After 14 years from the 12th year of the Apocalypse, Bi Maoshi, Galileo and Fang Yizhi's research group finally succeeded in making electricity, a physical thing, be used by human beings.

The cost of this is huge, and it not only costs a lot of silver dollars, but also consumes the efforts of many people.

At least he succeeded in turning Galileo, a classical physicist who was originally only studying mechanical problems, into a proficient optoelectronics, and together with Fang Yizhi, he became the founder of Daming optoelectronics.

Since coming to the Ming Dynasty, Galileo has been arranged by the imperial court to study this subject.

Fang Yizhi is the same, this literati who was originally one of the four princes of the late Ming Dynasty spent more time on this subject than Galileo, and he was also a jinshi, and many of the jinshi in the same year as him were either six squires or local governors, and he was still just a scholar of the royal academy with the rank of review officer of the Hanlin Academy.

But the contributions created by these two people are naturally incomparable to those of the Governor and the Six Servants.

Because Galileo was a little older and there were still some difficulties in language communication, Zhu Youxiao asked Fang Yizhi to be the head of the newly established Royal Power Company, and he was given the title of right attendant of the Ministry of Engineering.

Directly promoted from the Hanlin Academy to the level of the right attendant of the Ministry of Industry, this is the first time in the Ming Dynasty.

But no one objected to this, after all, with Fang Yizhi's qualifications as a second-class jinshi, even if he became an official again, it was possible to achieve a third-grade official position in more than ten years.

After the establishment of the Royal Power Company, Fang Yizhi first chose a coal mine and a relatively rich area of water resources near Gyeonggi, that is, the area around what is now Tangshan, to establish the first thermal power plant in Daming.

The generator used in the power plant is a group of machines successfully developed by the Royal Academy of Engineering after five years, excluding the loss of resistance during cable transportation, it can transmit thousands of kilowatts of electricity, and can basically support the electricity consumption of a small part of the capital.

Of course, the first to get the qualification for electricity was naturally the Imperial Palace, and it was precisely because of this that Liu Ru and other palace people in the palace exclaimed because of the appearance of electric lights.

However, Zhu Youxiao did not have free time to explain to this group of palace people what electricity is and how electricity came from, and he is now summoning Fang Yizhi to ask him when he will be able to use electricity on a large scale, at least so that a few royal capital enterprises can use power equipment and residents in big cities can use electricity for lighting, so that the working hours and nightlife hours can be extended, so as to create more labor value.

Fang Yizhi replied that now that the first thermal power plant has been successfully built, and the step from power generation to electric lighting has been successfully completed, as long as the coal resources and copper resources continue to flow in the future, Daming will be able to quickly popularize electrification.

In this regard, Xu Guangqi, the secretary of the Ministry of Industry, who also spoke back to Zhu Youxiao, said that with the large-scale mining of coal mines from Jiliao to Mobei and Siberia, Daming's coal resources can be guaranteed not to be exhausted for decades, and copper mines are no longer in short supply because of the laying of Java Island and many island countries in the South Seas, not to mention that Siberia also contains rich copper resources.

Zhu Youxiao was very satisfied after hearing this, but after receiving the compensation from England, within half a year, he started to make a big move again, ordering the direct establishment of the Ministry of Communications, with Huo Weihua as the first secretary of the Ministry of Communications.

The entire Great Tomorrow Post Keeper was immediately incorporated into the system of the Ministry of Communications, and short-term training was carried out, while preparations were made for the construction of the railway.

Song Yingxing was also awarded the title of Zuo Shilang of the Ministry of Communications, with full responsibility for the construction of the railway, and the first money he received was 10 million silver dollars in the English indemnity.

The first railway to be built is to build a railway from Shanhaiguan to Beijing, once this railway is completed, it will be conducive to the Ming Dynasty to quickly transport troops outside the customs, and at the same time, it will also be more conducive to exchanges inside and outside the customs.

Of course, the construction of railways is not a simple project, which involves the manufacture of locomotives and power equipment, as well as the manufacture of various special steels, and the erection of bridges that can carry railway transportation, and the construction of tunnels.

In this era, the construction of railways is not the construction of railways by Zhan Tianyou in later generations, there have been people in the world who have successfully built railways, and now in the Ming Dynasty, these are the first attempts in the world, without any technical assistance, the only reference is the information and models that His Majesty does not know how to give them today.

Each of these projects has a lot of technical challenges for Daming, and of course, every success means another breakthrough in Daming's various technologies.

Fortunately, as early as more than ten years ago, Daming has established a complete scientific research system, and within five years, the perfect combination of production, education and research into a production chain.

From theoretical breakthroughs to laboratory embodiment to practical application and training of various talents, Daming is now able to quickly solve technical problems through the most fundamental theoretical analysis and correction to experimental improvement.

Moreover, the scientific research of the entire Ming Dynasty is managed by the state, and it can concentrate the greatest strength to break through the problems, rather than a plate of scattered sand, and everyone studies their own.

In short, because of the resumption of the opium trade, a steady stream of wealth flowed into the Ming Dynasty, which made the development of the Ming Dynasty enter the fast lane again.

Not only are power plants and railways on the agenda, but roads are also becoming more popular.

After the completion of the construction of the Liangjing Avenue, the highway from Guangzhou to Fuzhou and then to Hangzhou was built successively, and from Hangzhou to Nanjing, making the entire Pearl River and the Yangtze River Delta more closely connected with the capital.

As a result, domestic trade is more smooth and prosperous, foreign goods from Guangzhou and Hangzhou can be delivered to the capital faster, and Daming's goods can be quickly shipped abroad.

Due to the further improvement and optimization of the steam engine, and the successful construction of chariots in the past, locomotives with a slightly smaller size began to appear.

And these locomotives soon became the darlings of the whole society, which also made highway construction must be developed as soon as possible.

However, at present, the most urgent highway construction for Zhu Youxiao is to build a highway from Beijing to Xi'an and then to Chengdu and Wuzhou, which will directly affect whether Zhu Youxiao can gather heavy troops near Gyeonggi to the southwest region and expand to Southeast Asia and South Asia in the future.

After all, after intimidating England and destroying the combined fleet of the West last time, the countries of Europa had no hope of advancing eastward.

However, if the Ming Dynasty wants to plunder more wealth, it must continue to expand, and countries such as Burma, which hinder the hegemony of the Ming Dynasty in Southeast Asia, will also be the first obstacle for the Ming Dynasty to remove in the future.

Therefore, Zhu Youxiao asked Huo Weihua, the secretary of the Ministry of Industry, to personally take charge of the popularization of highway construction.