The 140th vote was added.

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Needless to say, Australia and western North America were directly under the territory of the Middle Ages, all of which were descendants of Chinese immigrants. The population of North America has grown to more than 40 million, and Australia has a population of more than 8 million.

North America does not need to be repeated, where agriculture is developed, industry and mining are equally important, and the total amount of industry is inferior to the United States, but the industrial level is basically the same, and the reason why the total amount is not as good as that of the United States is mainly because the agricultural immigrants controlled by the government are basically self-cultivated farmers, and the workers who are differentiated from the peasants are always scarce, and the scarcity of labor affects industrial development. With the exception of a few highly profitable industries, the market is flooded with goods from China and other industrial countries.

Australia's industry is not very developed, but the development of agriculture and animal husbandry is quite good, and the history is different, the history of Australian animal husbandry is developed on the basis of sheep breeding and wool exports, but now Australia, more or meat livestock, China is not a traditional wool textile production and consumption of large countries, and there are closer Mongolia, Qinghai-Tibet grassland supply raw materials, Australia's wool industry has not developed. Another important reason is that Australia's geographical location is more conducive to Greek immigrants from southern China, but southern immigrants do not have a tradition of farming, and go more to the agricultural land.

It is only in the past few years that the breeding industry has gradually begun to gain scale, which is still because some immigrants from the interior have begun to pour in, and the northern provinces of China also have a tradition of raising sheep, especially immigrants from Shaanxi and Gansu, many places are both agricultural and animal husbandry.

The British, who had introduced high-quality sheep from Europe as early as the time of the exiled prisoners, had been breeding in Australia for a long time, and these sheep could provide high-quality wool, which soon opened up new export products. Australian wool, in terms of quality, is not inferior to the best quality wool in Europe, but the cost of large-scale breeding is much lower than that in Europe. Some of the animal husbandry companies that had completed the accumulation of capital in the Mongolian steppes and the Central Asian steppes began to enter Australia, and they acquired a large amount of semi-desert land from the government that could not be used for agriculture, and hired herders to graze the herdsmen, often more than 100,000 acres of large pastures, making them extremely productive and profitable.

Wool is mainly exported to the European market, because Europe has the most developed wool textile industry, and at the same time, it is also a traditional consumer of wool textiles. In Asian countries such as China and India, wool textiles have not been the main consumer goods, in ancient China, high-end textiles were used for silk, linen cloth was used for resistance, and after the Song Dynasty, mid-range textile cotton cloth was added. Therefore, wool textiles have not been a mainstream consumer product in China, and only in the grassland areas have the habit of consuming wool textiles.

However, in recent years, Australia has developed another commodity, iron ore exports, which are mainly for the Chinese market.

The discovery of mines in northwest Australia has been continuous, and Zhou Lang let the old Zhou Guan occupy this place because he knew that there were iron mines here.

Within a few years of Zhou Guan's occupation, the iron ore here was discovered, not directly promoted by Zhou Lang, but a system of general survey of minerals by the Chinese government, which was in charge of the Tuntian Department of the Ministry of Industry. After acquiring the whole of Australia from the British, they sent people to survey the mineral resources and arable land resources here, and found a large number of mineral deposits, such as gold and iron ore. But in the decades that followed, Australians cared only about the gold mines, and the gold rush continued to expand, attracting a large number of immigrants. However, the iron ore has not been developed, and there is only one reason, the iron ore is mined from Australia, where labor is scarce, and then shipped back to China by ship, facing only a loss of money.

The turning point came five years ago, when the Englishman Bessemer invented a new steelmaking method that could directly smelt iron ore into steel. In the past, steelmaking was to smelt the ore into pig iron first, and then smelt the pig iron by stirring method to mature iron, and then either use the crucible steelmaking method, or use the forging method to smelt steel, the crucible method and the forging and smelting steel have the defects that the cost is too high and the output is too low, resulting in the price of steel has been very high, except for a small number of applications in the military field, it cannot be used in civilian use.

Bessemer's invention of the converter steelmaking method is indeed a genius invention, but it is still based on the discoveries of predecessors, the main principle is to blow air into the molten iron, so that the oxygen in the air and the carbon in the molten iron oxidize the reaction, and finally remove the carbon and smelt the iron into steel. This method of blowing air is called the air boiling method, which was discovered by the American Kelly in 1847, but a complete solution has never been found. Bessemer's innovations were to combine the method of blowing air, to improve the smelting furnace, and to invent the converter, thus making it technically feasible to make steel directly from pig iron.

It is worth mentioning that Bessemer's invention of this method was a conscious attempt to create a large-scale steelmaking method, not by chance, but by conscious research and development based on theoretical knowledge. The motivation that prompted him to study steelmaking methods was mainly to provide raw materials for cannons. Frequent wars in Europe led Bessemer to join the lucrative invention of weapons, and he developed a rifled cannonball, but the British military believed that his cannonballs were powerful enough, but it was difficult to ensure safety because of the large bore pressure. With steel, the cost is too high, and it is difficult to generalize it on ordinary infantry guns.

As a result, Bessemer stepped up the research and development of steelmaking technology and created converter technology, which was a full five years before Bessemer developed the converter steelmaking method in history. It has to be said that because of China's squeeze, the world's technological competition has intensified, and the emergence and promotion of new technologies are much faster than in history.

Bessemer's new technology was soon registered in all countries with patent laws, such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and China, and then rolled out in various countries. Partners were found in England, and soon after the establishment of the smelting furnace, partners were also found in China. In recent years, European inventors, more than one has been successful in China, and they have found that technologies that can succeed in Europe can basically be successful in China, and technologies that cannot succeed in Europe also have a high chance of success in China, as long as the technology is feasible, they can always find a market in China.

Countless inventors, driven by interests, have promoted a large number of new technologies to China, and some Chinese have seen business opportunities and taken the initiative to introduce new technologies. Therefore, in this era, although China has not yet been able to become the primary center of new technologies, the promotion of new technologies in China is not slow at all.

Of course, China is not an invention desert, and the Chinese have begun to show their heads in the field of pharmaceuticals, chemistry, and these more important fields of theory. Tens of thousands of effective traditional Chinese medicinal materials have been screened out in a scientific way, making China the world's largest producer of medicinal materials. In the field of chemistry, the previous leader has always been the French, and the Chinese scientific system was established by introducing French scientists, so the beginning of chemistry is very high, and some general inventions have appeared, such as fertilizers.

In the field of machinery, there are also some important inventions, such as the invention of the rice transplanter, using a floating wooden boat as the fuselage, and using a steam engine to drive the transmission mechanism, but because of the weight of the steam engine, it is difficult to generalize, and only some large farms are in application.

It is undeniable that the West's strong natural science foundation and strong culture of invention and creativity are more dynamic than China's imperial examination system and the scientific research system dominated by universities, and Europe and the United States are still the birthplaces of important inventions in the world.

In fact, not only China, but also the West, especially Britain and the United States, can become science and technology centers, which has an important relationship with the social culture, system, and law of the two countries. For example, Bessemer's name is not a common English name, but a French one, because his father went to the European continent at the age of 11 to settle in the Netherlands with Bessemer's grandparents, became a registered mechanical engineer in the Netherlands, and participated in the construction of the first steam engine in the Netherlands.

Bessemer's father moved to Paris, France at the age of 21, and at the age of 26 he made a significant contribution to the improvement of the microscope, becoming a member of the French Academy of Sciences. However, due to the French Revolution, he had to move to England and use his skills in printing and dyeing and gold and silver jewellery to make a living in London.

Bessemer was born into a family of mechanical engineers, and his father received his education and experience mainly in France, so he gave Bessemer a French name.

The great thing about the British is not how many geniuses they can cultivate, but that they can always provide a platform for geniuses. Although the empire established by Zhou Lang cannot cultivate geniuses, the scale of China's market, in an open environment, can provide enough stage for geniuses.

Therefore, there are always inventors like Bessemer who bring important human wisdom achievements to China as soon as possible, so that China's technological level has always been at the forefront.

The Bessemer steelmaking method greatly reduces the smelting cost of steel, enhances the steel production capacity, and makes large-scale steelmaking technically feasible.

As a result, his technology was rapidly promoted in China, and he could sell steel at one-tenth of the price used to be lucrative.

As a result, the factories that worked with Bessemer were quick successes, and then more people got the authorization from Bessemer, who didn't want to run it in China, and started to build more steel mills in China, and Bessemer got a lot of money, and China got the best technology.

But this technology has a serious drawback, that is, it is only suitable for smelting iron ore with low phosphorus and sulfur content, which is precisely the most common iron ore in the world, and only Sweden has rich reserves of low-phosphorus iron ore in Europe, and in Asia, only Australia's iron ore meets the requirements.

The British began importing large quantities of iron ore from Sweden, while China extracted high-quality iron ore on a large scale from its own overseas territory, Australia.

Iron ore mining has finally become a continuous driving force for Australia's economic development, which is far more valuable and has more potential than gold mining.