According to Samuel, the ideal place to build a steel mill was Birmingham, where Watt invented the steam engine, the second largest city in England after London, and the most important heavy industrial city. It also has a very inglorious Jianghu tuba: the coal capital. Echoing the fog. Tang Ning doesn't like this kind of place very much, the fog has already made him fed up, and it is really worse to go to the coal capital to develop. He meant Middlesbrough, where iron ore had just been discovered, and looked at the map, 250 miles from London, twice the size of Birmingham, so forget it, salute Watt, and don't challenge the industrial power of Birmingham as a whole.

Of course, he would choose the outskirts of Birmingham, closer to the London side.

At this time, not many people can understand Tangning's ambition as a steel king. The UK as a whole produces around 2 million tonnes of iron a year, 40% of which is exported, while steel production is negligible. Downing was going to build a giant steel mill that would not only meet the needs of the whole of Britain, but also export large quantities. There is no doubt that the ironworks will basically be destroyed, and the workers and directors will all be swallowed up in the belly of our great British steel company.

Tang Ning planned this steel-producing monster with an initial 100,000 tons, a mid-term 1 million tons, and a maximum of more than 10 million tons in his Situoyuan Grand Library. In the beginning, the price of steel would be £30 a tonne, and the mill's annual turnover would reach £3 million. In the medium term, steel will largely replace iron as the most important industrial raw material, and steel prices will fall at this time, with an estimated annual income of up to £15 million. He will become the overlord of heavy industry, and how to keep a low profile will be his most difficult problem!

Well, he will give up the position of president to Samuel after the steel company is on the right track, and he will be the chairman and hide behind the scenes. With such a huge factory plan, the land alone cost 100,000 pounds. And in order to quickly build a super-large factory, he invited Joseph? Paxton, the designer of the Crystal Palace, the pavilion at the International Industrial Exposition, is also a landscaper.

The Crystal Palace has a nice name because it was built using only two materials – iron and glass. The extensive use of glass not only makes the pavilion crystal clear, but also creates a greenhouse effect that heats the interior of the pavilion. That's what gardeners do best. Tropical crops are all owned by glass greenhouses. The use of iron frames made the pavilion quick and inexpensive, which was an important factor in Paxton's winning proposal.

The Exposition's committee was set up in January 1850 and was expected to last just over a year, when it received 245 designs from 38 countries, including Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Hanover (not unified with Germany), Switzerland, Braunschweig (without Germany), Hamburg, France, etc. Two designs were praised for their use of both iron and glass. However, both options were rejected. The reason is that it is not cost-effective. Turner, the co-designer of the Kew Gardens Palm House, was presumably confident and angrily pestered the committee for months after the rejection, and he didn't want to think about his huge budget of £300,000, and the end of the successful fair was just over £100,000.

In the final stage, it was impossible to find a suitable design, so the committee came up with its own plan, which was a brick design, and the roof was made of iron plates designed by Brunel, a famous engineer of bridges, railways, and ships. The glaring iron-plated roof design was clearly the biggest failure, and major newspapers published articles satirizing the ugly design.

Brunel was an excellent engineer who creatively solved many of the age-old engineering problems that made it possible to build the subway, and in 1843 he built the world's largest iron-hulled ship, the Britannia, which was the ideal vehicle for transatlantic voyages at the time. However, his aesthetic was not recognized by the citizens of London. The Committee eventually had to shelve the programme again.

The protracted quarrel caught the attention of Paxton, the gardener, who also became interested in designing the pavilion. His greatest specialty was the construction of gardens, and he was a master of British horticulture. His design for Bergenheitt Park had a direct influence on the design of New York's Central Park. More famously at Chartersworth Manor, where he experimented extensively with greenhouses and developed new modular prefabricated fabrications using standard-size glass panels, plywood and cast iron.

Plywood sounds like a cheap and inferior material, and I want to use it to scold: "Your family only uses plywood, and your whole family uses plywood every day!" "But it's actually a high-tech artificial wood, which is more advanced than virgin wood in terms of properties. The grain of the native wood is in one direction, so when Haizi faces the sea to feed the horses and chop wood, he will put the wood up and chop it, and the karate master will tell you the secret of splitting the planks - following the grain of the wood. Plywood is made by cutting wood into thin slices and stacking the grain vertically and joining it with a strong adhesive. And because the flakes are rolled down from the wood like they follow the growth rings, small pieces of wood can be made into large boards, which greatly increases the usability of wood. The final benefit is the lightweight texture of the non-compactness, which is made of man-made panels for all of its products by high-tech furniture companies like IKEA.

In the "Great Conservatory" at Chartersworth Estate, Paxton was the first to adopt a glass greenhouse in the shape of a "mountain and valley", resulting in the largest building in the world at the time.2 80,000 square feet. Later, the advent of the pourable glass pane technique gave him the opportunity to build a glass curtain wall that hung vertically on beams for the water lily room in the Royal Botanic Gardens. His excellent greenhouse and horticultural skills have brought the water lilies, which had been poorly surviving in the Royal Botanic Gardens, back to life after being transferred to Chartersworth Estate.

Paxton, after meeting with enthusiastic commissioner Cole, took a walk around Hyde Park, which had been marked as the site of the fair, and completed the first draft of the design two days later on June 11 on his way to a meeting on the Midland Railway, his exquisite craftsmanship and diligence on his famous pink absorbent paper were reflected in the detailed planning, calculations and budgeting that took him less than two weeks.

The committee was under tremendous pressure and with less than a year to go before the opening of the show, they had to make a decision as soon as possible. Paxton's design caters to both the need to build quickly and cheaply, at just £85,800. That's only a third of the egoat designer of the Palm House, and the usable area is 770,000 square feet, which is 25 times the size of the previous designs!

With only eight months left for the design to be approved by the committee, Paxton not only did a great job, but also altered the top of the site to accommodate two tall old elm trees in Hyde Park. Such an excellent designer and design scheme are exactly the plant designers that Tangning has been ignorant of.

Steel mills need to be simple, fast, robust, and insulated, and don't forget that steelmaking is a hot job. As a tasteful chaebol, Tang Ning also has requirements for beauty, even if it is a steel factory, it cannot be sloppy. After planning the initial, medium-term and long-term of the plant, he invited Paxter to design the factory for this great project with an investment of one million, and he wanted to build a beautiful and practical crystal factory.

Paxton visited Downing at the famous Stove Palace, where he saw a bookcase of all sorts of works on science and engineering, and literature and the like could hardly be found.

"What is a wind farm?" Paxton asked curiously when he saw a large strange area on Downing's rough drawings.

Downing: "It's a place where wind power is used to generate electricity, and you can think of it as a Dutch windmill, if you've ever seen it." ”

Paxton: "So big? ”

Downing: "Yes, the big steel mills will consume a lot of electricity in the future, and besides, the excess electricity can be sent to Birmingham to sell later." ”

Seeing that he was very curious, Tang Ning showed him dozens of wind blade models that he was experimenting with. Blade design is not a simple task, in order to reduce the difficulty of construction, Downing used a vertical axis wind wheel, also known as a Darieu wind wheel, unlike the Dutch windmill to face the wind horizontally. Horizontal-axis windmills are not a balanced design, so they have high material and engineering requirements, as well as high ground clearance. The vertical axis windmill means that the difficulty of construction is transferred to the difficulty of designing the blades. The Dutch windmill is more intuitive, and the Darieu windmill can change the resistance type into a lift type, or a half-resistance and half-lift type through the clever design of the wind flow line of the blades, and the efficiency of the lift type of the Darieu windmill is not inferior to that of the Dutch windmill.

Seeing that Paxton was very interested in windmills, Downing briefly introduced the theory of wind power design, and Paxton was unaware and unsatisfied.

After looking at the windmill and returning to the drawings, Paxton found an unidentified object: "What is this 30-foot-tall collector?" ”

Tang Ning: "Steelmaking is a high-temperature environment, and the big greenhouse is still not hot enough!" I'm going to design a tall tower with a boiler on top of it, and dozens or hundreds of large mirrors will be installed under the tower to concentrate sunlight on the boiler and use it to heat the blast furnace and ventilation pipes of the steelmaking equipment. The excess heat was returned to the steam engine, and in short, a place had to be set aside for the first tower to be built. ”

Really tech freak, interesting project. Paxton felt that the trip was worthwhile.