It's funny to say. At the beginning of the war between the East Coast Republic of China and the British, the white elite group of natives of La Plata, led by the Rodriguez family, collectively dissociated themselves from the East Coasters, fearing that they would be attacked by British ships. At that time, they not only closed the sea trade routes of Colonia, but even took the opportunity to inflate the prices of urgently needed goods on the east coast, and demanded that the people on the east coast lower the prices of export goods.

After the signing of the peace agreement between the East Coast and the British in March this year, seeing that the powerful East India Company had no way to take the East Coast, they only managed to make a draw that was not embarrassing or embarrassing, and the Laplaceans were completely on their knees. In order to make up for the previous mistakes, when they saw the lack of funds for the development of the East Coast Republic, the sixteen families led by the Rodriguez Chamber of Commerce jointly provided a low-interest loan of 200,000 yuan to the East Coast Republic of China. The annual interest rate is only a low point, which is the meaning of the meaning.

Since these La Platans know each other so well, and they will still be asked for in the future, then the people of the East Coast will naturally no longer pursue their previous bad things, and the two sides will ostensibly reconcile again.

Compared to the embarrassment of the people of La Plata, the Almeida family in São Vicente, Brazil, is much smarter. During the war, they got along well with the British and supplied British ships; On the other hand, they secretly transmitted important information to the people on the east coast, and after the war, they immediately sent a large number of industrial raw materials urgently needed by the east coast to the port of the east coast on credit.

Of course, after the end of the war, they also saw the great potential of the Eastern Republic and did not forget to continue to invest in maintaining the relationship between the two sides. Several Brazilian families in San Vicente banded together to provide a low-interest loan of $150,000 to the East Coast, also at the rate of one cent per annum.

With these two loans totaling 350,000 yuan. The Executive Committee successfully paid part of the fees for the Ming Dynasty immigrants. Then, after a rough estimate of next year's fiscal revenue and expenditure. The Executive Committee boldly demanded that the Portuguese double the number of Ming immigrants transported in the following years. At the same time, two flute-type merchant ships and a frigate gunboat were built in one go.

The construction of these three ships caused a battle between the Dayuhe Naval Shipyard and the Zhenhai Shipyard. In the end, the Executive Committee made a balance, and the orders for the two merchant ships went to the Dayuhe Shipyard and the frigate gunboats went to the Zhenhai Shipyard. After the order was issued, not only the two shipyards immediately began to prepare for production, but also some supporting manufacturers relying on the shipyard to survive, such as anchor chain factory, shipyard factory, canvas workshop, coop workshop, cable workshop and other enterprises also began to make active preparations.

In order to ensure the smooth completion of the three ships, with the approval of the Executive Committee, the Government Council specially set up a commercial bank, the United Industrial Credit Bank, to provide commercial loans to some state-owned enterprises and small private workshops in China to promote domestic industrial development. The start-up reserve of the United Industrial Credit Bank is $300,000. Among them, the Ministry of Finance contributed 240,000 yuan, and the East Coast Company invested 60,000 yuan. Compared with the Northwest Reclamation Bank, the United Industrial Credit Bank is a joint-stock commercial bank, and the shares of the East Coast Company account for as much as 20%, which is a sign of the deepening penetration of the national economy by the crossers.

After the establishment of the United Industrial Credit Bank, it immediately issued a number of loans, the most important of which was a loan of 3,000 yuan to provide start-up capital for the newly established Northern Gunpowder Factory.

Speaking of this gunpowder factory, it has to be mentioned that the Executive Committee is now determined to get rid of the dependence on foreign gunpowder trade, and the self-production of saltpeter, one of the important raw materials of gunpowder, is quite crucial. There is a lack of natural saltpeter mines in the territory of the Republic of East Coast of China, so it has to resort to manual means of obtaining it.

Although some people in the previous crossing crowd were vague and vague, they could extract nitrate from latrines and manure pits. But in the end, no one delved into it. First, because there are few people who understand chemistry in the crowd, most of them have been transferred to study the important coal chemical industry and glass industry. Either they were transferred to the Corps Fort to teach, resulting in no successor to the project; Second, because the project itself is dirty, tiring, bitter, and there is a possibility of illness, and the channels for purchasing gunpowder from Europe are relatively smooth, no one has paid too much attention to this project. It is not that no one has ever mentioned the need to produce their own gunpowder, but these proposals have been drowned out in a sea of other project applications, and have not been taken seriously enough.

In the later stages of the war with the British, the navy on the east coast used up almost most of the country's gunpowder stockpiles, and the situation was critical for a time. It can be said that if the British had held out for a few months to half a year longer, perhaps the situation would have been completely different.

After the gunpowder crisis, the people on the east coast finally learned to be obedient, and while vigorously hoarding gunpowder and increasing stocks, they began to try to produce their own gunpowder in order to get rid of the dependence on gunpowder imports from Spain, France and other countries. At present, the main components of black powder used on the east coast are potassium nitrate, sulfur and carbon. The carbon problem is easy to solve, and potassium nitrate and sulfur are a bit more difficult, because neither of them has been produced on the east coast before.

The sulphur is imported from Chile as the finest volcanic sulphur, while the nitrate (the main ingredient, potassium nitrate) is purchased from France, which is expensive and the production is limited. As a result, the East Coast gave up after experimenting with homemade gunpowder for a while and began to import gunpowder directly from Europe, primarily Spain. Of course, this kind of take-it-or-leave-it doctrine is definitely unacceptable now, so there is the newly established Northern Gunpowder Factory.

As the name suggests, the main thing produced by this factory is gunpowder, more precisely black powder. Sulfur, one of the two main raw materials for the production of black powder, can only continue to be imported due to the lack of natural sulfur ore, but fortunately, Chile is not far away, and there has been a lot of sulfur flowing into Colonia from La Plata. It has previously been proposed to recover sulphur (mainly sulphur from hydrogen sulphide gas) in coke oven gas in coking plants, which can avoid air pollution and turn waste into treasure, the best of both worlds.

The process of recycling sulphur is not complicated, but the processing of its production equipment is still beyond the current industrial capacity of the Eastern Coast Republic. Perhaps only when large-scale hydraulic presses, rolling mills, machine tools and other industrial tools are ready, can we get a glimpse of the mysteries in this. However, the industrial sector is also actively researching alternatives, that is, how to use existing technologies to bypass these problems when it is not possible to produce equipment such as large reactors, so as to realize the recovery of waste sulfur from coal gas.

The problem of sulfur may not be solved for a while, but with the arrival of several new Ming craftsmen, the production of nitrate has made great progress. The methods of these Ming artisans were not new, and they used traditional composting methods. That is, a large amount of animal manure and urine and corpses are crushed and spread in an open space with high soil moisture content and good ventilation, and then a large amount of plant ash is sprinkled on it. If the temperature is right, after a period of nitrification, a thin layer of white crystalline material can be scraped off the land, which is nitrate. After the scraped nitrate soil is sorted and purified, potassium nitrate with extremely high purity can be obtained.

This nitrification reaction is very simple. Because animal manure and carcasses contain a large amount of nitrogen acid, under certain conditions, it can react with nitrifying bacteria in the soil to produce nitric acid, and then nitric acid reacts with potassium rich in plant ash to produce nitrate - potassium nitrate, and the artificial composting method is just to artificially provide such a suitable condition and place for this reaction to occur.

Immediately after this method was proposed, the technicians in the chemical sector carried out small-scale experimental production, and the results proved that this method was completely feasible. In fact, it is not surprising at all, because at this time Europe and the Ming Dynasty did this.

Now that the method is feasible, the next step is to start large-scale production. On November 15, while Guo Zili's exploration fleet was still adrift at sea, a large-scale factory had been built in the wasteland outside Jushu Village in the north of Ping'an Town. This is the nitrate workshop of the Northern Gunpowder Factory, and a large number of doors and windows are opened on the walls of the factory to keep ventilation and ventilation; In the factory, ten acres of nitrate fields have been opened up. Workers dug a shallow pit of 10 acres in the ground, the bottom of which was poured with concrete and covered with a thin layer of soil.

On November 16, the nitrate workshop started trial production. Workers crushed animal manure and carcasses collected from nearby areas, spread them evenly on top of the shallow pit and thin soil, and then sprinkled water into the soil to maintain the moisture and humidity in the soil. The factory is well ventilated, and there is a lot of glass on the top directly above the nitrate field to let sunlight shine through. With such excellent conditions, nitrifying bacteria in the soil should be able to gradually react these nitroacid-rich substances into nitrite and nitric acid.

In the following period, workers often sprinkle some plant ash on top of the nitrate field, which provides an opportunity for the gradual formation of nitric acid in the soil to react the potassium rich in the plant ash into potassium nitrate. At this time, the east coast area began to gradually enter the late spring and early summer, and both temperature and humidity were more favorable to nitrification.

On December 31, under the watchful eyes of many technicians and factory workers in the chemical group, the first nitrate collection in the nitrate workshop began. At this time, a thin layer of nitrate soil has been formed on the top of the nitrate field, which is the potassium nitrate mixture. The workers carefully scraped off this layer of nitrate soil and collected it into a container, and after collecting it, they continued to fill the nitrate field, compost it, and sprinkle grass and wood ash to allow the nitrate field to continue to react.

The scraped nitrate was quickly taken for simple impurity removal, cleaning, purification, and then the resulting pure potassium nitrate was weighed and calculated, and the final result was surprising - a total of more than three tons of pure potassium nitrate were scraped out of ten acres of nitrate. And these three tons of potassium nitrate, combined with carbon and sulfur, can make a full four tons of gunpowder, which is already a staggering amount. It is important to know that the "10 August" class battleships only need less than 200 kilograms of black powder for a salvo, and eight tons of black powder is enough for a war monster like the "10 August" class to fire more than 20 salvos.

In addition to being used as gunpowder, these potassium nitrates can also be used as fertilizers and nitric acid, which is of great value! The production of the nitrate workshop was a great success!

PS: The idea of installing glass on the top of the workshop and sprinkling grass and wood ash on the top of the nitrate field in this chapter comes from the pheasant mulberry, and I would like to thank you very much. (To be continued......)