Rubber, Glass, and Chandeliers
Beyond the agricultural harvests, the yields from other quarters were no less substantial.
First among them was the rubber goods factory, into which Hwi-yeom had poured the Architecture Department and the Blacksmithing Department until it stood fully complete.
The rubber products Hwi-yeom had once shown Dang Un-sang only as concept sketches had been fashioned into prototypes at the Innovation Hall and demonstrated before the clan’s senior officers.
The reaction was explosive.
In particular, the vulcanized rubber gloves—tough, resilient, and thin—drew lavish praise from everyone connected to the Poison Hall.
“To think a glove could be this thin and yet this durable, completely unreactive to acids and poisons!”
“Th-this is a revolution! A true revolution!”
Clans that handled toxins as a matter of course—the Sichuan Dang Family and Yunnan’s Five Poisons Sect among them—had traditionally used gloves of deer hide when working with venom. Deer hide was thinner and softer than cowhide, fish skin, or ordinary leather, making delicate work easier, and after chemical treatment it offered some measure of protection against poison.
These rubber gloves, however, were far thinner still. Compared with deer-hide gloves they felt like a second skin, an almost seamless extension of the hand; the Dang clansmen shivered with pure delight.
Dang Un-sang himself could not contain his excitement and began hounding Hwi-yeom at once.
“Begin mass production immediately and issue them to the Poison Hall, the Patriarch’s Hall, the Innovation Hall, Cheol-u-jeon, the Blacksmithing Department—everywhere!”
“We have more than enough stockpiled rubber latex. Rather than limit them to laboratory and fabrication work, why not put them to use far more broadly?”
“Broadly? Where, exactly?”
“The kitchens, for instance?”
Dang Un-sang’s face said What kind of nonsense is that?—until he witnessed the kitchen staff’s thunderous enthusiasm and promptly shut his mouth.
Hwi-yeom only smirked.
“If we meant to use these only within the clan, I would never have invested in this kind of facility. We are going to sell them across the entire Central Plains. Before long, no one who works with water will be without our product.”
“…Yes. That does sound right.”
Rubber gloves received the loudest welcome, yet the other items fared no worse. When U Seong-sik heard the explanation of the rubber boots, his eyes went round and he immediately demanded mass production from Hwi-yeom.
“Every farmer in Sichuan will have eyes only for our production windows, Young Master!”
Well—show a pair of rubber boots to farmers who spent their days transplanting rice, and that reaction was only natural.
If gloves and boots ignited fierce passion among specific professions, rubber shoes set the entire population ablaze.
“Such comfort… such springy give…”
“They don’t leak, and they don’t make a sound when you walk!”
Hwi-yeom had not invented anything exotic; they were ordinary rubber shoes. But to people who had worn only leather Tang-style shoes or carved wooden clogs, the elastic cushion underfoot was nothing short of revolutionary.
When the Dang family’s highly trained martial artists put them on, the shoes became something almost supernatural—footfalls that truly made no sound at all. (Hwi-yeom himself thought, What the hell… that’s terrifying…)
Their drawbacks—they tore easily, offered no ventilation, and trapped moisture that could breed athlete’s foot—were real enough, yet leather shoes and wooden clogs suffered the same faults, if not worse.
The single most useful item of all—the rubber tire—barely got a reaction…
Hwi-yeom had also unveiled handcarts fitted with rubber-rimmed wheels in place of the usual iron-shod ones; everyone remained thoroughly unimpressed. The high-ranking gentlemen never pulled carts themselves, so the improvement never quite registered on their skin.
No help for it. We’ll show them when we demonstrate the improved carriages.
He was already planning a next-generation carriage that used leaf springs and rubber tires to smother vibration. Chief Blacksmith Han Cheol felt a sudden chill for no apparent reason, but that was another story entirely.
Just as the rubber goods had caused a sensation, the glass workshop’s achievements proved equally satisfying.
Niccolo, the glass maestro and master craftsman from the Western Regions, had spent long months of trial and error inside the glassworks the Sichuan Dang Family had built for him. Beginning with the clear glass Hwi-yeom’s “soda” made possible, he experimented with soils, metals, and dyes from every corner of the Central Plains, struggling to learn the temperament of each local earth.
The man who helped him most was Paracelsus, the great European alchemist and physician.
Until then Niccolo’s method had been purely empirical: classify soils by region, add them one by one, and keep melting until the desired color appeared. Paracelsus offered a different suggestion.
“Meister Niccolo, when you melt glass the flame takes on many colors. Could those colors not tell us what substances are mixed in the earth?”
“What do you mean?”
Niccolo had never paid the least attention to flame color. All his focus had been locked on temperature, the state of the molten glass, and control of its surface—exactly the way a player deep in a game of go misses the move that a kibitzer spots at once.
Paracelsus tested his hypothesis.
And then:
“The color of the flame changes according to the substances in the soil. Copper burns blue-green, salt yellow, phosphorus blue, lime orange… Using this property, could we not identify the composition of the earth we use for glass?”
What Paracelsus had discovered was the flame test—basic chemistry taught in middle school in the twenty-first century, yet never systematically recorded in this age. Once soil composition could be read from flame color, the art of coloring glass shifted from pure experience to something more methodical and quantifiable.
Naturally Niccolo nearly tore his hair out with joy.
“Doctor! You’re a genius!”
He applied the discovery at once. His first commission was to produce safe glass vessels for the Sichuan Dang Family’s countless poisons and acids. Unlike porcelain, glass allowed the contents to be inspected without breaking the seal. Light-sensitive drugs went into brown or black bottles; toxic compounds into green ones that served as warning; acids into yellow, alkalis into blue.
After the rubber gloves, this was the invention that drew the loudest cheers from the clan.
“Honestly—getting this excited over mere glass bottles…”
Bottle-making was the most elementary skill of any glassworker, so Niccolo found the praise almost deflating. Hwi-yeom only smiled and made a new proposal.
“Then leave the bottles to the apprentices. You masters and meisters should tackle something harder.”
“What shall we make?”
“We are going to make a fortune with magnificent glass ornaments.”
“Bowls and decorative pieces, then?”
“No. You will make chandeliers. Enormous, dazzling chandeliers to hang in the Emperor’s palace in Beijing.”
“Pardon?”
Niccolo looked momentarily blank. Chandeliers had existed since Byzantine times; of course he knew them. But earlier chandeliers had been little more than practical fixtures for hanging multiple candles or oil lamps. Only around this very era had bronze, brass, even gold and silver chandeliers begun to appear in palaces and wealthy noble houses, shifting emphasis toward interior decoration. Chandeliers adorned with intricate carving and cut glass were just beginning to emerge, so the notion of a “glass-heavy chandelier” still felt somewhat foreign.
“Glass on a chandelier? Not crystal?”
“If we use lead ash and soda when making the glass, we can produce glass that is both transparent and scatters light with exquisite beauty. Hang hundreds—thousands—of pieces so they catch sunlight or candlelight and blaze. That glass will be far more beautiful than any chandelier trimmed with cut crystal.”
“So ornaments of glass could become more beautiful—and more expensive—than ornaments of costly crystal.”
Glass was already a luxury, yet still cheaper than true precious crystal. Hwi-yeom smiled thinly.
“If things go as I intend, glass ornaments may one day command the same price as an equal weight of gold.”
Luxury consumption naturally flows from the top downward. Flood the common market with cheap glass goods first, and demand among the people would appear—yet the upper classes might forever brand glass “something only the lowly use,” slamming shut the high-end market.
Besides, we don’t yet produce enough glass to stamp out cheap mass goods anyway.
Less than a year had passed since Niccolo and the other European glassmasters had begun training Dang craftsmen. Mechanization and true mass production were still far off.
So we begin as a luxury for the wealthy.
Hwi-yeom chose the opposite path.
Start with “glass = the costly treasure that adorns the Emperor’s palace,” let it become the fashion among powerful nobles, then among well-to-do merchants and commoners of means, and only at the end supply cheap goods the poorest can afford.
That way every stratum of society would buy glass.
He also brought Michelangelo into the chandelier project.
“A chandelier? Me? Why?”
Whether from his habitual contrariness or the sheer arrogance of a master architect, Michelangelo’s first response was a scowl. Hwi-yeom only laughed and explained.
“A chandelier is not furniture. Given its scale and weight, it must hang from the building’s beams yet occupy the single most beautiful position in the room. That is architecture. It is a structural element that makes the building itself more beautiful—is it not?”
“Hmm…”
“Picture it. The Forbidden City made more radiant, more glorious, than that arrogant bastard Julius II’s great basilica. Imagine the regret when he realizes he persecuted and drove out the very genius who achieved it. Let us build a chandelier so magnificent it will be recorded in the histories—and in that same moment Julius II will be remembered by posterity as an idiot pope.”
Appeal to an architect’s pride, then dangle the chance to humiliate the man he hated. If Michelangelo could resist that bait, he would not be Michelangelo.
Sure enough, he pouted—but could not hide the upward twitch at the corner of his mouth.
“Somehow I feel like I’m being played… Fine, whatever. If I can shove it in that bastard’s face, I’ll do it!”
Hwi-yeom smiled warmly.
“By the way—did you finish that drive-shaft coupling I asked for last time?”
“Huh? Oh, that. It was nothing special, so I made it and forgot. It’s in my workshop; take it whenever you like.”
Lee Jinmyeong asked out of curiosity,
“What sort of device is that?”
Hwi-yeom answered,
“A combination of the centipede-style steel cable Michelangelo designed and a set of compound gears—large and small.”
To a man of the future it would have looked like a bicycle chain married to a gear train for power transmission.
Lee Jinmyeong’s head tilted farther to the side.
“And what do you intend to do with it?”
“Any number of things… but for now,” Hwi-yeom grinned, “let’s make something delicious.”
“?”