It has been five days since Zhu Hongsan knew about this, and Ma Xiaofang knew that he couldn't go out, so he asked his third brother Ma Jingyuan to come and report to his lover. After listening to Ma Jingyuan's whole story, Zhu Hongsan smiled secretly in his heart and asked, "What about your eldest brother and second brother?" ”

Ma Jingyuan said: "My eldest brother returned to HN the day before yesterday because he was busy with HN affairs. My second brother is reading at home. ”

Ma Jingyuan thought for a while and said, "Sanwazi, let me tell you, you have to be nice to my sister in the future?" After this incident, basically no one dared to come to my sister to propose marriage, I don't think you can marry you, and if you don't treat my sister well in the future, I will make you look good. ”

Zhu Hongsan knows some things about the Ma family, and knows that this Ma Jingyuan has a relatively low sense of existence in the Ma family, but he didn't expect to be so good to his half-sister, Zhu Hongsan asked: "Ma Laosan, isn't your aunt not good to you?" Why do you still maintain Xiaofang? ”

Ma Jingyuan said: "You don't know, in our family, only my sister is sincere to me, really treat me as a family, my aunt is indifferent to me, the eldest brother is too far away from home and usually has little contact, the second brother is a prodigy, and he is polite to me on the surface, but I know that in my heart he treats me as a younger brother at all, maybe he is a little better than the servants in the family." Only my sister secretly gave me steamed buns at night when I was punished by my father and didn't let me eat. So if you treat your sister badly in the future, I won't let you go. ”

After Ma Jingyuan finished speaking, he left, looking at Ma Jingyuan's back, Zhu Hongsan thought: "It turns out that no one is really stupid, no matter who you are, as long as you are really good to him, you will be rewarded." ”

—————————— Dividing Line——————————

Time flies in a hurry, and in a blink of an eye, it is the seventh year of Chongzhen. The chaos in the world was a foregone conclusion, and in the second year of Chongzhen, Li Zicheng finally had no way out to vote for his uncle Gao Yingxiang. It was also this year that the murderous demon Zhang Xianzhong also started an incident in Shaanxi, calling himself the Eight Kings. The peasant uprising at the end of the Ming Dynasty and the two heavyweights finally stepped onto the stage of history.

From the first year of Chongzhen to the third year, there were more than 100 peasant armies in the whole territory of Shaanxi, and the peasant army has become a burning prairie trend. At this time, due to the corruption and incompetence of the officers and generals, thousands of combat-effective border troops mutinied due to lack of pay, and also joined the peasant army and became the backbone.

At this time, the peasant army was fighting, and it was spontaneous and blind. The central government ordered the trilateral governor Yang He to adopt a strategy of "suppressing and appeasement at the same time, and focusing on appeasement". However, the central government was unable to feed the large number of hungry people, and the people who had already been appeased and rose again. Yang He was imprisoned for this.

At this time, a powerful man Hong Chengchou appeared, and Chongzhen ordered him to succeed the governor of Shaanxi to change to the policy of "suppressing the strong and appeased, first suppressing and then appeased", and concentrated his forces to attack the Shaanxi peasant army. The peasant armies of various units successively advanced eastward, and in the fourth to sixth years of Chongzhen, the center of activity was moved to Shaanxi, and the operation also developed from extremely scattered and individual battles to relatively concentrated, echoing each other. Gao Yingxiang, Zhang Xianzhong, Li Zicheng, Luo Rucai and other departments of more than 200,000 people, known as the 36 battalions, once broke Daning, Zezhou, Shouyang and other cities.

In the winter of the sixth year of Chongzhen, Gao Yingxiang and other 24 battalions of more than 100,000 people broke through the encirclement of the official army, transferred to western Henan and northern Chu, and officially entered the hinterland of the Central Plains. After entering the Central Plains, the peasant army took Yunyang as the center, and its divisions were interspersed between Henan, Chu, Sichuan, and Shaanxi, taking advantage of the weakness of the officers and troops to defend the territory and not coordinating with each other, to carry out guerrilla mobile operations. In order to change the passive situation of "different powers and mutual wait-and-see," the central government has adopted the principle of "concentrating forces and encircling and suppressing each other in an all-round way."

In the seventh year of Chongzhen, with Chen Qiyu as the governor of the five provinces, he unified the command of the official armies of Shaanxi, Jin, Yuchuan and Huguang, and attacked from all sides, in an attempt to annihilate the peasant armies of all departments in one fell swoop. The peasant army successively moved into Hanzhong, and the encirclement and suppression failed. Chongzhen Zhu dismissed Chen Qiyu and succeeded him as the governor of the five provinces with Hong Chengchou. When he mobilized the official army into Shaanxi and reorganized the siege, except for Li Zicheng, who still insisted on flowing in Shaanxi and Gansu, the other ministries were transferred to HN again It is now June of the seventh year of Chongzhen, what is our protagonist Zhu Hongsan doing?

Zhu Hongsan is fifteen years old this year (the ancients counted him as a fictitious age), and finally had financial power the year before last, and his mother Zhao Chunhua has become more and more old in recent years. In fact, my mother is not very old, just thirty-four years old. However, under the medical conditions of the Ming Dynasty, the average life expectancy had just reached thirty-five years old, and thirty-four was already considered old age. Zhao Chunhua's energy has become more and more insufficient in the past few years, and when he found that his son had grown up, he handed over all the financial rights of the family to his son.

Zhu Hongsan used 200 taels of silver to buy a farm outside the city, with five houses, and built five more for himself. This will become Zhu Hongsan's base camp. Tie Niu's father died last year, Zhu Hongsan bought Tie Niu's blacksmith shop, and now Tie Niu is working for Zhu Hongsan, making all the weapons designed by Zhu Hongsan in the farm.

At this time, Zhu Hongsan had built a small steelmaking mill in later generations, and Zhu Hongsan had proved that steel could be smelted with charcoal and pig iron products, but the disadvantage was that it was difficult to grasp the proportion of materials, so what steel could be produced every time was completely up to luck.

Zhu Hongsan decided to use a converter side blowing method for iron smelting, using the converter side blowing method, to add a certain proportion of wrought iron. The proportion is about 75% of pig iron, 25% of wrought iron, and a very small amount of sand and baking soda are required, because China's iron ore is pyrite, so the steel is brittle, and the role of sand is to cause acidic slag and absorb the phosphorus contained in pig iron, and the role of baking soda is to carry out desulfurization treatment.

After Zhu Hongsan discovered diatomaceous earth, he fired it into refractory bricks. An iron furnace was built on the farm, a round iron furnace that was not large, but much more complex than an converter. Because the converter requires that the molten iron coming out of the furnace must reach 1380 degrees Celsius. This temperature is difficult to reach with ordinary fuels, and the maximum temperature that can be reached by humans is 1250 degrees Celsius before the regenerator.

To reach this temperature, it is necessary to replace the cold blast with a hot blast. This is called a "regenerator". The concept of hot blast was invented by the Englishman Nelson and applied to the ironworks in Glasgow in 1829.

The regenerator used by Zhu Hongsan was roughly the same level of technology as the British steel mill in 1850, using a cast-iron tubular hot blast furnace. The cold blast passes from the upper branch of the blast main to each furnace, and through the arched cast iron pipe located over the fire into the tube on the other side of the heat exchanger chamber, and then into the air outlet of the furnace.

The plant is sealed in a thick arched furnace made of bricks and refractory materials to preserve and reflect as much heat as possible, and the blast air is heated directly to a temperature of 300 degrees Celsius, enough to melt the lead. In addition, another measure is exhaust gas heating, from the top of the iron-melting furnace with ceramic pipes to the exhaust gas of the iron-making furnace out, from the upper part into the regenerative furnace, and then from the lower part of the exhaust gas outlet.

Without a regenerative furnace, it is possible to make iron or steel, but it is completely incomparable in terms of production efficiency. According to the calculations of the British, the early regenerative furnaces increased the supply air to more than 300 degrees Celsius, and the output of the same amount of fuel iron increased by 3 times compared to cold blast.

The furnace is almost finished, and the next step is coking. Zhu Hongsan used charcoal in the early stage, but coke is still the most ideal fuel. Steelmaking Zhu Hongsan knew what to do, after all, the previous metallurgical professional knowledge had not been lost, but coking was not good, so Zhu Hongsan could only adopt a simple soil method of coking.

There are many methods of soil coking, the simplest is the open-air method of piling up, 2~4 tons of coal are piled up into a semi-circle pile on the ground, the bottom diameter is 3~4 meters, the top is covered with straw to ignite, 4~5 days can be coke, the coking rate is only 50%, this method has been used in the era of large iron and steel, and the waste of resources and environmental pollution caused are extremely serious. Now Zhu Hongsan is still in charge of environmental protection issues, saving his life is the most important, and the rest will be talked about later.

After more than half a year of preparation and construction, finally, the coke and pig iron are ready. Zhu Hongsan summoned Tie Niu and some workers, and he repeated several key points with the people in various operating positions: first, the air volume must be adjusted evenly, not big or small, and secondly, when the molten iron is poured into the furnace, it cannot be higher than the tuyere, otherwise the tuyere will be killed, and finally the amount of molten iron poured can not exceed one-sixth of the converter furnace cavity each time, and the workers are required to make a good record, because in the absence of a thermometer, all based on experience, Zhu Hongsan has been ready to produce scrap steel in the first few furnaces.

Two animal blowers began to operate at the same time, each with two cows as the power and two on the side as a backup. A blast is carried out on the iron furnace, the temperature is gradually raised to more than 1300 degrees, the pig iron ingot has been completely melted, and at the same time, the converter is preheated, according to the requirements, the whole converter should be preheated to 1000 degrees Celsius, so as to reduce the temperature loss after the molten iron enters.

Because there is no thermometer, Zhu Hongsan can only rely on experience, at least when he was an intern in the steel mill before, the master taught to judge the temperature by the fire, the molten iron was poured into the converter and began to blow, and the molten iron continued to heat up under the urging of the high temperature hot air.

Zhu Hongsan stared closely at the tongue of fire in the furnace, one by one the iron flowers were constantly bursting, the tongue of fire was red and yellow, then yellow-white, and finally completely white and shiny. This shows that the furnace temperature is constantly rising. The blowing lasted for more than ten minutes, the density of the star-shaped carbon flowers continued to increase, and the white flame tongue changed from short to long, and the carbon combustion entered the peak at this time.

Zhu Hongsan saw that the tongue of fire began to shorten and the carbon flowers thinned out, and he knew that the remaining carbon in the molten iron began to approach the content of steel. He used the rocker to go up and down once or twice to see if there were more carbon sparks, and when he saw that the carbon sparks did not suddenly increase, he ordered the wind to be turned off.

Subsequently, the workers removed the furnace lid and air ducts, and began to beat and scrape the slag, and finally poured. The molding sand is made of 90% yellow sand, 5% clay and 5% white clay. After the casting is formed, it is the steel ingot. As for whether this ingot is high-carbon, medium-carbon and low-carbon, it can't be controlled yet, and it will be judged by Tie Niu, a professional blacksmith, after it cools.

The first furnace produced about 30 tons of steel, which is the minimum amount of input, according to Zhu Hongsan's construction of this blast furnace can produce up to 260 tons of steel. After cooling down just now, Tie Niu took a look, and hit it with a hammer, and ran over happily and said, "Big brother, this pot is all made of steel." ”

The surrounding workers were shocked when they heard this, and for more than half a year, they thought that it was just this white young master who was a loser with the family's money. The steel is all made of hundreds of tempers, and I have never heard of it being able to be practiced directly with a furnace.

Zhu Hongsan nodded and said to the foreman Lao Liu: "Uncle Liu, have you memorized the process just now, especially the color of the fire?" ”

Lao Liu's name is Liu Tiesheng, and his family has been striking iron for generations, and when he first came here, he heard that he was going to build a steelmaking furnace. But after seeing it become a reality, he immediately changed his attitude towards Zhu Hongsan, and even held a disciple ceremony, he felt that this secret of the little minister's family was not passed on, and now he taught me, then I am his disciple, Lao Liu said respectfully: "Master, the disciple remembers." ”

Zhu Hongsan didn't care about Lao Liu's psychological changes, there will be many surprising things in the future, and this is where to go. Zhu Hongsan nodded and said, "Okay, you first refine two furnaces to practice your hands, and you must use the minimum amount of material." ”

Seeing Lao Liu leading people to experiments, don't mention it. I looked at the steel ingots I practiced, and looked at it, which is probably medium carbon steel, that is, the level of strip steel in later generations. But don't forget that it is the Ming Dynasty now, and if you dare to report your ticket, no one in the whole of China may be able to come up with so many hundred steels at once. But it's still less, a gun costs 300 to 500 pounds of steel. It seems that the current steel is going to be used in much-needed areas.

Find the Iron Bull and ask, "How about making your chain mail out of this steel?" ”

Tie Niu said: "Of course, a pair of chain mail weighs about fifty catties, and it only takes thirty catties of this kind of steel to achieve the same protective power." ”

Zhu Hongsan said: "I think the process of your chain mail is too cumbersome, and I will improve your production process when I have time to let the output come up." ”

Tie Niu said happily: "Okay, this time the steel is available, and many things can be built." ”

Zhu Hongsan stopped him and said: "Don't get the others first, if you have time, you can hit 100 gunpowder canisters first, and you want the thinnest ones." ”

"Okay, I'll do it now."

After seeing that he didn't need anything of his own, he told Lao Liu to pay attention to safety, and at the same time told Zhao Tiedan to do a good job of security, and Zhu Hongsan rode back to the city. I haven't been home for half a month for the iron-making furnace, and I don't know what the old lady is in a hurry.

When he was about to get to the gate of the city, Zhu Hongsan saw a shantytown, which was full of hungry people from Henan, because of Li Zicheng, Henan had been destroyed, a large number of hungry people crossed the Yangtze River to Huguang, Wuchang County is still relatively small, there are about 10,000 people, and there are almost 50,000 people in Fucheng.

People die every day, and the county organization people carry the dead out every day, and some of the dead people obviously have traces of knife cuts, which is the beginning of people eating human flesh. I heard that among the homeless people, there are children who lose their children every day. Seeing this, Zhu Hongsan thought that he should start to form a team, the children in the homeless people are a good choice, after a long journey, they are in good health, the children are brainwashed, yes, go home and make a plan.