Chapter 150: The Telescope

“Great. What a coincidence.”

Lin Hanlong pointed to a half-assembled machine and said, “A plane grinding machine. We can assemble it and test it next week.”

Qian Shuiting turned his head back and forth, comparing the plane grinding machine with the spherical grinding machine next to it. “The structure feels very similar.”

“It’s basically the same design. But the grinding tool moves in a plane, so that part is slightly different.”

“You said this is for making binoculars for the navy? I remember binoculars weren’t equipped until the Battle of Tsushima, right? And they were very expensive. How much does your binocular cost to make?”

In response, Lin Hanlong walked to a workbench on the side, picked up a monocular telescope, and handed it to Qian Shuiting. By modern standards, the workmanship of this telescope was rather crude. The lens barrel was made of shiny brass, but scratches from processing were visible everywhere. The eyepiece had a protective ring that felt like leather to the touch. There was no obvious resistance when pulling the lens barrel back and forth, but it wasn’t very smooth either.

“This one is for the army, the cheapest. It takes five man-hours to make one.” Lin Hanlong smiled wryly. “But getting this much brass took a lot of arguing. There’s no way around it; we don’t have any better material than brass for the lens barrel right now.”

Qian Shuiting silently calculated. “Less than three circulation coupons, which is at most three fen of silver. If this thing could be sold, it would be great. Selling it for fifty taels of silver each, people would go crazy for it.”

“It can be sold. I have a better one.” Lin Hanlong said, handing over another monocular telescope.

This new telescope looked very different. Although the brass lens barrel was also full of scratches, its shape was flatter and more suitable for gripping, clearly showing ergonomic considerations. There was a large knob in the middle of the lens barrel, and turning it would cause the lens barrel to extend and retract on its own.

“This one takes fifteen man-hours to make.”

“Oh, so expensive. What are the advantages?”

Lin Hanlong led Qian Shuiting out a side door and pointed to a distant chimney for him to compare. Under the light of the gas street lamp, the five-man-hour cheap model could only barely make out the shape of the chimney in a blurry shadow, with indistinct edges. The fifteen-man-hour high-end model could clearly distinguish the brick seams on the chimney and the wisps of white smoke. The difference between the two was obvious at a glance. “This one is almost the same as the ones we brought. Absolutely worth the price.”

Lin Hanlong shook his head: “The quality is still a big step down. This is just for practice; nobody actually wants it.”

Lin Hanlong explained that the awkwardness of this thing was that it was neither here nor there. The army liked cheap products because they could be issued in large numbers to native junior officers, scouts, and gunners, and losing or damaging them was not a problem. The navy was set on binoculars and looked down on monoculars, no matter how good the quality. As for the Yuanen officers, they all had a few genuine military-grade items from the old world, which were naturally superior in performance.

As for the price of binoculars—the hand-ground prism plus silvering took a week, processing the lens barrel took nearly a week, and Lin Hanlong, with two assistants, spent more than three days on assembly and adjustment, finally getting three finished products. Add to that the cost of the lenses, and one pair of binoculars came out to more than sixty man-hours. However, this was the man-hours for the current manual trial production. Once the plane grinding machine was tuned and the lens barrel manufacturing process matured, the man-hours were expected to drop significantly. On the other hand, the navy’s non-combat ships would not be equipped with binoculars. If there was a Yuanen officer on a main combat ship, they would have a telescope from the old world. So, the real need was only for some combat and patrol vessels crewed solely by naturalized citizens. Lin Hanlong estimated that one or two hundred would be enough.

“This is the power of industry,” Qian Shuiting lamented. In other parts of the world, even the most primitive ‘thousand-li mirror’ was a rare and coveted high-end military product. In Lin’gao, binoculars, nearly 300 years ahead of the world, were a mass-produced item that took at most sixty man-hours to make.

Putting down the telescope, Qian Shuiting put on his sunglasses again and eagerly watched Lin Hanlong demonstrate the method of making aspherical lenses. To put it plainly, this aspherical lens was just a drop of molten glass. Due to surface tension, the molten glass would naturally form a curved surface. If the glass blanks had the same diameter and weight, it could be expected that the curved surfaces they formed after melting would be basically consistent. This method was suitable for making small-diameter, short-focal-length lenses, such as the objective lens of a microscope. Historically, Leeuwenhoek used molten glass rods to make objective lenses and made more than a hundred microscopes. His technique was lost after his death and was not rediscovered until more than a hundred years later. Here at Lin Hanlong’s workshop, the blanks were cut from a glass rod one by one. After confirming they had the same weight, they were placed on a tin plate and then heated and melted with a gas torch. As long as the heat was well controlled, it was easy to produce highly consistent products with a good finish. After that, a little polishing was all that was needed to finish them.

Qian Shuiting suddenly asked excitedly, “Old Lin, how about making photochromic lenses? They would definitely be off the charts in terms of trendiness.” He saw Lin Hanlong give an embarrassed smile and knew his question was abrupt. He quickly asked what the key difficulty was.

The principle of photochromic lenses is actually quite simple: fine particles of silver bromide and copper oxide are added to the lens glass. Silver bromide decomposes into bromine and silver under strong light, causing the color to darken. In weaker light, copper oxide catalyzes the recombination of bromine and silver, making it transparent again. However, it’s easier said than done. Currently, Lin’gao cannot mass-produce silver bromide, and turning solid chemicals into fine particles is also difficult. Therefore, photochromic lenses cannot be made yet. However, once the technology for silver plate photography is broken through, the same process can be used to produce the necessary raw materials for photochromic lenses. At the current stage, making some colored sunglass lenses in Lin’gao is not a big problem.

“If we can get natural crystal on a large scale, we could make things like brown sunglasses,” Lin Hanlong remembered that a lot of the crystal from Donghai County was brown.

As he spoke, Lin Hanlong led Qian Shuiting to a row of wooden shelves. The shelves were filled with boxes. Opening the boxes revealed piles of glass of various colors and shapes. On the lids were pasted tables, densely filled with data such as formulas and processing procedures. These were all samples made from the already mass-produced glass raw materials, with the addition of various minerals that could be obtained in Lin’gao.

“Oh, oh, so you found the formulas just like that?”

Lin Hanlong smiled wryly. “No. This kind of mixing is basically like a blind man feeling an elephant; you can’t grasp the key points.” He had been working with the Yuanen from the chemical industry department for almost a month, trying to formulate optical glass in small crucibles, but the results were not good. Without quantitative analysis, not only was it difficult to remove the color from the produced glass, but more importantly, each batch was different. In the end, he had no choice but to pester the Executive Committee for a special approval and used an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer once to analyze a batch of selected samples. This modern analytical equipment was a cheat code like a golden thigh. Within two hours, it had determined the precise composition of all the elements in the samples. On this basis, and with reference to the optical glass process manual they had brought, the chemical industry department quickly produced acceptable optical glass samples. Now they could make four or five grades of glass with relative confidence, including the most common crown and flint glass. However, the quantity of this batch of glass was limited, which was a hidden concern for the future.

Seeing Qian Shuiting’s stunned expression, Lin Hanlong further explained that to ensure product consistency, the chemical industry department had set aside twenty tons of glass raw materials. After being crushed and mixed evenly, it was sealed and reserved specifically for optical glass. The composition analysis was also done on samples from these twenty tons of raw materials.

Currently, the production of ordinary glass is very large. The original mineral source has been exhausted, and now they are using quartz sand from Changhua. The quality of the quartz sand from Changhua is very good, but it goes without saying that the composition of the new product will not be completely consistent with the old one.

“However, by the time these twenty tons are used up, I estimate it will be the late stage of the Second Five-Year Plan,” Lin Hanlong said confidently. “After this busy period, I’ll start making a Bunsen spectrometer, and then we won’t have to rely entirely on modern equipment.”

After finishing a tour of the optics workshop, Qian Shuiting was also feeling that his interest was waning. He was about to say his goodbyes when he saw Lin Hanlong slap his forehead. “Ah, your laser sight is fixed. I can show it to you.”

Lin Hanlong led Qian Shuiting out of the workshop, went around in a half-circle, and walked a short distance. Ahead was a row of single-story buildings with their doors and windows tightly shut despite the summer heat. Lin Hanlong pulled open a door and motioned for Qian Shuiting to enter. Inside was another door. Qian Shuiting noticed that the door was covered with thick insulation material. Lin Hanlong followed him in, closed the door behind him, and then opened the door in front.

The room was dimly lit, but a wave of cool air washed over them.

“Optics assembly workshop. The temperature is somewhat controlled,” Lin Hanlong said. The walls were luxuriously lined with some bronze pipes.

“This is a geothermal air conditioner. Just installed not long ago,” Lin Hanlong explained from the side. Forced-air cooling was no longer sufficient here, and using ice would increase the humidity in the air, so a special approval was given to install a geothermal air conditioner.

The temperature control effect of the geothermal air conditioner was significant. It could maintain a relatively constant temperature in both winter and summer without increasing the air humidity. The only downside was that it consumed a large amount of copper. Therefore, only a very few units in Lin’gao could afford to install this type of air conditioner.

Temperature control during assembly is mainly to prevent unnecessary errors caused by thermal expansion and contraction. Although many of the optical instruments made in Lin’gao now do not require very high precision, Lin Hanlong had always believed that it was much better to have strict standards from the beginning than to tighten them up later after becoming lax.

Qian Shuiting noticed that there were several workers in the room concentrating on operating instruments. He didn’t make any more noise and quietly followed Lin Hanlong around a few workbenches into another room. There was no one else in this room, only a few workbenches with some instruments that were clearly brought by the transmigrators. Lin Hanlong walked to a workbench. On the table was a vise, clamping a cylindrical object. He reached out and flicked it, and a red light spot appeared on the distant wall. Lin Hanlong motioned for Qian Shuiting to walk to the light spot and pointed, saying:

“The light spot is five meters away, and the error will not exceed one millimeter.”

Qian Shuiting bent down to look at the light spot, which was right in the center of a small crosshair. He nodded.

Lin Hanlong walked back to the workbench, turned off the laser, took it from the vise, and handed it to Qian Shuiting. “The epoxy resin was applied the day before yesterday. It should be completely dry now.”

Qian Shuiting thanked him profusely. This small laser was Qian Shuixie’s laser pistol sight. A few days ago during training, it had accidentally fallen from a high place and hit a stone. The casing was dented, and the laser was no longer collimated. Now the casing seemed to be fully restored, and the laser also seemed to be very accurate.

“Just one thing, this is heavier than before,” Lin Hanlong said, picking up a broken part from the table. “Your central positioning cone sleeve was made of engineering plastic, and it cracked when it fell. I made you one out of copper. The effect is the same, but it’s a bit heavier.”

Qian Shuiting suddenly remembered, “You said epoxy resin? Isn’t that a modern product we brought?”

Lin Hanlong chuckled. “Yes. But this stuff has an expiration date. It would go to waste if we just let it sit.”

Qian Shuiting took the sight, tossed it in his palm, and casually put it in his pocket. Then he took his leave. As Lin Hanlong was seeing him out of the assembly workshop, he encountered a naturalized citizen worker who looked at him with a pleading expression. Lin Hanlong nodded at the worker, then opened the door to see Qian Shuiting out.

Qian Shuiting felt that his trip was not in vain. He had not only deepened his friendship among the tech otaku but also gained a deeper understanding of the field of optics. Full of ambition, he said to Lin Hanlong, “Old Lin! I am honored that everyone thinks highly of me and elected me as the Speaker. To be honest, although I’ve taken the position, I don’t have much confidence. But since I, Qian, have taken it, I must do something for everyone. Don’t worry, I will take action in the near future to speak up for our frontline Yuanen and let everyone see the importance of people like us.”

Lin Hanlong nodded. “Then I’ll wait for the good news.”

After seeing Qian Shuiting off, Lin Hanlong returned to the assembly workshop. The worker who had asked for help earlier was operating a Foucault tester to inspect a newly ground lens, and he seemed unsure of the result. Lin Hanlong sat down, looked through the knife-edge, turned the turntable in front of it, looked again, and then moved the knife-edge left and right.

“You have stray light. The aperture is too large, and the reflection is too strong, so you see a bright field that masks the real image,” Lin Hanlong said, looking up at the worker. “Adjust it like this, and switch to a smaller pinhole, and you’ll be able to see it.”

Seeing the worker’s half-understanding, subservient expression, Lin Hanlong sighed inwardly. He had wanted to explain the principle of the Foucault tester, but no matter how he explained it, it seemed impossible for a worker who had held a hoe his whole life and was now attending an adult literacy class to understand the principles of physical optics. He could only let them accumulate experience through practice and hope they would make fewer basic mistakes in the future.

Lin Hanlong waited for a while, watching the native worker operate, and only left after confirming that he had gotten the hang of it. He strolled to the other end of the room, where someone was assembling a telescope. He stood behind the assembler for a while, then tapped his shoulder to signal him to move aside. He sat down and looked at the star test device in the distance. The sodium-yellow gas lamp was bright, and the light spot from the star test device was fine. The lenses for the telescope had already been glued to the brass mounting rings. He reached out and turned the ring, carefully observing the light spot refracted from the lens. After a few turns, he turned back to the assembler and asked, “What do you think?”

“Report, Chief! I think this side needs to be ground a little more!” The middle-aged assembler reached out from the side and pointed to a marked spot on the ring.

Lin Hanlong grunted and nodded for him to continue working. Currently, they lacked the means for mass-producing precision parts, and there were no good adhesives or adjustment screws. The only way to do optical assembly was through lapping and fitting. In other words, it was to use files, grinding stones, and sandpaper to trim the mechanical parts for installation to achieve the best possible precision. Needless to say, this method was inefficient, and the parts were not interchangeable, but it was still many times better than the rest of the world, which was still fumbling with the principles of optics.

After leaving the assembly workshop, Lin Hanlong returned to his office for a few sips of tea, then went out to the workshop for a few more rounds of inspection. Time passed quickly, and it was soon 11 p.m. It was time for a break and “lunch.” Lin Hanlong whispered a few words to his apprentice, who quickly ran over to the on-duty workshop supervisor and whispered in his ear. Lin Hanlong stood by a grinding machine and took out his watch.

Clang—clang—clang—

A bell suddenly rang in the workshop. It was the workshop supervisor ringing the emergency bell. Different bell sounds had different meanings; two short rings meant a fire alarm.

The workers in the workshop began to whisper to each other. Fire alarm! It’s a fire alarm! They all pulled the stop levers of their machines, did a quick check, and then started to walk out. Lin Hanlong stopped a worker who was about to turn off a grinding machine.

“This is a drill. Don’t touch this machine; let it run.” The worker acknowledged, bowed, and went out.

Within a minute, all the machinery in the workshop had stopped, and most of the people had left. The workshop supervisor, with two men, made a round of the workshop and finally came to Lin Hanlong’s side.

“Chief! Everyone is out. All areas have been checked according to regulations and are secure!”

Lin Hanlong nodded with satisfaction. “One minute and twenty seconds, not bad. Go outside and count heads.”

Outside the workshop, all the native workers had already lined up. The on-duty group leaders reported the number of people to the supervisor, who then reported to Lin Hanlong that everyone was present.

Lin Hanlong waved his hand. “Well done today. Let’s eat.”

Outside the workshop door, a few people had been waiting with food boxes and two shoulder poles. They all had bamboo passes hanging around their necks with ropes. Hearing Lin Hanlong’s order to eat, they immediately unloaded one of the poles. On one side of the pole was a large rice bucket, and on the other were two smaller vegetable buckets, stacked like steamer baskets. They set up a small wooden table, placed the vegetable buckets on it, and the rice bucket on the side. Rice ladles, vegetable ladles, and other utensils were also arranged on the table. The other pole was also unloaded and set up. On one side was a bucket of soup, and on the other was something like a modern tool cabinet with layers of small drawers. All the utensils that came into direct contact with food were made of tin or galvanized iron, with lids to ensure adequate hygiene.