Chapter 112: Thinking of the Upgrades
Ernest retreated to his bedroom where the only lighting was from the chandelier that hung in the center and the moonlight that was streaming through his windows. It was a beautiful view, and truly, candle chandeliers had their own appeal.
He went toward his bedroom’s adjoining bathroom and immediately appreciated one of the inventions he missed most from his previous life.
Indoor plumbing.
The room itself was simple by noble standards but revolutionary by the standards of the Kingdom of Belfast.
A polished porcelain bathtub occupied the center of the room while brass fixtures lined one side of the wall. Beside it sat something that most nobles in the kingdom had never even imagined.
A faucet.
An actual faucet.
Ernest reached forward and twisted the brass handle.
A few moments later, water flowed from the spout and into the bathtub below.
He never got tired of seeing that.
No servants carrying buckets.
No hauling water from wells.
No waiting for someone to heat bathwater over a fire.
Just turn a handle and water arrived.
Honestly, indoor plumbing was one of humanity’s greatest inventions.
The system itself was surprisingly simple.
Behind the manor stood a stone water tower nearly fifteen meters tall which supplied the entire estate with water. Steam pumps located beside a nearby stream continuously pushed water upward into the reservoir while gravity handled the rest of the work.
From there, iron and copper pipes ran through the walls and floors of the estate.
Kitchen.
Bathrooms.
Laundry rooms.
Even parts of the gardens.
Once the tower was full, the entire system operated almost automatically.
Physics, as it turned out, was remarkably reliable.
Of course, only his estate possessed such luxuries.
Even many nobles still relied on servants carrying water from wells and heating it over fireplaces before every bath. Installing pipes throughout a house was expensive enough already. Constructing a water tower and pump system pushed the costs into absurd territory.
Still...
He suspected that one day this would become normal.
People resisted new things right until the moment they couldn’t imagine living without them.
The bathtub slowly filled with warm water.
Ernest dipped a hand into it.
Perfect.
He stepped inside and leaned back against the porcelain with a quiet sigh escaping his lips. It was satisfying.
Now why is he keeping all these luxuries in his estate?
Well he had a plan for that.
The reason was simple.
People wanted things more when they could see them.
Steam engines had followed that exact pattern.
When he first described the idea of replacing water wheels and manpower with machines powered by steam, people thought he was insane.
When they saw the machines operating inside the workshops, opinions changed remarkably quickly.
Soap had been the same.
Nobody understood why they needed scented soap until they used it once.
The same principle applied here.
Indoor plumbing sounded unnecessary if all someone had ever known was wells and buckets.
Central heating sounded extravagant if winters had always been something people simply endured.
Electric lighting would sound absurd until the moment someone experienced a room illuminated brighter than a dozen candles without smoke, wax, or servants constantly replacing them.
People rarely bought products.
They bought experiences.
He leaned further back into the bath as warm water rose around him. His mind was racing with the plan of reviving the plan of electrifying the estate using a small dam connected to a nearby stream running through Oriel.
Like the one in the Cragside House in the United Kingdom from his previous world.
The memory surfaced almost immediately.
A wealthy industrialist had built an estate powered by a nearby stream using hydroelectric generators and electric lighting decades before electricity became common in ordinary homes.
The concept itself was surprisingly simple.
Water flowed downhill.
Water turned a turbine.
The turbine rotated a generator.
The generator produced electricity.
Electricity flowed through wires.
The wires powered lights.
That was it.
Actually, the more Ernest thought about it, the more he realized that most of the difficult parts already existed in Belfast.
Copper?
The telegraph project had practically forced the kingdom to establish a domestic copper industry.
Wooden poles?
The telegraph lines required thousands of them already.
Insulators?
The glassmakers and ceramic workshops in Helmarte had been experimenting with those for months.
Generators themselves would not even be particularly difficult.
After all, the principles behind electric motors and generators were almost identical.
Electricity flowing through coils created magnetic fields.
Moving magnetic fields through coils created electricity.
One produced motion.
The other produced power.
They were essentially the same machine viewed from opposite directions.
No.
The real problem sat elsewhere.
The bulb.
The history of electric lighting suddenly resurfaced in his mind.
Early inventors had tried platinum filaments.
Others experimented with carbon rods.
Some used carbonized paper.
Others tried cotton threads baked into carbon.
Eventually bamboo became popular because it lasted longer than most alternatives.
Then came tungsten.
Tungsten changed everything.
Unfortunately, tungsten belonged to an entirely different level of metallurgy than what currently existed in Belfast.
Carbon filaments, however...
Those were possible.
Glass bulbs already existed.
Vacuum pumps would be difficult but not impossible.
Steam engines relied on pressure differentials already. Creating vacuum pumps would require precision engineering rather than scientific breakthroughs.
Actually...
The more he thought about it, the more realistic electric lighting became.
The telegraph project had unintentionally solved half the problems already.
Copper wiring.
Electrical theory.
Insulation.
Basic generators.
Battery development.
Most of the foundations were already being laid.
His eyes drifted toward the chandelier again.
Perhaps electric lighting was not as distant as he originally thought.
That is going to be his side project of course. He couldn’t just abandon his work as the COO of the company as everything relied on him, and there were few people in the country qualified to do what he did.
Actually, there were probably none.
Not because Belfast lacked intelligent people.
Far from it.
The kingdom possessed excellent engineers, capable merchants, skilled craftsmen, and competent administrators.
The problem was that modern industry had a habit of demanding knowledge from several fields simultaneously, which he has because he was born in the 21st-century. And he is going to continue using it, because it’s what elevate his quality of life in this world.
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