it's supposed to have in case of a blocked outlet line. That's why it stalled out and overloaded the wiring. There's no fused disconnect switch on the wall here. Now that I think of it, I didn't see one at the mine entrance either. On top of everything else, you had the fuses at the generator bypassed. This motor smells like it's cooked."

Winkler looked wide-eyed at him. "Cooked? Why would anybody cook a motor?"

Bosboom's shoulders shook for a moment. He coughed, then got out, "Sorry. A figure of speech I heard at the factory. It means it was probably ruined by overheating."

"So what does this mean? How do I make this pump the water out of here so we can get down to the ore seam?"

"With this pump alone? You can't. It's impossible. The most it could do is push the water up the entrance shaft and out of the mine, if you didn't have a drain tunnel at this level."

"What? This is supposed to be a good pump. It cost enough!"

"It is a good pump, or it was. It's just not the right pump for this job. It's not even the right kind of pump. All right, I've seen what I need to. Let's climb back up and go over what has to be done. We'll start by going through the instruction sheets for the equipment in the mill, I think."

Theodor dipped the rag in the shaft again and handed it back to him. "I'll climb right below you, in case you need help on the ladder. I'm very sorry about the fall."

Winkler stalked off down the tunnel.

****

Frieda nestled the covered pot into the coals, and scooped more coals onto the lid. "That will do it for now, Mama."

"Good. Why don't you go tell Papa and Stefan when we'll be eating? Peter will be back by then, if I know your brother." She winked.

"All right, Mama."

She walked downhill to the mill and stepped inside. The stranger kneeling on the floor must be the expert Papa was expecting. He was doing something to that machine of Herr Winkler's that had caused so much trouble. There were tools and small parts lying around it.

Papa was saying, "Stefan, his shoulder is hurt. Go help him."

"Don't you want me to finish getting this load under cover before dark, Herr Hartmann?"

"Well . . ."

"Papa, I can help."

Papa looked over in surprise. "Oh, Frieda. I thought you were busy in the kitchen."

"No, most of that is done. Mama sent me to tell you that supper will be ready in about an hour. I can stay and help here if you need me."

"Well, yes, you came at a good time. Frieda, this is Herr Jan Willem Bosboom. He's here from the company that made all this electrical machinery. Herr Bosboom, this is my daughter Frieda."

The stranger looked up. "I'm pleased to meet you, Fraülein Hartmann."

"Pleased to meet you, Herr Bosboom. What would you like me to do?"

"I need you to pick up one end of this generator while I put a block of wood under it. Then the other end, and I'll prop that side up as well. After that you can take off these nuts and we'll pull it apart."

Papa picked up his grease pot again and went back to the mill machinery.

She knelt down and took a grip. It looked like a lot of iron, but . . . "Oh. This isn't as heavy as it looks. If you're quick with the sticks, I can pick it up all at once."

"All right." He put the blocks in place against the side. "Ready."

A second later it was propped up with its ends clear of the floor. He handed her a wrench and gestured with his hand. "You turn the nuts this way to take them off. I'll hold this down. Once that's done, you can slide off the end bells and we'll pull the rotor out."

She looked at the wrench in her hand. It shone like a mirror, and there wasn't a hammer mark on it anywhere—except . . . "Herr Bosboom, what's this here?"

"That? That's a kudzu leaf. It's the maker's hallmark."

"They must be great craftsmen. This is a beautiful piece of work."

He glanced up at her. "You appreciate fine tools?"

"Naturally. I grew up in this mill."

She turned to the generator, and set the wrench in place on the first nut. She gave it an experimental tug to get the feel, then braced her knee against the side and gave a solid pull. Two minutes later the insides were exposed to view, and she was lifting the pieces one at a time to a cloth spread out on a bench.

Frieda watched curiously while Herr Bosboom blew the dust away and started playing his lamp over the parts. She pointed to the wires wound around a stack of thin iron plates. "This looks very carefully made. What do all these pieces do?"

"Well . . ."

****

Winkler and Dränitz came back to the mill with a handful of thick pamphlets. Gerd came over to the bench to see, with Frieda beside him. Bosboom spread out the papers for the generator and the switchboard, and looked up in surprise. "Herr Winkler, these are in Italian! Do you read Italian? Do you, Herr Dränitz?"

"No, but there are plenty of pictures. We just went by those, and the tables."

"Whooh. So, you didn't get any of the cautions and the explanations. That explains a lot. The instruction sheets in German weren't packed with this equipment, obviously. I don't know how that happened, but I'll leave you my copies. But why didn't you just send for the right ones, before doing all this work?"

Winkler flung up his arms. "That would have taken a week or more for the post to go back and forth. I needed to get on with this, so my men could start mining."

"I see. Well, you would have saved a great deal of time, and a lot of money besides, if you'd sent for instruction sheets you and your men could read. Haste makes waste—it certainly has here. While you were gone, I inspected and tested the generator with Fräulein Hartmann's kind help." He nodded to her. "Except for that and a few bits and pieces, there isn't much here that can be saved."

"What! I wrote to the company to send somebody who could get this working, not to be told there is nothing to be done."

Bosboom straightened up and faced Winkler, his hand resting on the open leaflet. His voice went flat. "Herr Winkler, this trip up here is costing my company a day and a half of my time, and if you're being charged for it, I haven't heard about it. My job is to tell you the truth, not wave my hands in the air and magically turn it into something else. So I suggest you start taking detailed notes of this discussion, if you want to accomplish anything.

"Now, then. There's a great deal that can be done. In fact, this can be made to work. The basic idea is right, an electric pump is by far the most practical solution, with so little left of the old pumping machinery, especially everything there was above ground. But the system has to be engineered correctly. The pump company has people who can do that for you, and their consulting rates are reasonable.

"But the worst problem I see from the electrical side is that knob-and-tube wiring you have in the mine. That only belongs inside a dry building. It's dangerous anywhere in a damp tunnel, but you have it running right above open drain channels. Let a discharge line burst, and it's a death trap. Besides that, you have outdoor pole lines, and those don't look like they're up to standard either.

"There are just too many pitfalls here for inexperienced workmen. You need the services of a licensed electrician to direct the rebuilding, otherwise somebody's sure to be killed."

"An electrician? There isn't one within forty miles of here! It would take days to get one, and they charge a fortune! If you're such an expert . . ."

Bosboom clenched one hand on the edge of the bench.

"Herr Winkler. My employers make a point of maintaining a professional demeanor and sticking to technical matters when speaking with a customer."

"Well, of course!"

He looked unblinking at Winkler for a good two seconds, then growled, "I could make an exception in your case."

"What? What do you mean?"

"You asked for help. I've been patiently explaining what it will take to get the results you want, and make this pumping system safe for you and your men to be around. You stand here brushing aside what I'm telling you, as if a loud voice will change the facts to suit your convenience. It won't. We all had to begin from the beginning, but what seriously disturbs me is your unwillingness to learn when you have the chance. Do you expect to make this work without taking the trouble to get the right equipment and install it properly? For that matter, don't you care at all about the lives of your miners? Or your own life?"

"You expect me to throw money around like water? And take who-knows-how-long to do all this?"

"You don't like the cost of safe wiring? Would you rather pay to restore the old pumping system from before the war, with all the push rods and bell cranks? Would you like to pay to rebuild the dam so you could get power to drive it? No? I didn't think so. I can see the answer on your face."

Winkler was turning red. "Who are you, you young puppy, to talk to the head of an enterprise like this?"

Bosboom fixed Winkler with an icy glare and slammed his open hand down on the Italian installation manual. "Who am I, Herr Winkler? The examiners at Leiden consider me a civil engineer. Mr. Reardon is satisfied that I know enough about electricity to give sound advice to his customers. I'm the man who can tell you how to keep from walking into a worse disaster than the one you've already suffered. The Lord protect your men! What you have here would never have been built in any of the mines around Grantville. If the state inspectors didn't stop it, the UMWA would."

"Now what are you saying? Are you threatening me with the UMWA?"

"Oh, be serious! The UMWA isn't so foolish as to rely on companies or their representatives to tell them about dangerous mines. Now if you're through trying to bully us into rebuilding this whole thing without charging for it, you can start taking notes, and we'll discuss practical action to get your mine pumped out without killing anyone."

****

Winkler went growling and sputtering back to his office with his papers and notes.

Gerd watched the engineer for a minute as he started packing up his tools, still working one-handed. Finally he said, "Herr Bosboom, I don't think I've ever heard a speech like that one. Certainly not to old Winkler."

"I hope I did right. I hope I ...