The Glass Artisans
After installing Paracelsus in the Innovation Hall, Hwiyeom brought Niccolo next.
Unlike with Paracelsus, there had been no scramble of rivals trying to claim Niccolo. People simply did not yet understand the value of glassmaking technology—and that fact clearly wounded Niccolo’s pride.
“Honestly. What a complete lack of vision.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
Hwiyeom soothed him with a smile, and Niccolo finally dropped the sulky look and smiled back.
“I’ll show them. I’ll prove that the Young Master’s eye for talent was right to choose me.”
“I’m counting on you, Senior.”
“Hahaha! ‘Senior,’ is it? Me—once one of the finest glass masters on Murano—reduced to not even getting the chief researcher’s post. Just you wait. I’ll earn that seat with my own hands.”
“I expect it won’t take long.”
“Excellent! So where is my workshop? I’m itching to get started!”
Niccolo rolled up his sleeves, but Hwiyeom reined him in.
“The glass workshop hasn’t been built yet. We have no idea how to equip a workshop for the greatest glass artisan of the age. Strictly speaking, every detail of that is a Murano Island secret, isn’t it?”
“Mmm…”
“Besides, starting from a blank slate means we can fill it with exactly what I want, doesn’t it? Tell me about every facility you wished for on Murano but could never have. I’ll provide them all.”
Niccolo’s brow had been furrowed in thought; at Hwiyeom’s words he broke into a broad grin.
“Now that is music to my ears!”
Inside the empty warehouse Hwiyeom had prepared for him in the Innovation Hall, Niccolo began laying out the framework of the glass workshop where he and the other glass technicians would work.
“The blow pipe is fine with this, and the coal is… wait—what in the world is this coal?! Why is the heat so intense?”
“It’s called coking coal. This particular batch is natural coking coal, but you can also produce it by dry-distilling ordinary coal.”
“Dry-distilling?”
“Simply put, making it into coke—like charcoal.”
“Good heavens!”
Venetian glassmakers had been using coal as fuel since the fourteenth century, so Niccolo naturally knew coal. But the firepower of coke was an entirely new world.
“With heat like this I could create magnificent pieces. But…”
His eyes had been shining with eagerness; now his expression dimmed a little.
“This is inland, isn’t it? Glassmaking absolutely requires ash from burned seaweed… and that won’t be easy to obtain.”
In this era, glass was made using the ash of burned seaweed; the resulting greenish glass was called “seaweed glass.” The seaweed ash was used for the soda component it contained—sodium carbonate, Na2CO3.
Niccolo continued, “I’ve heard the eastern coastline is an enormous distance from here… hauling it all that way would drive the transport costs through the roof, wouldn’t it?”
“That’s true enough.”
Hwiyeom grinned.
“But don’t worry. I can solve that problem for you.”
“How?”
“I’ll prepare a reagent that produces the same effect as seaweed ash.”
Hwiyeom knew a simple method for making soda: the Leblanc process, developed by the eighteenth-century French chemist Nicolas Leblanc, which extracted soda from common salt.
The Leblanc process was straightforward. The ingredients were salt, sulfuric acid, and limestone.
First, salt and sulfuric acid were reacted. Mixed together and heated in a kiln fueled by charcoal to eight or nine hundred degrees, the chlorine from the salt combined with the hydrogen from the sulfuric acid to form hydrogen chloride—hydrochloric acid—leaving sodium sulfate behind.
Second, that sodium sulfate was crushed to powder, mixed with charcoal and limestone, and heated again. The final product was sodium carbonate.
The Leblanc process itself had been discovered only because the sudden boom in the French glass industry in the eighteenth century created a desperate need for bulk sodium carbonate; the Académie des sciences had offered a prize, and Leblanc had claimed it. From the moment Hwiyeom decided to produce glass on a large scale, he had already had this method in mind.
Seeing Hwiyeom’s confidence, Niccolo stopped pressing for details.
“Very well. Then how soon can you have the seaweed ash ready?”
“Give me three days.”
“Three days! Understood.”
As soon as the conversation ended, Hwiyeom went straight to the Poison Hall.
“Poison Hall Master, I intend to use a large quantity of sulfuric acid.”
“A large quantity of sulfuric acid? I doubt the Young Master is planning to burn someone alive… is it for that gunpowder production?”
“No. I’m trying to make something needed for glassmaking.”
“Understood. I’ll leave word with the steward—take as much as you need.”
“Ah, but…”
Instead of simply collecting the sulfuric acid, Hwiyeom was watching the Poison Hall Master’s reaction. The master tilted his head.
“Is there something else you require?”
“I think it would be best if the Poison Hall handled the production of this substance.”
“Why is that?”
The Poison Hall Master’s expression turned wary, as if Hwiyeom were trying to dump extra work on them. Hwiyeom answered,
“Because the by-product of making that substance is hydrochloric acid.”
“Ah.”
At the mention of obtaining hydrochloric acid, the Poison Hall Master’s face immediately relaxed.
“Then it certainly falls under our jurisdiction. All right. Hmm—so I’ll need the production method?”
“Yes. The method is…”
Hwiyeom explained how heating salt and sulfuric acid yielded sodium sulfate and hydrochloric acid.
“So that’s possible.”
The Poison Hall specialized in compounding and producing every kind of poison. While it lacked the massive blast furnaces of the Innovation Hall, the Hall of Iron Rain, or the smithies, it still operated a number of sizable kilns.
After hearing that salt and sulfuric acid could be combined to make hydrochloric acid, the Poison Hall Master wore a complicated look.
“Using expensive salt on top of sulfuric acid just to turn it into hydrochloric acid… it feels like burning gold to get silver.”
“Does our family rank sulfuric acid above hydrochloric acid?”
“Of course. Compare the lethality when they touch skin: hydrochloric acid causes immediate pain, but the tissue damage is milder than sulfuric acid’s. Sulfuric acid, on the other hand, destroys tissue widely and deeply, leaving burns that are hard to recover from and carry severe aftereffects. Judging as a martial artist of the Tang family, sulfuric acid is clearly superior as a weapon.”
Hwiyeom smiled at that.
“I’ll make sure that perception changes soon enough.”
“You have something in mind?”
“I do.”
Hwiyeom had already decided that gunpowder alone would not be enough if the family ever faced a large-scale nomad invasion or the imperial army. Gunpowder weapons also destroyed the Tang family’s own defensive lines—the circular barbed wire and the massive horse-halting spears—so he needed a mass-casualty weapon that left those obstacles untouched while killing only people.
His solution was poison gas: chlorine gas, mustard gas, and the like.
It’s a cruel weapon… but given Sichuan’s terrain, poison gas is actually more suitable as a defensive armament.
Sichuan was mountainous, full of obstacles, and densely forested; large-scale use of gunpowder weapons risked catastrophic wildfires. Defensive positions and outposts were built on high ground by nature, and fire climbed upward. Poison gas, by contrast, sank downward, was unaffected by complex terrain, and harmed the natural environment less than a forest fire.
And since it’s poison, it fits the Sichuan Dang Family’s image perfectly—and gives us an excuse for the Emperor.
Stockpiling large gunpowder weapons would put the Emperor on guard; poison was another matter entirely. Poison was a Tang family secret technique and was not covered by their contract with the throne. That was why even Baek Beon had not dared lay a hand on the Poison Hall’s toxins.
Of course, once they actually see a poison-gas weapon capable of slaughtering an entire army, their thinking might change—but that’s a problem for later.
While Hwiyeom was smiling to himself over poison-gas weapons, the Poison Hall Master, looking restless, pressed him.
“There you go again, knowing something and keeping it to yourself. Spit it out already.”
“Hahaha. Later.”
“Tch…”
The Poison Hall Master clicked his tongue but soon nodded.
“Fine. The Young Master must have his reasons. What should we call the by-product of the hydrochloric-acid production? Does it have a name?”
Hwiyeom paused, considering how to render “sodium,” then said,
“Call it sulfuric salt.”
“Understood. As soon as the sulfuric salt is produced, I’ll send it to the Innovation Hall.”
“Can I expect it within two days?”
“Plenty of time.”
The next morning—well short of the promised two days—several crates of sodium sulfate arrived at the Innovation Hall. Hwiyeom ordered the lumpy sodium sulfate finely ground, mixed with limestone and charcoal, and heated. The resulting sodium carbonate he carried straight to Niccolo’s workshop.
“Here’s your soda.”
“Soda?”
“Think of it as a catalyst that works the same way as seaweed salt.”
“Hmm…”
Niccolo eyed the unfamiliar substance with open suspicion, then gave a hearty nod.
“Ah, what the hell—let’s try it! And there’s one more favor I need to ask.”
“What is it?”
“Coloring glass requires all sorts of materials. The trouble is… they’re all soils from specific regions of Europe. You can’t exactly fetch European dirt for me, can you?”
“That’s a bit beyond me, I’m afraid…”
Hwiyeom looked reluctant, then added,
“It would be better to take your time and experiment with soils from the Central Plains, Senior.”
“Ahem. No help for it, I suppose…”
Niccolo gave up. Once Hwiyeom left, he began making glass for the first time with the soda he had been given.
“You lot! Get that furnace hotter! How do you expect the sand to melt like this?!”
Whoosh—!
Under Niccolo’s direction the European glass technicians set to work. The laborers who would eventually handle glass production for the Sichuan Dang Family clustered around them as assistants, helping where they could.
When the sand melted into something like red lava, Niccolo gathered it on the blow pipe and began spinning and blowing.
—Poooohhh…!!
With each powerful breath the glass slowly swelled, taking on the shape of a water droplet. Making a glass bottle was the most basic skill a glass artisan learned first—a warm-up, and also a way to test the soda’s effect. Niccolo nodded in satisfaction as he finished.
“This forms even better than when we use seaweed salt!”
It was only natural. Seaweed salt contained a great many impurities along with the soda; this was pure soda, so the glass flowed that much more freely.
But Niccolo’s astonishment did not end there.
“M-Meister!”
One of the Italian glass technicians called Niccolo “Meister” without thinking. Niccolo turned.
“Call me Senior now, you idiot! …Wait—why is that so transparent?!”
As the bottle he had blown cooled, it shone with a crystal-like clarity. It was more transparent than any glass he had ever made or seen in his life.
Seaweed salt introduced iron and other impurities from the seaweed that tinted glass green or brown. Niccolo was seeing, for the first time, the color of transparent glass made with pure, unadulterated soda.
He swallowed hard without realizing it.
“Mamma mia…”
And while he stood there trembling with awe, Hwiyeom was already drafting the blueprints for recruiting Michelangelo.