Firing Temperature
While Jang Ma-ryang roamed the country gathering Sampar-ttaraji — refugees who had come south across the thirty-eighth parallel — Ki-jo wore a path in and out of Seoul. He wanted the perfect brick kiln. And a perfect kiln, it seemed, first required him to look like a perfect man of Seoul.
The places he haunted were the universities. Passing himself off as a graduate, he went looking for professors who might advise him on the building of a brick kiln, but the faint country air that still clung to him may have been the trouble. More often than not he was shown the door of an office before he ever got inside, or the man he had come to see took one glance at his face and waved him off.
So Ki-jo resolved to take his appearance in hand.
"This ought to pass for a Seoul man, shouldn't it?"
He put the question to his own reflection in a barbershop mirror. The barber, setting his scissors straight, answered.
"A Seoul man isn't some separate breed. Look bored by the whole world, and carry yourself like a sharp-eyed skinflint, and anyone will pass for one."
Ki-jo laughed at the sight of his own head, slick and shining with hair oil. He sold the secondhand suit and had a new one cut, bought a fedora, and pulled it low over his brow, lest he meet the toughs of the Jongno Faction somewhere in the street and be recognized. He was simply not built for dealing with gangsters.
Seoul National University was the only campus left to him. He had meant to go there first of all, but the professor he hoped to see had gone off on a trip to the provinces, and the visit had been shoved to the back of the line. Now that he gleamed from hat to shoe, no one he encountered found him in the least suspicious. If anything, whatever he asked, people were quick to explain it with a ready kindness.
He knocked at the door of Professor Kim Moon-hwan's office with a box of Western pastries from Goryeodang in his hands, and a voice called for him to come in.
"Good day, Professor."
The greeting left him the moment the door was open. Thick glasses, hair in a wild tangle, a shabby figure of a man — the professor stared at him blankly.
"Who might you be?"
"My name is Lee Ki-jo. I have come from Yeoncheon."
"Yeoncheon?"
Ki-jo abandoned the pose of a Seoul man and answered honestly. The professor's face had convinced him this was not a man who would judge anyone by looks or by birthplace, and the money he had spent prettying himself up felt suddenly wasted.
"I do not believe we have met. What brings you here?"
"I have come hoping to ask your counsel on the building of an industrial kiln."
"For a matter like that, you ought to go to one of the workshops in town."
"I have already made the rounds. Not one of them could build the kiln I am looking for."
At those words a curiosity seemed to stir in Professor Kim Moon-hwan. Through the thick lenses he studied Ki-jo with care.
"What sort of kiln do you mean to build, and what do you mean to make in it, that you should go to such lengths...? Sit down on the sofa, at any rate."
Ki-jo held the box of pastries out to him first.
"Ah, there is no need. I will just hear a little of what you have to say."
The professor declined the bribe. Abashed, Ki-jo quietly set the box down beneath the table.
"I mean to fire red brick."
"Red brick?"
"Yes, Professor."
Professor Kim Moon-hwan gave a dry little laugh, then spoke with disappointment written all over his face.
"Then go down to the provinces and meet the onggi potters, or the ceramic craftsmen. I am not slighting you. I say it only because those men can build a kiln better than I can."
"I am not trying to build a system of production that depends on a craftsman's feel. What interests me, Professor, is production engineering — relying entirely on the performance of machines, and turning out sound brick at a high yield."
Language that refined, pouring unexpectedly from this man's mouth, changed Professor Kim Moon-hwan's expression.
"Where did you go to school?"
"I am ashamed to say I never even finished primary school."
"Then you have read a book or two?"
"Yes."
As he answered, his mind went back to the research into brickmaking he had done before the regression, scouring the internet. If the internet counted as a book, then a book it was.
"I like the notion of leaving production yield to the machines."
Professor Kim Moon-hwan's gaze on him had softened.
Before the regression he had heard, over and over, of the trouble with yield in the making of semiconductors, and he was applying that same trouble now to brick. In the 1950s, after all, the semiconductor he intended to produce was red brick.
Listening to Ki-jo's plan for the development of Cheongsan, the professor was drawn all the way in. So taken was he that when Ki-jo, as if it were nothing, brought the pastries out again, Kim Moon-hwan put one in his mouth without knowing he had done it, and went so far as to praise the taste.
"A young man, and thinking on a remarkable scale. Would you mind if I called you Mr. Lee?"
"Not at all, Professor."
Lee Ki-jo did not forget that to this man he was no old fellow who had lived to ninety with his face in the internet, but a youth of twenty-five.
"If that dream of yours is realized, Mr. Lee, every building that goes up in Seoul will be raised from the cheap, good brick you produce in quantity. There is, however, one great difficulty."
Ki-jo knew the difficulty already. He pretended that he did not. He would need practical help from Professor Kim Moon-hwan in the days to come.
"To produce brick of an even quality, everything hinges on holding the firing temperature."
"Firing temperature?"
He asked it knowing perfectly well.
"The firing temperature is the precise heat suited to the working of the material. Holding it steady is not as easy as the phrase makes it sound."
"Which is why I set a wood-fired kiln aside from the start. To hold a constant flame by burning firewood is next to impossible."
"Good. A mercy that you are sharp, Mr. Lee. In the end, where the control of heat is concerned, coal is better than wood, and oil better than coal — which is to say the kiln will have to burn oil..."
As Professor Kim Moon-hwan rose to fetch the cigarettes on his desk, Ki-jo held out a Zippo lighter and a carton of American cigarettes, both of which he had from Kim Doo-han.
"Please accept these, Professor."
"My thanks."
Once the professor was absorbed in a thing, he seemed to have the habit of taking whatever was put into his hand.
"If it is the highest yield you are after, it will have to be an oil-fired kiln."
"That is so, Professor."
He lit one of the American cigarettes with the lighter Ki-jo had given him, blew a stream of smoke at the empty air, and shook his head.
"The dream is too big. You..."
After that he said nothing, and only smoked for a long while.
"Mr. Lee, look at the reality of this country. Has electricity even come to Yeoncheon, where you live?"
"It has not reached us yet."
"I will tell you how it is with me. As an engineer, when I judge whether a nation is advanced, I judge it by how much energy its people are able to use."
"Yes..."
"Americans consume far more energy per person than the Japanese, and the Japanese consume several times what we do."
"But..."
"Korea has no energy to use, and what little it does have costs far too much. A typical backward country. Build as fine an oil-fired kiln as you please — the price of the oil will sit so high you will never bring the cost of a brick into line."
He was the very picture of an intellectual of the fifties: fervent and expansive while the talk stayed scholarly, and bleak the moment he struck a practical wall.
But Ki-jo was a businessman. He could not surrender a dream merely because it had met with reality.
"Then might you not build me the finest kiln that burns coal? A coal-fired kiln every bit the equal of one that burns oil."
"Now, now... I am telling you it is not so easy a matter."
There was nothing else for it. Ki-jo set the bag he had brought upon the table. Opened, it flashed with ten kilograms of gold bullion.
"I will place this gold with you as funds for research. If you will have the kiln made, by your knowledge and by the connections you possess, I will answer for everything that follows — however I must."
The professor took off his glasses, lifted one of the bars, and examined it closely.
"All of this... you mean to invest it in developing a brick kiln?"
"If the cost of development runs short, you have only to say so. I will bring more, even if I must draw on dollar debt to do it."
"Hm."
A sharp light leapt in Professor Kim Moon-hwan's eyes.
"Mr. Lee. Are you in earnest?"
"I am."
"Then what would you say to developing an electric furnace with me? In the advanced countries of Europe and America, they already use the electric furnace as a kiln. Nothing is easier to govern for temperature."
"Electricity has not come to Yeoncheon, Professor..."
"Ah — of course. Where has my head gone."
Ki-jo had read, in the memoir of a student Professor Kim Moon-hwan had trained, that the man was possessed by research. A passage in the memoir of an old professor at Seoul National University recorded that, so long as no practical difficulty stood in the way, Kim Moon-hwan had wanted to build even an atomic bomb. That was why Ki-jo had sought him out, and the memoir had not been wrong. The moment research money lay before his eyes, his hunger reached all the way to an electric furnace.
But Ki-jo knew better. The price of electricity was mad, and in the 1950s the power failed as regularly as people sat down to a meal. To develop an electric furnace in such a time was suicide. The best answer was a kiln that burned coal and held, without wavering, 1,200 degrees Celsius — the firing temperature at which red brick came out right.
From the inner pocket of his suit he drew a sheet of paper and spread it on the table.
"The shape of a kiln you have drawn yourself?"
"Yes, Professor."
The professor bent close over the drawing, and his eyes went round.
"This is... that... the Ho— Ho—"
"Yes. A Hoffmann kiln."
"Yes! The Hoffmann kiln. A ring kiln, they call it as well."
"That is correct, Professor."
Kim Moon-hwan looked once more at the plan: a kiln in the form of a long oval, like the running track of a stadium. Twenty-four chambers stood along it, and heat and the gases of combustion traveled the circuit around them before escaping at last up a chimney. It was the best structure there was for turning brick out in quantity. Like the upside-down boiler that would one day fill the television advertisements of the 2000s, it sent the combustion gas through again and again, and so it saved energy as well.
"Where did you say you went to university?"
"Not even primary school..."
"Ah. So you said."
The professor scratched his head. He folded Ki-jo's drawing with care, slid it into his shirt pocket, and asked,
"This Cheongsan-ri, where you want to put up a factory — where is it? I should like to see the ground for the brick plant before anything else."
"Do you ask because you fear I may be a swindler?"
"None of that! What do you take me for!"
Professor Kim Moon-hwan all but sprang from his seat.
"The soil must be studied first — the earth you mean to make the brick from! I shall bring a professor of geology, look at the clay, and calculate the proper firing temperature! Come now, write the address of the land on this paper!"
Ki-jo wrote the address on the sheet thrust at him, and grinned. For a man who laid plans that looked like madness to other people, a scientist capable of going mad alongside him — a man like Kim Moon-hwan — was exactly right.
Professor Kim Moon-hwan chewed with pleasure at the pastries Ki-jo had bought, glad of the simple fact that he now had something to research and no need to worry where the money would come from. It was 1954, the war only just over, and some lunatic had walked in loaded with gold and asked him to build the finest machinery in the Republic of Korea. He was not a man to refuse.
This was the Kim Moon-hwan who had once been called a genius, who had even studied abroad at the Imperial University of Tokyo. For such a man to receive not a penny in research funds, and to live on at the school droning lectures at students — that life had depressed him past all bearing. In his eyes now, the scholarly madness that had left him in his youth was coming back.
Watching Ki-jo's back as he went out of the office, he made a vow to himself.
Just you wait, Mr. Lee. I will give you the finest brick kiln in all of Korea.