West Coast, Collins Shipyard.

It is a small shipyard that has been mainly engaged in the construction of fishing boats and whaling ships. Whether it is a fishing boat or a whaling ship, it will not be too large, generally not more than 1,500 tons. But the Collins fishing boat had a good reputation, and it made some money for the boss. Recently, the business of container cargo ships has been so good that many shipyards have scheduled their production plans for several years. Mr. Collins, the owner of the shipyard, naturally saw that he was also hot, so he gritted his teeth, borrowed a large amount of money from the bank, expanded the shipyard, added a 10,000-ton slipway, and prepared to start building container ships.

There is a big difference between building a container ship and building a fishing boat, and a lot of things have to be brought in from outside. Such as design, such as engineering staff, and even a large number of experienced workers. Collins offered higher wages and recruited skilled workers from other shipyards to work as foremen and lead the rest of the work.

Charles Sr. is one of them. Old Charles has been working in the Hartin shipyard on the East Coast for decades, first as a sledgehammer riveter for ten years, but fortunately, Charles is studious and actually taught himself a lot of shipbuilding-related things, and Butters, the engineer in the shipyard at that time, saw that he was diligent and studious, and was willing to take the time to teach him. Gradually, he was able to give Butters a hand and become an assistant.

Of course, the boss is also very willing to see this situation, originally this kind of assistant or everything has to use college students, the salary cost is not cheap, and it is much cheaper to use Charles. So Charles took the wages of the workers and took up the work of an assistant. It is said that the boss also promised to straighten him out in the future and make him an official assistant. However, Charles worked for another thirty years, but he was still a temporary assistant.

"Is there a temporary assistant for thirty years?" Charles finally couldn't take it anymore and took the opportunity to jump to the Collins shipyard and became an official engineer assistant.

And at the end of their first boat, Charles is putting the finishing touches on it. And the main content he is responsible for is the inspection of the riveting condition of some key parts of the vessel.

"Ryder, the rivets in these places are not right." Charles said to the workers, "This is how it is going to be here...... But it's not too much of a problem...... A little bit more...... That's pretty much it. Hurry up, the boat will be in the water next week. ”

……

Slipways like this are rapidly increasing, and new boats are being launched one after another. On the other side, almost any steel mill is producing containers in large quantities. Now the shortage is not only the ship, the container is also in short supply, MacDonald Steel easily bought the patent of the container at a good price, and now other manufacturers need to pay McDonald Steel five dollars in royalties for each container produced. Worldwide, this patent alone could net McDonald Steel millions of dollars in a year.

"Container patents aren't going to be bypassed, right?" Wearing a yellow hard hat, Greystone stood in the press shop at McDonald's Steel's Pittsburgh Steel plant, shouting at Donald as he looked down at the huge press about to stamping pieces of galvanized sheet.

"No problem! We ...... "The surroundings were so noisy that although Donald shouted at the top of his throat, Donald's voice was obviously not loud enough for Gladstone to hear clearly."

"What do you say? I can't hear clearly! Damn it! Let's go out and talk about it! Greystone shouted as well.

They walked outside through the huge factory building through an overhead steel passage that ran through the entire workshop. The outside was full of all kinds of noise, but it was still much quieter than inside the workshop, at least I could already speak.

As in its original history, Pittsburgh, as the most accessible inland city by water, became the center of the U.S. steel industry, and today nearly one-third of the steel in the United States is smelted here, making it the steel capital and smog capital of the United States as it was in its original history. It's just that because of the emergence of McDonald Steel, the original historical American steel, Carnegie or Mellon consortium, naturally failed to emerge.

"Ahem!" Donald coughed.

"Pittsburgh is such a bastard place. The air here is really ...... Ahem...... "Stimulated by the cold air outside, Greystone coughed as well.

"It is said that London was called the Fog Capital back then, and it should not be as good as Pittsburgh." Donald had already gasped for breath and asked, "What did you just want to ask me?" ”

"I want to ask, is there a way to get around our container patents?" Greystone also stopped coughing.

Containers don't require any difficult technology, so it doesn't seem impossible to bypass patent restrictions. Naturally, Greystone was a little worried.

"Technically, it's not that hard." "I have at least a hundred ways to bypass our technical limitations and make something like that," Donald said. None of this is of much use, though. Because what really matters to our patents, and what makes it difficult for others to deal with, is the size regulations. At least for now, this rule ensures that they can't easily get around our restrictions. However, as you know, this qualification is also based on the development of Alaska. And all the ports in Alaska are in our hands. Therefore, if the container does not meet our limits, we can claim that it cannot be loaded and unloaded. This makes it necessary for any vessel that intends to operate on the Alaska route to use our size containers. But in fact, as you know, the size difference is a little bit smaller, and our port facilities can handle them just as well. So this is only valid for those goods that are going to be used in Alaska, and as for the ships that run elsewhere, to be honest, there is nothing to do. No, we can at least guarantee that all containers destined for Alaska will provide us with patent revenue. As far as I know, those damn Brits, another dimension has been prescribed. For them, the shipping business in Alaska is not particularly large anyway, and container transportation can bring them more benefits, so they ...... Greystone, you know, we're at the moment, there's not much the British can do. ”

"Damn British!" Greystone also said that the feeling of being robbed of money was terrible.

"Someday, I'm going to make these Brits spit out all the money for us!" Graystone finally said this viciously.

……

Although most of the work was entrusted to Greystone, it was still difficult for Scrooge to be completely idle, and to be honest, it was not necessarily a good thing for someone like him who had been busy all the time. Many elderly people who have been busy, once they are idle, often have a rapid decline in physical and mental condition.

There are a few things that Scrooge is most concerned about now, and the same is some experimental research in the big laboratory. For example, the effect of traditional Chinese medicine on viruses, such as new bactericidal drugs, these things, at present, no one can completely replace him. Of course, if Dena could come back, Scrooge felt that he could entrust her with this piece with confidence.

Over the years, Scrooge seems to have regained his influence from Rockefeller and become religious, and he now attends church more often. Although he had donated a lot to the church before, and the church unanimously recognized him as a devout believer.

Many years ago, oh, I should say in my last life, when Scrooge was in high school, he studied a text called "Scrooge". This article is an excerpt from Monsieur Balzac's novel Eugenie Grandet. When studying that article, Scrooge always felt that Balzac's description of the old Grandet was so exaggerated that it was not like a realistic writer, but like a romantic like Hugo. And at that time, he was always incomprehensible to the last sentence of the text, "This proves that Christianity is indeed a miser religion." And now, as he gets older, Scrooge finds himself more and more able to understand the elder Grandet, and more and more understand Balzac's words. If death is empty, then what is the use of the accumulated wealth? Therefore, "over there" must exist, otherwise, it is impossible to expect that one day in the future, Greystone, who has taken care of everything, will be able to come to "that side" to "account" to him. So now, when life is gradually entering the old age, Scrooge's faith in Christianity really has a little bit of devotion in it.

Of course, the last important thing is to collect and analyze the relevant information about Dena. Dena has also participated in many revolutionary activities over the years, and has also left a lot of theoretical works. Scrooge gathered all the relevant information, carefully studied Dena's style of acting, theoretical characteristics, and made various inferences about her next move, and then further adjusted and upgraded his database based on the feedback. Scrooge found that Dena, like all Communists of the time, had little foresight of the problems they might encounter in the future. Scrooge felt that he might be able to seize on the loophole in her theory and assumptions and find a suitable time, such as when they had a disagreement or a major setback, and use this to break Dena's confidence in communism in one fell swoop, and then, perhaps, Dena would honestly return to the MacDonald family, thus making up for the last flaw of the second generation of the MacDonald family.