On December 24th, Christmas Eve, the Telegraph reported a short news story about the change of ownership of the Garden, and the Duke of Buckingham had sadly left his lair, and the new owner would be Baron Buckingham, the president of the British Telegraph Company and the inventor of the famous wireless telegraphy, Downing? Windsor. The news also briefly describes the interesting experience of the legendary new owner who was born in the United Kingdom, studied in the United States, and then traveled to China and India.

Because he bought the Duke of Buckingham's estate, he received this imposing name. The Baron, a lifelong nobleman, was given a reward for the new owner's generous £1.5 million in tackling London's sewerage. The award ceremony will take place on the New Year, almost.

Baron Buckingham, who was both on the verge of housewarming and entering the Lordship, hosted a banquet at his new home, Stole Garden, including Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, Chancellor of the Exchequer Wood, who wrote to the Governor General of India recommending Downing as Governor of the Straits Settlements, and Lionel, a member of the House of Representatives of the City of London? Mr. Rothschild, Mr. Rawlinson, who should have gone to the Bank of Victoria in Australia a few months ago, Samuel, a financier with a keen eye for technology and business who started in the iron industry? Mr. Smith, the great scientist and the new chief scientist of Ferrari Power, Mr. Faraday, Mr. Hobbes, the skilled locksmith, Mr. Beckwell, the fax machine development scientist of the British Telegraph Company, the arms dealer Colt, the John of the Daily News? Foster, Mr. Hancock, wire and cable supplier.

It can really be said that the elites of the industrial and political circles gathered, and most of the guests brought their wives, and some even brought their own children, which is really face-saving.

The most interesting thing is that there is also a guest from China, Xu Rongcun, a comprador of Baoshun Foreign Company. Foreign bank is the meaning of import and export company, because foreigners do not know much about the Chinese market, the language barrier is more difficult to get, so generally foreign companies find a Chinese as a comprador, this word is more intuitive at a glance, help purchase and handling. Basically, every comprador of a foreign bank has its own business, and Mr. Xu Rongcun's own brand is Rongji Husi. There are four major production areas of silk in China, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Huzhou in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, Dongting Lake basin in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, Bashu region and Hanzhong region, and after the Ming and Qing dynasties, it is relatively concentrated in the Suzhou-Hangzhou Lake area, among which the raw silk of Huzhou is the most famous. Rong Ji Husi was the only Chinese company to participate in the International Industrial Exposition, and it was in a private capacity, because the Qing court still regarded itself as the superior kingdom of the Celestial Empire, and was not interested in this kind of exhibition of strange and indecent skills, but the British really wanted China to participate, so that their name of the world would be more worthy of the name.

A total of three types of medals were awarded to the exhibits at the International Industrial Exposition - the New Invention and New Technology Award, the Manufacturing and Handicraft Award, and the Memorial Award. Tangning did not see the faces of the Chinese at the International Industrial Expo, probably because he happened to be absent from Xu Rongcun when he passed by the booth, and Tangning himself was not very interested in silk. Since the rise of the cotton industry, which was easier to produce and spin, in fact, the value of silk in China has been depreciating day by day, and the center of silk in Europe is not actually in England, but in France and Italy, which are known for their luxury and enjoyment.

The French and Italian silk reeling techniques are estimated to be more advanced than those used by Rong Kee. Xu Rongcun, who did not pick up at the Expo but was about to return to China, saw a short news in the Telegraph about the legendary "No. 1 philanthropist in history", saying that he had traveled to China and was fluent in Chinese. It can be regarded as finding a person who can speak his native dialect in this thousands of miles of England. So, Xu Rongji took the liberty to come to visit, and then was stunned by Tang Ning's Chinese, which was more authentic than the Beijing dialect spoken by Lao Xu! Well, it can only be described and expressed in two words: genius. Of course, he has a good impression of Downing's shorter nose and yellower skin, which is really ...... There weren't many half-breeds at the time, otherwise he would have started to be suspicious.

The reason why Xu Rongcun bought the Telegraph was because the article in the Times said that after the United States, India was about to open a transoceanic telegraph with the United Kingdom, and China would follow, when he learned that the Telegraph was founded by the president of the British Telegraph Company, he was curious to buy an issue to see, and found that the Telegraph was really a little different, more concerned about the international form, often had news about China and India, and often used very simple English, which was just right for him, a foreigner with half-baked English. So he formed the habit of buying the Telegraph.

After meeting Xu Rongcun, Tang Ning's biggest gain was that he finally recruited a Chinese chef, hey, I haven't eaten Chinese food for a long time. The Cantonese chef who came to England with Xu Rongcun was "gifted" to Downing by the boss, and today's powerful dinner is a collaboration between Chinese chefs and Italian chefs. Hmph, let these guys who eat British dark food or Indian curry all day a little bit of food.

Xu Rongcun's purpose in getting acquainted with such a big man as Tang Ning was naturally to cooperate with him, bypass Baoshun Foreign Bank, and save the profits in the middle. An "Englishman" who has a good impression of Chinese culture is a rarity, and he must seize this opportunity. He still did not know that this big man who ran the telegraph company and the newspaper was still a director of the Bank of England, a director of the East India Company, and a possible governor of the Straits Settlements, otherwise he would have to kneel.

Downing invited Prince Albert to be very particular, he had to ask if the work of solving Fermat's conjecture had been handed over to a mathematician who knew about it, and the prince was a little embarrassed, he had forgotten about it, although it had been handed over to the mathematician Babbage of Cambridge University, but there was no response, and over time, (for many months), he forgot about it. The embarrassed prince apologized to Downing and said that he was going to urge Babbage.

Babbage was a renowned mathematician who held the honorary position of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, an extremely honorable teaching position held by Newton. In 1823, with the support of the government, Babbage began to build a difference machine powered by a steam engine to compare the differences between numbers, and after 10 years of failure, Babbage turned to a more complete design of an analysis machine that directly used punch cards to input and store data.

The so-called differential machine is to use the "machine qì" to automate the process from calculation to printing, and comprehensively eliminate human errors (such as: calculation errors, transcription errors, proofreading errors, printing errors, etc.). Difference machine No. 1 uses the nth order polynomial evaluation to have the common nth order difference characteristics, and uses the gear to drive the addition, subtraction, and carry of the decimal values.

Built by the British government-funded by craftsman Klimen, Difference One is expected to require 25,000 parts (roughly divided equally between the calculation and printing parts) and weighs 4 tons, which can be calculated to the sixth order difference, and can store up to 16 digits (equivalent to gigabits). However, due to the difficulty of manufacturing a large number of precision parts, and Babbage's constant modification of the design while manufacturing, in the ten years from 1822 to 1832, Babbage could only show 1/7 of the finished product.

Babbage's constant delay in the completion of the project (the British government's final liquidation in 1842 found that the entire project cost the treasury a total of £17,500), the design of Zuò was constantly revised, and the frequent conflict with the Cremen caused the complete Difference Machine One to be completed, and more than 12,000 unused precision parts were later melted down and scrapped.

Babbage can be said to be the pioneer of modern computers, but it was too difficult to build a general-purpose computer from machinery, and it would have been possible if Downing had done it, because he had already built vacuum tubes that could act as logic switching circuits. Whether it is in terms of technological advancement or engineering difficulty, it is not the same.

But Downing will not complete this great invention that opened the information age so quickly, because to make the real information age come, it will need the support of many basic industries, and it will take a lot of effort to build a computer without solving the core problem. At least not now, if you think about it, isn't it too much to build electronic computers when electricity was not popular?

There is a sad thing here, my good friend Rawlinson is finally going to Australia in a month, and Downing is emotional, saying that he will make a set of desalination equipment for him within a month, so that he can use it on the ship. Of course, if possible, he would make chlorine disinfection equipment suitable for use on ships.

Among the raw materials for the manufacture of reverse osmosis membranes that can desalinate seawater, there is a very versatile cellulose acetate. （http：／／.）。 This is a thermoplastic resin obtained by esterification of cellulose with acetic acid under the action of a catalyst. Cellulose is one of the two major components of wood, the other is lignin, which is an industrial raw material for sand production, and the main raw material for papermaking is cellulose. In addition, acetic acid has been used for tens of millions of years in human history, and it is stored in vinegar and can be produced on a large scale through guò fermentation.

It is capable of preparing cellulose acetate with various properties. For example, cellulose diacetate plastic can be used as a variety of tool handles, alphanumeric keys for typewriters, textile equipment parts, insulators in electrical appliances, pen holders, glasses frames and lenses, toys, daily miscellaneous products, etc., of course, the most important thing for Tangning now is that it can also be used as a desalination membrane. Cellulose triacetate, which has a high melting point, can only be processed as a solution and used as a film base, X-ray film base, insulating film electromagnetic, audio tape, transparent container, separator in silver-zinc batteries, etc. It is very useful for the future industrial development of Downing.

Rawlinson was very happy and said that he had found another reason to stay for a while longer, until Downing got the marine reverse osmosis membrane out. After some exchanges with Faraday and other chemists and physicists, Downing already knew that the use of chlorine had reached a certain level, and they had a "hypochlorite disinfectant", but they did not understand that the causative agent of cholera was transmitted through the excrement and vomit of patients, so Downing was obliged to tell everyone this fact in a more convincing way. It is obviously not enough to publish it in the newspaper, but in this era there are not even decent scientific and medical journals, yes, now even the famous "Nature" magazine has not been founded, perhaps this historical mission will fall on Tangning's head.