When Shen Shuren arranged tasks for Daye's arsenal half a year ago, of course, he also provided some ideas for Fang Yizhi and Song Yingxing.

In particular, he picked some military science and technology that he was relatively familiar with in later generations and seemed to be easy to implement, and let the scientific researchers figure out how to tinker with it themselves. After pondering for the past half a year, Song Yingxing and they will certainly not be completely ungained.

Therefore, in the face of Shen Shuren's question, Song Yingxing only said: Of course, there are other breakthroughs, but they are not in metallurgical forging, and they will not be displayed in the forging plant of this ironmaking plant. If Lord Futai wants to see it, he can go to the newly built "refinery" not far from the city tomorrow to inspect it.

Shen Shuren knew that the "refinery factory" mentioned by Song Yingxing was actually a chemical plant that had just been built in the second half of this year. It's just that there was no professional term "chemistry" at the end of the Ming Dynasty, so Song Yingxing and Fang Yizhi just took the original gunpowder bureau as the team and set up a "refinery", responsible for the improvement of gunpowder formulas, as well as some other strange chemical raw material technology optimization.

Of course, the people of Shenshu were very interested in this.

……

The inspection of the steel mill and the forging factory was originally to brainwash the miners and displaced people, and by the way.

Since there weren't too many novel weapons and technological breakthroughs to see here, after a short rest that night, the Sinking Tree Man continued his journey to inspect the refinery the next day.

It was his first time in the area, but he had known about the existence of the new factory months earlier.

Because at that time, Song Yingxing asked him for a large amount of funding in order to conduct research, and the first batch of funds was tens of thousands of taels. After Shen Shuren understood, he was very happy to approve it.

Song Yingxing was also shocked at the time, to be honest, when he came to ask for money, he didn't expect the financier to approve the funds so happily, and he was also worried that Shen Shuren would treat the study of material transformation as the evil art research of alchemists like the corrupt Confucians of the past dynasties.

Only Shen Shuren knows that spending tens of thousands of taels to let Song Yingxing engage in chemistry casually, but if he can produce some results, he will definitely not lose money, and the money is worth it. What's more, Song Yingxing was not blindly looking for a research direction at the beginning, it was all proposition research, everything revolved around upgrading and optimizing gunpowder technology, which was immediately used in actual combat.

The refinery is located in the Taoist Shichun in the east of Daye County, which is a small river on the nearby Tieshan Mountain that eventually joins the Yangtze River, with a certain drop, a little waterfall, and the water flow will form a whirlpool undercurrent when it is injected into the Yangtze River, the environment is very beautiful, and it is also convenient for sewage discharge.

In these years, the scale of chemical industry is very small, and there is no theory and technology of sewage treatment, so it can only be discharged directly.

If it is stagnant water, or at least it is not liquid enough, it may still cause undesirable harm.

But this amount is directly discharged into the Yangtze River, so it is not a problem at all, it has long been naturally purified, and it is located in the most downstream of the nearby river, so it will not pollute the upstream water source.

When Shen Shuren arrived, he also saw that at the entrance of the village where the refinery was located, there was a stele pavilion, and there was a stone standing in it, on which a poem was engraved: "When the river stone is in danger and has no roots, it will fly and fall and squat." Looking down at the secluded palace for thousands of feet, the migratory stream is rushing from east to west. ”

Shen Shuren read it once, and he didn't think that this poem was well written, so he casually asked Fang Yizhi, who accompanied the inspection: "How can this level be engraved on a monument?" ”

Fang Yizhi smiled: "If you look closely at the payment behind the virtuous brother, you won't have this question - this stele pavilion was erected decades ago, and this poem was made by Zhang Juzheng, writing about the scenery of this place."

At the beginning of the Wanli Dynasty, Zhang Juzheng was powerful, he was a native of Hubei, and the gentry of the nearby provinces would flatter this fellow scholar. Although it was later liquidated, the Huguang gentry did not push Zhang Juzheng's poetry tablet pavilion. Anyway, no one cares, so I'll keep it. ”

Shen Shuren nodded and read it again, since it was written by Zhang Juzheng, he didn't have such high requirements for literary talent, and he was not known for being a poet in the first place.

After slowly entering the village, Shen Shuren noticed that the secrecy and defense of the whole village were very tight, and the whole village was fenced with sharpened wooden piles on rammed earth walls, leaving only the road entrance and exit gates to set up gates, and only the city wall was built directly.

As soon as you enter the wall, you can see that almost all of the village is under militarized management, and the only local villagers are also hired by the government to do things, and there are no idle people.

On the outermost periphery, there are rows of gunpowder workshops, and it is obvious that Daye has moved the original gunpowder production institutions of the Military War Bureau.

In every courtyard, there are craftsmen grinding all kinds of raw materials, carefully weighing, proportioning, and mixing, and occasionally you can see the secretary and the clerk recording the data of every operation there, and they have accumulated a thick stack of account books.

Obviously, the improvement of the gunpowder formula and mixing process has been going on. The Shen Shuren let them control the variables and scientifically control the experiments, and the experience in this area is not endless for the time being.

Even if it is just the traditional black powder, with the current technology of Shen Jiajun, it is not possible to say that the best formula process has been exhausted, and the black powder can be used in the West until the 1870s in history, and there will definitely be room for improvement in the next two hundred years.

If you can create black powder with a faster combustion rate and faster gas expansion rate, you can continuously moisturize things and silently improve the firearm combat power of the Shen Family Army.

However, these are also manual tasks of slow trial and error, all relying on heaping time, and the further you study, the more diminishing the marginal returns are, and it is impossible to give any big surprises. Shen Shuren inspected it a little and confirmed that the other party's way of doing things and attitude were fine, so he didn't look any more and went straight to the next stop.

After walking around the village for about half a stick of incense, Shen Shuren gradually came to the core of the village, a workshop located in the Taoist scenic area, and you can see small waterfalls and turbulent currents outside the house, which flow into the Yangtze River.

The nearby buildings have also become whitewashed with white walls and neat green tile roofs, and they don't look like gunpowder workshops anymore.

Shen Shuren entered a neat compound, and the first thing he saw was a few Xiaowan spinning machines and flying shuttle looms, where cotton yarn and cotton cloth were being made.

Shen Shuren was also surprised when he saw it, and almost thought that he had run in the wrong place.

Of course, he is no stranger to these machines, because they were all built by Fang Yizhi and Dong Xiaowan a few years ago.

Fang Yizhi did not seek to be famous, and he only provided theoretical support, and it was Dong Xiaowan who started to do the practice, and the world only knew that this machine was called Xiaowan spinning machine, which was invented by a concubine in Shenfutai's mansion.

Shen Shuren couldn't help but ask, "Brother Fang, is this an itch?" Think it's not fun to turn on the shuttle loom back then? Or do you think of better optimizations? How can I put it in this alchemy to tinker with the loom? ”

Fang Yizhi pointed and explained: "Optimization, it is indeed possible to continue to optimize, but it is only piecemeal, and it cannot improve the efficiency of spinning and weaving by one or two percent."

However, the original intention of moving these machines here was because when he was tinkering with gunpowder materials according to the ideas that the virtuous brother had explained before, he inadvertently inserted willows to get other materials. We pondered it for a while, experimented again, and found that it could be used to make cloth for bandaging injuries. ”

As he spoke, Fang Yizhi motioned to a craftsman who was spinning and weaving cloth in the courtyard to bring some semi-finished materials over and show them to Shen Shuren.

Shen Shuren saw that it was just gauze and cotton balls, which he had already seen, the Shen family's textile business in Susong was very large, and it was also associated with the old family of Songjiang Xu Ge, and they owned no less than one million acres of cotton fields.

Therefore, in the Shen family's army, the popularity rate of cotton products is very high, and the daily use of ordinary soldiers is abundant, and cotton balls and gauze have long been popularized in the medical supplies of wounded soldiers.

However, Shen Shuren took a closer look and noticed that this kind of gauze and cotton balls felt very different from the original, and he pondered it again, and couldn't help blurting out: "This is absorbent cotton?" Degreased gauze and cotton balls? ”

Fang Yizhi was stunned for a moment, and did not admit it directly: "Absorbent cotton? This name is easy to understand, indeed, this is the cotton with some alkaline plant ash and some other powder after disposal, and then dried, remove part of the oil, but also remove the cotton is easy to spoil, acidification and deterioration of things, leaving only clean pure velvet.

Originally, according to your explanation half a year ago, when we were engaged in 'sour cotton wool', we found that it was not easy to do, and the cotton had impurities and was unstable, so we thought of a lot of ways to dispose of the cotton in advance and remove all kinds of impurities. As a result, one of the ideas got this.

After making it, it suddenly occurred to me that although gauze was used to wrap wounds and suck blood to promote healing in the army, cotton balls were still easy to be stained with pus and blood and gradually decay.

So I thought about recycling waste, and used this semi-finished product, which was not allowed to make 'acid cotton wool', to make gauze for the soldiers to wrap their wounds. On the side of Daye Mine, there are indeed some accidents and injuries from time to time, and there are ample opportunities for experiments.

In the end, I found that the cotton washed out in this way was the cleanest, and it was used to wrap and bandage wounds, and the chance of pus and blood deterioration could be reduced by as much as two or three percent! ”

When Shen Shuren heard this, he was also quite emotional.

It turned out that before he set out for the expedition half a year ago, he also explained some ideas for improving gunpowder to Song Yingxing Fang Yizhi. And what he thought of at that time, the easiest to achieve, and the most well-known in later generations, was naturally to develop "fire cotton" or "nitrocellulose" to replace black powder as musket propellant.

After all, people who know a little bit about history know that the manufacturing method of fire cotton is very easy - throw cotton into concentrated nitric acid, wait for the concentrated nitric acid to react naturally with cotton, and become charred black, and then carefully take out and crush the cotton, which can be made into nitrocellulose.

After this thing was invented by the French in the 1870s, it immediately replaced black powder, created the first generation of smokeless gunpowder, and only then did it have the modern primer bullet.

The effectiveness of nitrocellulose, which is used as a warhead charge for artillery shells to provide explosive damage, is questionable. But as a propellant, it is more than enough, and it is definitely much stronger than black powder. Until World War II, nitrocellulose primers were still used in American and Soviet rifle cartridges.

However, although Shen Shuren knows this common sense and knows how to make nitrocellulose in the last step, he does not know how to make the intermediate raw materials required for nitrocellulose, which has led him to go through four years and have been tinkering with black powder, and he doesn't dare to think about smokeless gunpowder - he knows that cotton with concentrated nitric acid will make nitrocellulose, but he can't make concentrated nitric acid!

Until Fang Yizhi and Song Yingxing were all accepted by him, he felt that these people had a certain degree of self-research ability, and he could point out the general direction, and then the people below would organize the experiment by themselves.

At that time, the direction he gave was also very clear, that is, under the pretense of "I heard from the Hongmaoyi people that in recent years, in the extreme west, some top scholars in the Hongmaoyi have invented a concentrated acid made of saltpeter, which is smokeless and explosive with the strong gunpowder produced after the acidification of cotton and the scorching black."

Then ask Fang Yizhi and Song Yingxing to figure out how to create this "thick acid that can react with cotton". This task was allocated half a year ago, and a considerable part of the tens of thousands of taels of scientific research funds given to Song Yingxing at that time were also used for experiments, followed by another gunpowder bureau on the Taoist side.

Now it seems that regardless of whether Fang Yizhi has created concentrated nitric acid or not, he has at least developed the by-product of absorbent cotton, which can improve the medical conditions in the army.