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In the blink of an eye, it is December, and in the middle of winter, it is almost dripping into ice.

Xianyang and Nanyang are different, and completely different, since entering October, it will snow every three or five days, and it is all the kind of goose feather snow, sometimes for several days, and then finally the snow stopped, melted, and before anyone was happy, he woke up one night, and Nima covered it with a thick layer.

After entering December, the snow almost never melted, layer upon layer, and the Wei River outside the city was completely frozen, and it was completely impossible to go out of the house when it was cold, and the pee would be frozen into popsicles.

"Nima, I can't stay anymore, I can't stay anymore! What a chicken is a broken place! Chen Xu cursed the ghost place of Xianyang over and over again.

Although later generations have also experienced this kind of cold winter, and last winter in Xiaohe Village also experienced two heavy snowfalls, but it is completely small compared to the endless heavy snow in front of them.

"Hou Ye, every year in the cold winter and Xianyang, why be anxious, the weather is cold, just play mahjong at home for recreation, if Hou Ye still feels bored, I will let the dancing girl in the house come to sing and dance for Hou Ye to relax!" The housekeeper of the Hou Mansion hurriedly said with a smile.

"Forget it, I'll go to the Academy of Sciences, by the way, go buy a dog and come back, and eat dog meat hot pot at night!" Chen Xu got off the kang and beckoned a few entourages to prepare the carriage to go out.

Last winter, he was still in Xiaohe Town, playing mahjong and chess with Wang Wuwang and Wang Qiyu Wuya and others in heavy snow, Xinger Yu Ji sang and danced on the kang, the water was gentle and Chen Jiangshi sat on the kang and knitted sweaters, and the weather was sunny and walked by the river to climb the mountain, digging some yams and medicinal herbs, and lived a peaceful and happy life.

Chen Xu sat in the bumpy carriage and missed his distant relatives, and arrived at the Academy of Sciences more than ten minutes later.

The current Academy of Sciences is completely different from when it first started, and there are several more departments.

One is the hydraulic engineering office, the person in charge is Hu Kuan, and Chen Xu also hung up a position for him in the craftsman Shaofu, and he can be regarded as a real civil servant, so in recent times, Hu Kuan has been soaking in the office all day and night like chicken blood, and even went to the factory outside the city for three days, and took a few subordinates to pull a large bundle of measuring ropes to measure the river embankment, and began to design the location of the dam and the waterwheel according to the sketch of the waterwheel drawn by Chen Xu.

The only thing he is better than the people of the Qin Dynasty is that he knows that he can use the dam to control the flow of water to drive the waterwheel, and even how to use it after the waterwheel can operate normally, but this does not hinder the future development, as long as the waterwheel is made, and then put forward the application principle, organize the craftsmen to work together, and always be able to solve the problem and put it into practice.

The Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period were a period of unprecedented prosperity of various theories of Chinese civilization.

The Qin and Han dynasties were the most prosperous period for the development of a large number of theories into practical application, especially the development of smelting and agriculture, which can be said to have laid a strong foundation for the prosperity of Chinese civilization.

That is to say, the current Great Qin is in a huge turning point of Chinese civilization, from a plate of scattered princes to the era of war after unification, there is no war year after year, although there is only more than ten years of unification, but a large number of theories began to be transformed into practical results, coupled with the Qin Dynasty's emphasis on craftsmen and farmers and rewards, the primitive farming civilization is rapidly changing to intensive cultivation methods, if this process is not interrupted after the death of Qin Shi Huang, the population has not gone through a cliff-like decline, a hundred years later, Great Qin will inevitably develop to a very prosperous stage.

Therefore, with the gentle push of Chen Xu's little butterfly, this process will develop faster and faster.

So now with the support of Qin Shi Huang, Chen Xu is not worried that he can push the carriage of Great Qin to gallop forward quickly, but the premise is that the Great Qin Empire cannot collapse.

In addition to the research and development of hydraulic engineering led by Hu Kuan, there is also a movable type printing research institute, an optical research institute and a gunpowder research institute.

Movable type printing is very simple in theory and application, mainly difficult in a creative, and Chen Xu just simply put forward his own ideas and then threw it to the steward and a group of craftsmen to study, mainly to make movable type is more complicated, and all have to be carved with a small seal, but this is not a problem, Xianyang is more proficient in writing and carving craftsmen, first use wood to carve out movable type, and then typesetting and printing can see the effect.

But this matter is still in secret, Chen Xu is ready to start promoting after the beginning of spring, the opportunity is when 10,000 new-style horse pawns sweep Henan, when the time comes, he summons some scholars like Huangfu Que and cultured, knowledgeable and ideal scribes to accompany the army to the front to interview, write what happened on the battlefield into articles, and then run a newspaper to publicize the current affairs news of the battlefield every once in a while, in this way to publicize the bravery and fearlessness of the soldiers of Daqin, and at the same time let the people of the world be proud and glorious of Daqin's martial arts.

Public opinion propaganda is the most important means of rallying the people's will, and at the same time, newspapers can also be used to propagate some of their own theories to build momentum for more reform propaganda in the future.

Chen Xu first went to the Printing Research Institute to inspect it, and there were seven or eight craftsmen and more than a dozen helpers in the two rooms inside and outside.

The carpenter will make the wood with a fine and flat texture into a height of one inch, five points of length and width of the wood, the helper uses gravel to polish the surface smooth, and finally uses a simple vernier caliper to measure, the error can not exceed half a minute, the qualified one is taken to the carving craftsman to carve out the text on it, and the carving is handed over to the supervisor to check the qualified storage.

In order to cooperate with the printing, Chen Xu also designed a set of retrieval methods according to the radical, and then imitated the classification method of the hospital pharmacy, made a three-storey rotary type movable type storage device, according to the radical identification classification of these movable type, when using the map Suo Ji can quickly find the words to be used, of course, these are Chen Xu's initial design, once the need for large-scale printing later, the situation must be much more complicated, a book dozens of hundreds of pages, at the same time typesetting printing may require dozens of hundreds of sets of repeated movable type, And because many words are used differently, the number of production will not be the same, so it seems to be simple in theory, but it is cumbersome to put into practice.

It is said that everything is difficult at the beginning, but in fact, it is difficult in the middle and difficult in the back!

However, the difficult things in the middle and the difficult things in the back Chen Xu were handed over to the steward of the Printing Research Institute for a headache, he was the Einstein of Daqin, and he was only responsible for proposing the method and conjecture the ending, and the verification problems in the middle were not his responsibility, it was the craftsman's business, he only wanted the result.

After going around the Printing Research Institute and encouraging all the staff inside, Chen Xu went to the Gunpowder Research Institute.

The Optics Research Institute and the Gunpowder Research Institute are all managed by Chen Xu himself, because these two things are really difficult.

Gunpowder Chen Xu was successfully developed in Xiaohe Village, but limited by the production and purity of sulfur and potassium nitrate, the output was limited, and Chen Xu had seen the black powder of the earth gun was the size of cat litter granules, so the energy released when burning was relatively concentrated, and it instantly produced a powerful explosion effect. But it was only as good as expected.

But it is not easy to get uniform granular gunpowder, it is necessary to add some coagulant to the powdered gunpowder and stir and beat it repeatedly and then dry, but in this process requires very, very careful care, and a little spark may cause irreparable heavy losses, so Chen Xu carried out it more secretly and carefully, specially carried out in a separate warehouse of the Academy of Sciences, all the utensils are made of bamboo and wood, there can be no metal and flames, and there are only two helpers for the time being, two dumb slaves bought from the slave market.

Seeing Chen Xu come in, the two dumb slaves knelt on the ground and kowtowed together, and then babbled and pulled Chen Xu and Chen Xu to see the results of their production.

There are a few bamboo plaques on the slightly hot warm kang, which is spread with a layer of black gunpowder, some are irregular size granules, some are semi-powdery, Chen Xu pinched the gunpowder of several bamboo plaques next to each other and checked it by hand, some have been dried, some are still damp, the formula of these gunpowder is almost the same, seven parts potassium nitrate, two parts charcoal and one point sulfur, this ratio is adjusted by Chen Xu after many tests in Xiaohe Village, the higher the potassium nitrate content, the better the explosive effect of gunpowder, but the higher it is, the more unstable it is. Therefore, the higher potassium nitrate content Chen Xu did not dare to experiment.

Chen Xu finally selected several gunpowders that looked to have good granularity, brought them to the workbench, and sifted them through two bamboo with different thicknesses, leaving behind granular black powder that looked relatively uniform in size.

This is already an authentic black powder, not the so-called fireworks gunpowder, which already has a very strong explosive power, but according to the different coagulants, the explosion effect still needs to be confirmed after the test explosion.

"Fetch some clay pots!" Chen Xu grabbed several gunpowder particles with his hands and read them again, and then ordered.

A dumb slave hurriedly brought over a few red clay pots slightly larger than his fist.

This is specially made by Chen Xu, with a big belly and a thin mouth, the diameter of the bottle mouth is only less than an inch, and the capacity is not large, and it can put about three taels of gunpowder.

First insert a lead with the thickness of a ballpoint pen refill, then pour the gunpowder into it with a funnel, shake it gently after pouring it to make it tighter, and then carefully plug the mouth of the bottle with the crumbs of hay and twine, so that only a half-foot-long lead is left outside.