A Comrade Like a Lord
Year 3879, 3rd Research Laboratory, Sinsi Daehan Shipyard.
Ziiiing… fss.
"Huh? Ah… it went out again. Every time I try to get something done, this thing dies on me. Honestly, a candle or an oil lamp would be better than this!"
Sitting in the research lab studying electromagnetism, he found himself once again at war with the electric lamp that had been installed recently. It was giving him nothing but trouble.
"Does it last about a day? It's bright enough, but how does it burn out and vanish this fast?"
Grumbling, he lit the oil lamp he'd set aside nearby. It was weak. Even that felt brighter to his eyes than the arc lamp had.
"Too dim, too. I'm losing my mind…."
Back in his university days, he had never imagined himself enlisting in the military, yet here he was, doing research in uniform. With so little time to study and zero desire to get dragged off into administrative duty, he'd chosen to enlist — and wound up in a naval research lab.
"Forget to swap out the rods for even a single day, and this is what happens…."
The arc lamp he was using now had been built for exactly that reason — the oil lamp was far too feeble after dark. But the arc lamp burned out so quickly that it was barely worth using.
"It's electricity jumping across a gap between two rods… just how hot must it be to burn away a carbon rod like that?"
Yeong-sil stared at the arc lamp, genuinely marveling at it. Then a thought struck him.
"Hmm? Could this thing actually melt iron?"
Curiosity about the heat was all it took. He began gathering equipment — a pair of thin iron wires lying around the lab, and some wiring pulled from a generator.
"Better keep the gap small, I suppose?"
Screech… screech.
The two iron rods crept toward each other, closer and closer.
Fzzz-CRACK.
"Whoa!"
Just before the steel wires touched, they melted and dripped away in an instant. Jang Yeong-sil could only stare, stunned.
He sought out thicker and thicker wires, little by little, until he was finally working with full iron rods.
"Hmm. So at this thickness, it takes this much current?"
He meticulously recorded every experimental condition, down to the smallest detail. Then—
Thud.
"Hm? That's all it can take?"
The gap kept shrinking until the rods were practically fused together, melting rather than separating. Something gave way.
Vrrrrm! BANG!
"Gah!"
Something had exploded — and judging by the sound coming from outside, it was the generator.
"No, no, no!"
He'd barely managed to talk someone into lending him that generator "for research purposes," and he'd modified it specially himself. Getting another one meant building it from scratch.
White-faced, Yeong-sil bolted for the door. The generator had been his entire life's savings, scraped together bit by bit from his allowance.
Even if he procured another one, re-doing all those modifications would cost him money out of his own pocket.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
"…."
In a corner of the research lab, Yeong-sil hammered away at metal in grim silence. Fixing the broken generator consumed his every waking hour. He had tried asking his wife for a raise in his allowance, but all he'd gotten back was a lecture.
So there was nothing for it. He would have to build and repair everything himself.
"Hmm…."
Yet even as he worked, his mind kept drifting back to the pinwheel the child had been playing with last night.
"Wind can make it spin, can't it? And steam is just the power of moving air in the end, isn't it?"
What circled in his head was the seed of an idea — the concept of an impulse turbine, the thing that would one day become the steam turbine.
And hadn't he just learned basic welding — the kind you'd need to put wire together — which would let him actually try building it?
"Maybe I'll make one."
From that day on, Yeong-sil threw himself into making pinwheels.
Daehan's research labs allowed their researchers to pursue whatever interested them freely. Not out of generosity — it was purely because they were short-staffed. With everyone angling to leave for better posts, the only way to keep researchers around was to let them work on whatever looked relevant, whether or not it was.
The one condition: a thorough written report, reasons included.
"Let's build it small first and run some tests!"
For all his title of researcher, Yeong-sil leaned decidedly toward the physical side of the craft. He trusted gut instinct over calculated analysis, and it showed.
As he churned through failure after failure — mountain after mountain of failed data — a junior partner finally arrived at his door.
"Here, take him and put him to good use."
"Oh! Thank you, sir!"
Before Jang Yeong-sil stood a gentle-looking young man with a slightly plump build.
"Pleased to meet you. My name is Yi Do."
"Oh! Welcome! I'm Jang Yeong-sil!"
After eight years of researching the steam turbine alone, Yeong-sil finally had a colleague.
Lab assignments were decided by pure luck of the draw, and he'd fully resigned himself to working solo — so this stroke of fortune delighted him beyond measure.
"I'm thirty-one this year! And you?"
"Twenty-seven, sir."
"Barely any difference at all! Just call me Yeong-sil — or Jang-hyeong, if you like!"
"Oh — may I really?"
In Daehan, a four-year gap was the kind of age difference where a junior grew up getting smacked around by his mother and older brothers. It was hardly nothing.
"Of course, of course. Let's be comfortable with each other — we're not working together for just a day or two, are we?"
"Oh! Thank you, Jang-hyeong!"
"There you go. And you call me casually too!"
"Yes, sir!"
The truth was, Yi Do had been a little afraid of Yeong-sil at first — those rough, calloused hands under a face like a mountain bandit's. But with his senior being this easygoing, he felt he might actually survive here.
"I'm so glad I came here!"
"Glad to have you! Though tell me — what were you doing before? You're a bit old to have just finished studying, aren't you?"
Those who studied at university before enlisting or joining a lab typically arrived at twenty-three to twenty-five. At twenty-seven, Yi Do was a touch late.
"Hahaha! There was a bit of a… dispute aboard a ship, so I ended up transferring here!"
Yeong-sil's face clouded slightly at the answer — Yi Do had originally been a sailor.
"An accident?"
"Ah. I had an argument with the navigator over chart-reading, it went nowhere, and we ended up trading a few fists."
"Oh dear…."
Yeong-sil began to worry. Maybe this fellow had a rough streak after all.
"The idiot couldn't even manage basic arithmetic, you see. So I said something, and, well… it escalated."
"Are you good at calculations, then?"
"I love mathematics and the sciences!"
"Hmm?"
Something wasn't adding up. To be assigned as a researcher, he'd clearly studied quite a bit at university…. And what kind of man who loved math and science ends up serving aboard a ship?
"Then why were you on a ship at all? Why not come straight to research?"
"Ah! My father's name is Yi Bang-won."
"Gah…."
Only then did Yeong-sil understand why a researcher had finally been assigned to him — a man with eight years of no results and nothing but accidents to his name.
If it was the Yi Bang-won he was thinking of, the man was slated to become the next Grand Admiral of the Navy….
Yeong-sil found himself genuinely afraid that if the two of them fought or got off on the wrong foot, his own head might go rolling.
"W-welcome aboard…."
"Are you unwell, sir?"
"No, no. Let's just… have a look around the lab."
"After you!"
Yi Do, for his part, was overjoyed simply to be somewhere he could read books again after leaving the sea. If anything, he thought he should have thrown his fists years ago and gotten off that ship much sooner.
It feels like a lord has just been posted under my command….
Beside him, Yeong-sil was so busy agonizing over how to treat his new junior that a headache was coming on.
"Come in. This is my lab."
Yeong-sil's laboratory was a cleanly built warehouse. Inside, various tools and pinwheel-like contraptions lay scattered about — it was indistinguishable from a blacksmith's workshop or an artisan's studio.
"Mmm! The air is lovely in here!"
Yeong-sil had left the window open, but the warehouse was thick with its particular stuffy, oily stench. What an odd fellow, he thought.
"Hm? All I smell is machine oil?"
"That's the good stuff! I love the musty smell of paper! And those on the wall must be blueprints of whatever you've been researching?"
One side of the lab was piled high with books, but what truly caught the eye were the blueprints he had drawn, revised, and redrawn over the years.
"Hmm? You can tell what they are?"
"I don't understand them yet, but I can feel something magnificent in them!"
"Hahaha! What a fun friend you are!"
Yeong-sil had a feeling he and Yi Do would get along just fine. Research had its tastes and temperaments too — when they didn't match, a project could wander off into the mountains and never come back.
As Yi Do looked around, his gaze came to rest on the object at the center of the room.
"Oh? But that pinwheel-looking thing — how did you make it?"
The turbine's shape was somehow too rough to have been cast, and Yi Do's curiosity was piqued.
"Ah? I melt the iron and fuse it together."
"Pardon? You can do that here?"
Melting and fusing — didn't that require a proper furnace? Yi Do glanced around the room in confusion.
"Turns out you can. I call it 'welding' — as in, melting and sticking together."
"Oh! Might I see it?"
Yeong-sil had never shown his welding technique to anyone yet, but it was a genuinely remarkable discovery.
"Shall I show you right now?"
"Yes, please!"
And so there was a brief welding demonstration.
Fzzzzz.
"Gah!"
"Don't touch that! It's hot!"
Yi Do, dazzled, had reached out to feel it with his bare hand, and Yeong-sil lunged to stop him.
"Ah! Of course. If it melts iron, it must be unimaginably hot!"
"Goodness. Do be careful."
Yeong-sil let out a sigh of relief — he'd nearly had to break out the Holy Water on day one — and resolved to keep a close eye on his new partner in case of future disasters.
"So what are you making, exactly?"
"Steam is the power of wind too, isn't it? So I thought — make blades like a pinwheel and pass steam through them. I've been building one to find out."
"Oh?"
Yi Do studied the device intently, and his expression quickly turned strange.
"Built this way, won't it fail entirely?"
"Eh?"
"Won't the wind just ride along the surface of the blades without turning them?"
"Oh… OH!"
That was precisely the question that had tormented Yeong-sil for the past eight years — the years in which he'd produced no results whatsoever and only grown better at welding. The wheel wouldn't turn; the wind simply skimmed the blades and slipped past.
"Is there a solution?"
"You redirect the airflow at intervals — change its direction partway through!"
"Gah! How?!"
"I have an idea, but we'll have to try it to know."
Yi Do had spotted the flaw at a single glance and offered a solution in the same breath. To Yeong-sil, he looked like a rope lowered from heaven itself — the brilliant, sharp-minded genius partner he'd been desperately missing!
"We try it right now!"
On day one, with no welcome party, no toast, the two men went straight to work.
They were a pair cut from the same cloth, and it showed.
So the idea was born — and the two of them proceeded to endure failure after endless failure.
Blades breaking off from bad welds. Steam leaking from the pipes. On and on it went.
It took them a full two years before they could finally assemble a working prototype.
Fsssssss.
"Look at you — a proper welder now!"
"Haha, it's all thanks to your teaching, Jang-hyeong."
Those first welding attempts had been chaos. Yi Do had stared into the arc light without thinking, then flown into a panic — am I blind?! I'll never read a book again! I'm finished!
Now the same man had become a master of the craft. The two had even built their own welding tools, simple though they were. Beside them at this very moment sat a device that fed welding wire forward automatically, a little at a time.
"And if I hadn't insisted we build a tool to make welding easier first, you'd still be standing there with a fistful of wire stubs, feeding it in bit by bit by hand. Am I wrong?"
"Hahaha! It was pure misery!"
Necessity, as ever, was the mother of invention.
"It's been a long road, hasn't it?"
"Haha. It was a joy. And we've plenty left to do — why are you talking as if we're finished?"
"Ah! Right you are, still a long way to go, hahaha!"
What the two had built was a very early impulse turbine. If it merely ran — just ran — it would deliver five times the efficiency of the piston engines then in use, which struggled along at three to five percent.
"Then let's finish the assembly and run it!"
"Yes, sir!"
For the final steps, they sealed the housing and began connecting the boiler and piping. The boiler had been built specially as well, since they needed high-pressure steam. Nothing about this project had been easy.
"Think it'll work?"
"It'll work. And if it doesn't, so what? We find out what went wrong and do it again. Simple as that."
"Hahahaha! Exactly right! I was thinking about it all wrong!"
The mood, which had nearly soured into gloom, turned cheerful again at a single remark from Yi Do.
"Right — light it up!"
"Let's boil the water first and bring the pressure up!"
Hiiiiiiiss….
Shoveling coal, hanging over the boiler for what felt like ages — then the two men heard the sound of pressure escaping. The vessel had reached the limit of what it could hold.
"Good! Now let's run the steam through!"
"Go ahead, sir!"
Shhhhhh….
The engine they had built was a small experimental model, barely reaching their waists. Steam roared down the narrow pressure pipe and burst through it at tremendous speed.
Viiiiiiing—
The turbine spun faster and faster, until it was whirling at a terrifying rate.
"Gah!"
"What is it?"
If anything, it was turning faster than they'd expected — the two of them could only gape.
Rattle-rattle-rattle-rattle.
There was an uneasy sound mixed in somewhere, yes — but for now, the experiment was a resounding success.
"It works! It works!"
"WAHAHAHA!"
As the two men danced and whooped around the lab, the steam turbine spun on mightily beside them.