As a result, after the alternating current system was invented, giant companies such as the Wind and Thunder Electric Light Company quickly purchased patents and used their own technological advantages to begin to popularize large-scale power grids. The company is ambitious to establish a transmission network covering the entire Susong region and monopolize the electricity consumption of electric lights in the developed areas of the Yangtze River Delta.

The emergence of new technologies such as alternating current requires all kinds of opportunities, but China has met most of them, so new technologies have begun to emerge faster, if not by Chinese inventors, but also in the hands of inventors from other countries with the funding of Chinese commerce.

For example, gasoline engines also appeared more than ten years in advance.

The appearance of gasoline engines was the result of a heavy bounty offered by the Black Sea Oil Company.

The reason why oil companies promoted the emergence of gasoline engines is mainly because of the rapid development of the power industry, which has made oil companies almost desperate. The more electric lights became more widespread in the cities, the more profits of oil companies declined, because the main product of oil companies in this era was kerosene for lighting.

The popularization of urban power grids has almost driven kerosene lamps out of the cities, and can only be sold in villages where electricity cannot be covered, and the consumption habits and consumption power of farmers are obviously not as strong as those in the cities who love nightlife, resulting in the increasingly difficult operation of the Black Sea oil company in recent years.

Therefore, oil companies are eager to find a new direction for oil applications, they look for several alternative products, invent the new product of lubricants, and mass-produce cheap lubricants, making commercial whaling almost unprofitable all over the world, but contributing to the survival of whales, but the market of lubricants still does not change the predicament of oil companies, because the market of lubricants is obviously not as large as lighting supplies.

Petroleum is also used in medical research and is used in various chemical researches. But oil companies know very well that the biggest use of oil is in power. Everyone knows that the biggest feature of oil is that it can be burned, and under the competition of electric lights, oil companies do not see the slightest prospect of recovery in the field of lighting, so they can only find a future in the steam engine that also burns fuel to generate power. Oil companies believe that if the world's steam engines switch to oil as fuel, there is hope for a reinvigorated oil industry.

So they offered a big reward for a steam engine that could efficiently burn oil to produce power.

And a few years ago, in 1862, the French scientist Rosa conducted a study on the thermal process of the internal combustion engine and proposed the theory of the four-stroke. The German inventor Otto put this theory into practice and invented the four-stroke internal combustion engine in 1866, but it was gas-burning. Otto saw the heavy reward offered by the Black Sea Oil Company in the newspapers, and immediately contacted the oil company, showed him his internal combustion engine, and told the other party that he could improve his internal combustion engine and use oil as fuel.

The oil company, struggling with the power crisis, immediately accepted Otto's request and provided him with funding, including funds and raw materials for the experiment. Otto experimented with a large number of oil companies, from crude oil to kerosene and even lubricants, and finally found that gasoline was more suitable as a fuel for internal combustion engines.

Over the course of five years, Otto perfected his internal combustion engine and created a practical gasoline engine. This was a surprise for oil companies, as gasoline had previously been used as a waste liquid from kerosene smelting. The ignition point is low, it is easy to explode, and it is not good to make lamp oil, nor can it be used as boiler fuel, and many times it is burned directly at the place of origin.

Now it can be used as a power fuel. But promotion is still a huge problem, oil companies can use gasoline engines as power sources in their factories, and use gasoline engines to drive generators to work. But marketing to other companies is a problem, because the railroads are reluctant to transport gasoline because of its danger.

While safe coal can be used as fuel for power generation, the oil industry, such as desperate power companies, is reluctant to use this kind of fuel, even if it is free, lest they blow up their power plants.

The oil company's goal is still the train, but it is still the long-standing problem, safety, the railway company is not willing to transport kerosene, let alone gasoline.

As a result, this important invention was dusted and never applied. Even if inventors from various countries have successively put the smaller, lighter gasoline engine to replace the steam engine of the past into the automobile, and invented the modern automobile. But for a while, it was still far from popularization, and the oil companies did not see the future of automobiles, because they did not think that the prospects of such toys could be compared with railways, otherwise the world automobile era might come sooner with their strong push.

Therefore, Otto's invention of the gasoline engine eventually became a hobby of some inventors, and everyone made a series of new inventions based on the gasoline engine, or improved the performance of the gasoline engine, or improved the performance of the car.

At the same time, under the bounty of the oil company, a number of other inventions appeared.

There are several steam engines that have been provided, which are basically based on the Watt principle, but some improvements have been made to the boiler, adding fuel injectors and other structures, so that the boiler can burn oil instead of coal.

Even if electric motors have appeared and begun to replace coal as the new power source in cities, electricity will not always be able to cover them in the field. So they wanted oil to seize the field market for coal, and they found a lot of unique advantages, that is, the same volume of oil, which burns more energy than coal, can drive a train to travel a longer distance. This means that a single refueling will run a longer distance than coal.

But when the oil steam engine was invented, the market did not recognize, because only the advantage of increasing the transportation distance was not enough for the railway company to convert the system, coal has established a complete set of transportation and supply system, to rebuild an oil transportation and supply system, the cost is too high, and the price of oil is always much higher than coal. At the same price, no one wants to use oil when burning coal can go farther.

The only breakthrough is the army, which cares less about cost and more about technical superiority. When the Navy found out that it could run half the distance longer with the same volume of oil, it was a huge advantage. Because the navy has been suffering from not being able to directly bypass West Africa to attack the British mainland, if the range can be increased by half, they can have the ability to fill up the mailbox at the Chinese base in the Niger River, and then sail directly to the United Kingdom to fight, without being subject to the step-by-step advance in the Mediterranean.

So the Navy decided to adopt these new technologies, and when the arms race began, new battleships began to use fuel instead of coal. Not only has the combat distance been longer, but the refueling has also become faster than before. In the past, the soldiers on the ship had to work hard for two or three days to fill up the warship, but now the oil is pumped with oil pumps, and the fuel can be replenished in half a day. And compared to the coal bunkers and decks full of coal ash, the use of oil makes the warships cleaner.

For oil companies, the use of the navy is not a problem, because the navy is only one or two hundred large ironclads at best, and the amount of oil that can be burned is limited, and the ocean-going merchant ships still use cheap and convenient coal.

In the face of the continued downturn in the market, oil companies have even closed many oil fields with declining production and laid off employees en masse, but profits remain meagre and stock prices have plummeted.

It wasn't until three years after the invention of the gasoline engine that the application ushered in a ray of light.

Hobbyist cars are still toys, but the fact that some people have begun to install gasoline engines on combine harvesters has made gasoline engines more valuable, at least in the eyes of orthodox businessmen, more promising than toys.

The combine harvester was invented by the Americans, so they made the greatest number of improvements, producing a combine harvester powered by a gasoline engine, replacing the horse-drawn combine harvester that had been used for decades. Cheap gasoline has finally found a market.

The Chinese installed gasoline engines on rice transplanters, which were very impractical because they were either powered by buffaloes or small steam engines. Fortunately, the rice transplanter is mounted on a hollow shallow water wooden boat, so it can be used in paddy fields, not even the lightest steam engine in a vehicle. However, this large rice transplanter, which is installed on a boat, is only suitable for agricultural companies that operate rice fields. China's largest number of small rice fields not only can't afford the cost of rice transplanters, but they can't even be adjusted.

However, a gasoline engine with a lower weight is obviously more suitable for use in rice transplanters. As a result, the rice transplanter was miniaturized and began to usher in life.

In order to increase oil revenues, oil companies have even taken the initiative to promote the popularization of gasoline engine-driven combine harvesters and rice transplanters, provide farmers with loans to purchase agricultural machinery and equipment, and subsidize harvester and rice transplanter manufacturers to switch to gasoline harvesters and rice transplanters.

At the same time, efforts began to establish a gasoline supply network, and on the one hand, the establishment of oil refineries in agricultural areas began to refine oil. On the other hand, start ordering denser gasoline barrels, do experiments to prove the safety of gasoline barrels to the railroads, and at the same time put pressure on the railroads to tell them that if they don't help them transport gasoline, then their oil won't be transported by their rails. There are more than 100 railway companies in China, and there are as many as four of them with their own national railway network, and the competition is so fierce that no one wants to lose a big customer like an oil company.

As a result of these efforts, the profits of oil companies have only begun to recover slowly, but they are still far from the peak before the popularization of electric light, and the stocks of oil companies have not yet recovered to one-tenth of their peak.

Thanks to inventors and laboratory institutions such as Edison, Siemens, and Otto, they began to provide intellectual services for Chinese enterprises, and in the intellectual industry, other countries around the world have also begun to slowly integrate into China's economic chain.

It began to provide cotton yarn to the textile industry, and the machinery industry provided parts, and in the intellectual industry, it also squeezed into China's economic link.

China began to gather high-quality intelligence, technology, and capital from all over the world to produce new business models, and then promoted them to the world, invisibly, China upgraded to become the engine of the world economy!

And because the China-centric economic system has benefited so many people, they are generally reluctant to see war.

De Xuanlin, who was constantly caught in fierce competition, was already very troubled, so when he saw the reports of those newspapers that feared that the world would not be chaotic, he couldn't help but be furious, threw a newspaper analyzing the situation in Spain into the trash, and told himself to stop and cancel the newspaper subscription.