Two Geniuses, Four Broken Turbines

Was this right?

Vreeeeee — grik-grik-grik!

The two men were examining an engine that had been running smoothly for quite some time when a hideous, metal-grinding screech began to ring in their ears.

"Ugh! What is that sound?!"

"Master Jang, shut it down first!"

"Good call!"

They shut the engine off, intending to open it back up and inspect the problem, and waited for the machinery to cool.

"I want to open it up already!"

"I'm dying to know what went wrong!"

The turbine, which superheated the steam a second time as it passed through, still radiated waves of heat even after a long cooling period. Unable to bear it any longer, the two men began opening the housing.

Clunk.

"Still hot!"

"But it'll cool ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠faster with it open!"

Left gaping open, they began turning the mechanism by hand, examining it closely.

"Huh... the friction points are a mess?"

"We'll have to find a solution for this, won't we?"

That tearing, screeching sound from partway through the run had been the noise of the friction surfaces wearing away.

"We'll need to build something to replace it..."

"And ideally something we can swap out when it wears down, right?"

As the two men hunted down the problems one by one, they began to invent a whole string of solutions. The first was a bearing, to take the place of rotating friction.

"Oh? So you fit these little round metal rods in there, and they roll in place of the shaft turning?"

What the two men were studying so intently was Yeong-sil's sketch of an early roller bearing.

"I watched them rolling steel plates over cylinders at the ironworks, and I thought — wouldn't that work here too? I'm planning to let oil flow through the inside."

Though he himself didn't realize it, the bearing he had just sketched would prove a tremendous boon to the wheels of carriages and trains, which until now had simply been slathered in oil and hoped for the best.

And so one very important invention came into the world.

Hissssss.

"Hm? Should we pile a bit more coal into the mid-stage reheater?"

Studying the boiler closely, he had come to understand something: the steam produced by the main boiler mattered, but the reheater that gave the steam a second heating pass mattered just as much.

At first they had installed it out of fear that the steam would cool and water would condense inside the pipes. But now — the hotter the incoming steam, the faster the thing spun, didn't it?

"Hm? That's strange, isn't it? It's speeding up the more we heat the steam."

Yi Do, recording the experimental results alongside him, also looked like he was racking his brain over why.

Ting-ting-WHAM-crack-BOOM!

"Gah! What the—?!"

"Gah! Should we take cover?!"

"Just hit the floor!"

At the alarming sounds, the two men dropped to their hands and knees and began crawling out of the laboratory.

"What do ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠we do if that thing ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠blows?!"

"Better than people getting hurt!"

Ting-tee-ting! Ting!

Leaving behind the constant sound of something ricocheting and slamming about, the two men crouched flat outside the warehouse, peeking in cautiously.

"How much coal do you think is left in there?"

"Not much. We only added a little."

"Let's hope nothing serious happened."

Ka-BOOM — hissssss.

Just then, a tremendous bang shook the engine, followed by the sound of rushing air bleeding out.

"Looks like it's stopped — let's disconnect everything!"

"Right!"

Convinced that something had broken, and broken spectacularly, the two men's hands flew into action.

And the frozen-over interior was a complete disaster zone.

"Dear heavens... what on earth..."

"The blades are all shattered..."

Blades had torn loose here and there, bounced around inside the housing, and smashed everything to pieces.

"Huh? How did this happen?"

"Hm... I know we call it steel, but could its heat tolerance be lower than we assumed?"

"Well, the pressure would've been enormous too."

It was a slight misunderstanding on their part, but the fact remained: using plain carbon steel rather than an alloy meant they had to work with comparatively low-temperature steam. Overheating the steam had been the root of the catastrophe.

"Either we find something more heat-resistant, or we lower the temperature, I suppose?"

"Be nice if a new kind of metal came along."

"You're telling me. But that's above our pay grade, isn't it?"

"Neither of us knows much about metallurgy anyway. Haha!"

The world around them didn't know it yet, but the two men were geniuses, make no mistake. Their fields were simply a little different from one another.

And if these two had taken a step forward, wouldn't the other master craftsmen of Daehan take a step to follow?

"Right then — let's find the right operating temperature! And figure out what material to use!"

"Yes, sir!"

Giving up steam reheating was out of the question. It was an essential step for achieving high energy efficiency.

As the experiments piled up, so did the records — and so did the wrecked steam turbines. All four turbines already broken in the laboratory were carefully kept in storage.

Vreeeeeing.

Watching the turbine spin powerfully, the basic framework seemed to be coming together. But as Jang Yeong-sil observed the machine during its test run, a furrow creased his brow.

"Hm..."

"What's wrong?"

"The exhaust steam is hotter than I expected. It feels like such a waste..."

Watching the steam billow out of the smokestack, Yeong-sil couldn't shake the feeling that perfectly good energy was being squandered.

"Then... shall we hook up another pinwheel?"

"Hm? You think it'd work?"

The two had tried attaching an extra turbine before, for exactly this reason — the wasted steam bothered them. The result had been a failure; it was worse than nothing at all.

"What if we build a brand-new pinwheel designed for low-temperature steam?"

"A new one?"

"Yes. The problem is that it's weak, right? So what if we make the blades bigger?"

"Oh?"

Jang Yeong-sil was closer to a craftsman than a scientist. Whenever Yi Do organized a thought like this, Yeong-sil would picture it in his head and make an intuitive call.

"Yeah. That could work."

And since that intuition was right most of the time, Yi Do had learned to lean on it — which let him stretch his thinking as far as it would go.

"Roughly what size do you think we'd need?"

Yi Do trusted his partner's instincts. The starting point always came from Yeong-sil's opinion; the precise calculations that followed were Yi Do's job.

"Hmm... how many times bigger, I wonder..."

Following the answer Yeong-sil conjured from the picture in his head, the two men set about building a larger steam turbine.

What was taking shape before them was a device that would recycle the wasted exhaust steam and push the energy efficiency even higher.

The two sketched out the proper dimensions to match the main turbine's size, and what they ultimately produced was nothing less than a stack of turbines reaching a full four stages.

Perhaps because the units were small, but it seemed no amount of energy was too little to give up on.

"But... what on earth do we do with this?"

"This one is really tricky, isn't it?"

The problem was that each turbine in the stack spun at a wildly different speed.

And so they set about making gears matched to the different rotation ratios.

"Hmm... no. This is not something gears can solve!"

"What do we do?"

"We need some kind of mechanism that only engages when the force is strong enough."

When they built it with gears and tested it, the changing steam conditions made each turbine's speed fluctuate, and the teeth either stripped clean off or overloaded the faster turbine instead.

So the two men began researching clutches instead of gears.

"You know, Master Jang... haven't we been getting surprisingly good support lately?"

"Have we? I assumed it was your father pulling strings. Am I wrong?"

"Ha! Not a chance. That's not the kind of man he is."

"Then what's going on?"

Research funding is genuinely hard to come by. You have to pour your heart into the reports, painstakingly explaining, at length and in detail, why the research matters.

Yet at some point, whenever they delivered results, a short note would arrive along with every item they'd requested.

Every one of those curt little replies had been written by Haneul.

As usual, Haneul was leafing through reports in Sinsi.

Flip, flip.

He was turning the summary pages one by one when his hand suddenly stopped.

"What the—! Why is this in here?!"

"Yes? What is it?"

"Jang Yeong-sil and Yi Do are attached at the hip?!"

The two men — soulmates, practically — were apparently inseparable even on paper, playing together in the reports, so of course he was startled.

"Well, that's charming. So, what are they building?"

"It looks like they're working on an engine?"

Let's see...

Wait — a steam turbine? How on earth are they making one of those? Casting alone would only get you the small parts...

Huh? They're welding it?

Oh, there's a separate report for that?

Ah, I see. They're using thin wire, apparently. Then it wouldn't need as much electricity as I assumed.

<The welding technique is impressive. Refine it into something easier to use first.>

He made the reports in duplicate, so he'd have to write his reply on one and send it back.

"Send this along, and make sure those two get everything they ask for."

"Yes? But they haven't produced any results yet?"

"They're about to produce enormous results."

After all, those two were geniuses who fit together like a hand in a glove.

The two men were building a mock-up clutch and running experiments.

"By the way, Master Jang."

Yi Do was suddenly seized by a question.

"What is it?"

"This 'boiler'? 'Bearing'? 'Clutch'? None of these sound like Daehan words. Why are the names so strange?"

No matter how he looked at them, they were neither Daehan's tongue nor the language of any neighboring country.

"No idea. They were written that way in the report, so I just call them that too."

"Ah..."

Haneul had long since given up and simply named things however they came to him. At least he'd had the courtesy to write "boiler" in Hangul rather than English.

"Hm. Let's test this one next."

"Something like this waterwheel? They're not even touching, though?"

"Who knows? We try it and find out."

What the two men were testing was the fluid clutch. The idea came from watching a waterwheel submerged in water: when it spun, the wheel beside it — touching nothing — began to turn as well. Fascinated, they had built one.

Vreeeeing.

"Huh? It actually works!"

"It's a touch slow, but not bad at all?"

On the heels of the bearing, the two men went on to invent a whole variety of clutches. Precision machining technology was advancing at a dazzling pace.

"If we combine the gears with the right clutches, wouldn't the whole thing work now?"

"True. That speed-triggered one was really elegant..."

"Its durability problem was simply impossible to solve."

They had tried building a centrifugal clutch as well, but the rate of wear on its internal parts ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was utterly beyond tolerable, and they abandoned it.

"Let's put together the final report."

"The last experiment, then?"

They had built a new engine, but the real question was whether it was actually practical. That was the whole crux of it.

Which was why they were now comparing how much efficiency each engine could deliver.

Two steam engines sat side by side, each connected to a large wheel. The test was to see how long and how far each engine could keep its friction-loaded wheel turning.

"Right — let's feed in exactly the same amount of fuel, measured out."

"Yes."

They had managed to find two engines of roughly comparable size, though the measurements were sure to be imperfect. They knew it — this was an experiment for the sake of comparison, nothing more.

Screeeeee.

Steam pressure built, and the wheels began to roll, slowly at first.

The two men signaled back and forth to each other, feeding in fuel at a steady rate,

clack-clack-click,

while the mechanical counter silently tallied the revolutions of the wheels.

Hisssss.

The last coal had gone in a long while ago, and now the two men sat before the wheels with their eyes bulging, rubbing at them without noticing the soot smeared across their faces.

"What...?"

"Could the counter be broken?"

The engine brought in for comparison read <134>.

Their newly built engine read <433>.

The gap was simply too enormous to believe.

"Shall we run it one more time?"

"Oh? Should we? I'll go fetch another counter."

"Good, thanks."

Yi Do hurried out and came back with a counter.

With the experiment reset, the two began again. They even swapped the fuel-feeding positions between the engines, and after a long wrestle in front of the fires, they returned once more to the counters.

<131> <487>

The gap had only widened.

"What is this?"

"Er... let's just run with it, shall we?"

"Yeah. I've got nothing."

The experiment had succeeded so wildly that the two men were left in a daze, and they began drafting the report.

"Heh-heh-heh."

"Hee-hee-hee."

As they wrote, the weight of all their past toil and the joy of the experiment's success began to well up from somewhere deep inside.

One of them drew the illustrations while letting out deranged giggles, the other wrote the text, and the finished report soon climbed all the way to the very top of the Navy.

To Yi Bang-won, Yi Do's father.

"What? Is this true?"

"Yes, sir! It appears we may finally be able to build a practical ironclad!"

"And they wrote this name down in earnest?"

"Yes, sir! Your son has accomplished something tremendous."

Reading the name Yi Do written on the report, a wave of relief spread across Yi Bang-won's face.

A son born into a soldier's family who loved nothing but books and hated moving his body — the boy had been a constant worry. And now he had pulled off a monumental achievement?

"Order a demonstration to be prepared."

"Yes, sir!"

A report that would carve a line into naval history — no, into the entire history of Daehan's mechanical engineering — had arrived, and now the demonstration awaited.