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Point Source

Written by Gorg Huff

When dealing with the 1632 universe we are dealing with a point source in advancing technology. It is not, when it comes right down to it, analogous to much of anything in our history. When the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk they arguably beat all the other guys to the punch. (I say arguably because just about every country in the developed world claims that they have somebody who did it first. Not to mention a bunch in the less developed world.) But even if Orville and Wilber got there first, it was not by much. When the first steam engines were built in our timeline there were hundreds, even thousands, of places where they could be built at a similar rate. While there have been times in our history that had point sources for specific technology and areas that excelled in technology in general, there has never in our history been anything really analogous to the Ring of Fire.

What is the effect that this point source going to have? The most common assumption is that it's going to slow things down. There are only so many machine shops and only so many up-timers. Most of the up-timers have no particular skill training or talent. The few, the select few, who can actually do anything useful are going to be snowed under doing the essential things. They are not going to have time to mess around with reinventing steam engines, stamp presses, transistors, amplifiers, and all the rest of that stuff. In my view the problem with that assumption is that it carries with it a couple of hidden assumptions. The first of those hidden assumptions is the Atlas Shrugged view of the world. The notion, to put it bluntly, that most people are drones incapable of truly useful or original work and only the few—the elite, the superior—are qualified to create and, naturally, to run things. The second mostly unstated assumption is you have to have an up-timer running things. This is a slightly less offensive version of the same deal because while it still relegates most of the world to the servants quarters, it does so on the basis of environment rather than innate nature. "After they've been sufficiently acculturated, we'll let the down-timers play too."

Okay, I'm overstating the case and rather a lot. Even if you count every drunken bum and two year old in the Ring of Fire as the next Lincoln, Carnegie, or Edison there still ain't enough of them to go around. And it's true that someone who can read and comprehend modern English is pretty necessary to the process. And physically there are only five machine shops: three job shops, the one at the high school, and the one at the power plant. And while there were more computers, books, heavy machinery and infrastructure in Mannington than we estimated, it's still not enough to go around.

So what?

That's a serious question, by the way, not a denial of the issue. How will those issues affect productivity and for how long?

When the hardware store runs out of six-penny nails, it runs out of six-penny nails and that's it? Well, no. There's that guy who has turned his car dealership into a nail-making shop. The thing is, when you go into a hardware shop in the early twenty first-century—or the middle twentieth for that matter—there are more than a few kinds of nails. Not just millions of nails, hundreds of kinds of nails from little bitty staples and tacks to great big heavy spikes.

When the hardware store runs out of up-time made nails it will restock with down-time made nails and while there will likely be just as many nails, there will be two things different. One, there won't be as many kinds of nails, four or five sizes maybe. Two, they will be more expensive. The machines that they can get at the transformed car dealership simply won't, can't be, as efficient as the up-time factories that had machines that turned out hundreds of nails a minute. And the iron or steel wire they use will be more expensive to get. And to get a six-penny nail and a twelve-penny nail takes two nail making lines. So if you can make three lines and cover most of your market by running them harder or make six lines and a few more kinds of nails, you want to make three lines. Those early days are not going to be the time for niche marketing. The nail factory, the nut factory, the hammer factory, these all have ready-made investors in the people whose businesses need nails, hammers, nuts and bolts. At the same time, they are going to have to work things out so that they can get by with only a few sizes of nails, nuts, bolts, hammers, tongs, and so on.

Fredric is starting a distillery. He knows what sizes of nuts and bolts are available in Grantville from the new nut and bolt factory that is just starting up. He knows because the newspapers and radio, even the TV, have carried the news, complete with specifications. So he makes the holes to fit the sort of nuts and bolts that are available. He does it that way because his distillery won't support a special size of nut and bolt. And he doesn't want to pay blacksmith prices for handmade nuts and bolts. Gustav, who is making wagon wheels with up-time style bearings, does the same thing. He attaches his bearings to his wheels with standard nuts and bolts. Kelly Construction had input into the sizes that the nail factory produces; they had to figure in advance what basic sizes they could get by with and lobby for those sizes.

The machine shops are busy turning out computer-free machine tools so that the good stuff can be saved for important jobs, while they are also turning out the specialized machines that are needed for industries. The steel wire puller that will turn a bar of heated steel into steel wire so that it can be run through a nail maker which will snip off lengths of steel wire, sharpen one end and blunt the other into a nail head to make nails. In the middle of which, they are being interrupted with orders for cannons for Gustav Adolph and plate armor for the APCs and other emergencies.

It's not like our world where there are a dozen manufacturers competing for every niche market in tiny tacks. Instead, it's an extreme case of the old Ford motto of "They come in any color you want as long as it's black." You can have cheap nails—very cheap nails by down-time standards—if you're willing to have the standard sizes that they make. If not, go see a blacksmith and spend twenty or more times as much per nail.

There is a natural corollary to that. When the nail guy is deciding what size nails he's going to make, he spends some time looking for the size that can be used by the largest market. And that is going to be the guiding principle of the early industry in and around Grantville and in and around Magdeburg: "What's the most useful design/size for the largest market?"

Not everyone is going to follow that philosophy. There's the guy who built a hovercraft and he did pretty well with it. Not real well, because it was a niche market and a niche that was going to shrink as the railroads and the steamboats came more and more on line. But the niche was never going to go away entirely, so he could have made a go of it if he wasn't a horse's hind end. But he never would have become a really rich guy, not like the Stone family—or the guy who did the nails, for that matter. Nor like the Schmidt family or the Higgins family. They make three models of sewing machine because when you're dealing with leather, sail cloth and stuff people wear, three is about the minimum number you can get away with. Plenty will begin pouring out of the golden horn of Grantville almost immediately. Variety will take a little longer. A lot longer. A whole lot longer.

Of course, pouring in this case is a relative term. In terms of the size of the USE, its closest relative is dribbling. Take, for example, the steam engines that Adolph Schmidt starts producing in late 1633. Assume that his production rate gets up to ten cylinders of steam engine per day, 365 days a year. That means that by late fall 1634 there will be a grand total of . . . wait for it . . . 3650 cylinders of engines. They will be put together into engines of various sizes, one-cylinder engines all the way up to a few forty-cylinder engines. (Remember my comment about "What's the most useful design/size for the largest market?" this is an example of what I meant by it. Not necessarily the fewest parts per engine but the fewest kinds of parts for the largest number of engine types they can manage.) Call it an average of three cylinders per engine, that's 1217 engines or thereabouts. At the end of 1634, in all of the USE, there are fewer Schmidt steam engines than there were internal combustion engines in Grantville on the day of the Ring of Fire. In terms of horsepower, there's less than there was in the school parking lot. On the other hand, the USE is, just from that one plant in Magdeburg, 14,600 horses richer in motive power. Motive power that is several times as efficient in terms of usage cost as the horses it replaces.

All in all, it's better than nothing but not a lot better than nothing. Where are those 1217 steam engines in the fall of 1634? Well, here's where they might be:

637 might be in moderately prosperous villages, where around plowing time they are put into a tractor frame and used to plow the field. After harvest time they run a thresher or a mill wheel. The rest of the time they run other appliances of one sort or another, depending on the village.

317 might be running small to medium boats up and down the Elbe River, mostly privately owned and more than a few built in the Magdeburg ship yard. Those boats, in turn, are shipping goods upriver as far as Prague and often enough out onto the North Sea to Amsterdam or even London. A couple of those are using forty-cylinder one-ton 160hp engines in support of sails. That is, they are on single- or double-masted sailing ships and they start up the engines when the wind isn't blowing the way they want it to.

178 might be running small generators which are providing electrical power to wealthy households and palaces from Hamburg to Prague, or the needed electricity to this or that factory.

39 might be running steam wagons for wealthy industrialists to ride to the theater in, thereby proving how wealthy they are, or carrying goods over good roads. Not all of those steam wagons would be in Magdeburg. There will be some in Prague, Hamburg, other places. Heck, Louis of France might have one. Ferdinand III might have one. He likes cars, it's said.

26 might be busted by someone who didn't read the instructions, and been replaced by Schmidt Steam.

20 might be in factories running fans or water pumps or other equipment, including one that is providing power for thirty-four sewing machines in the readymade garment industry.

Or, of course, they might be in any number of other places. The only thing that is certain is that, in the fall of 1634 assuming Adolph and co. are putting out ten cylinders worth or twenty cylinders worth of steam engines a day, it's not enough. Not nearly enough. They come flooding out of the Magdeburg factory and disappear as though eaten by a Boojum.

All of which brings us to the Boojum, which is central Germany—the USE to central Europe. Eleven million people in the USE, twenty-five million in France, millions more in Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and even England and Russia. Millions and millions of people, most of whom are desperately poor. Haiti poor. Bangladesh poor. And yet, relatively well off compared to the rest of the world. For most people in the seventeenth century, life sucked great big lemons and less savory things.

They were not poor, even then, because of a lack of productive capacity. It was more the reverse. The Mercantilists, as they would be named in another century and a half by a Scottish economist with his own axes to grind, were stuck in a zero sum game. Money was gold and silver and there wasn't enough of it to support the economy they had. There are economists out there who, like Adam Smith, have their own political axes to grind and will tell you that the market will adjust, that Adam's invisible guiding hand will put things right. Ah, no! In fact, it doesn't and the Thirty Years' War is one of the better examples of what actually does happen. Prices do go down some, but even more, productivity shrinks to fit the money supply. Now the theory can be saved by changing the definition of "right" to "really sucks to be you" and proclaiming that everything has been put right. And the very early money ...