Chapter 118: Search for Bamboo
The morning after construction officially began at Beryl District, Ernest discovered something he had not experienced in months.
He was no longer indispensable.
Sunlight spilled through the office windows at Oriel Estate, stretching across stacks of reports and rolled maps scattered over his desk. Outside, wagon wheels rattled over the courtyard stones while workers shouted inventory numbers somewhere near the warehouse. The sounds drifted through the open window before fading into the background hum of the estate beginning another day.
For once, none of it required his immediate attention.
The hydroelectric station had surveyors.
It had engineers and foremen.
It had road crews, stone masons, timber deliveries, schedules, supply chains, and enough paperwork to suffocate a lesser project.
Construction could continue even if he spent the entire day locked inside his office.
The electric lighting project, unfortunately, remained a one-man problem.
His eyes drifted toward the notebook lying open beside him.
Lamp Development Program
Beneath the title sat three entries.
Glass bulbs.
Vacuum pumps.
Filaments.
His fingers tapped once against the desk.
The filament worried him.
Glassmaking in Belfast lagged centuries behind what he remembered, but glassmakers had still spent generations producing bottles, windows, decorative pieces, mirrors, and lenses for wealthy merchants and nobles. Convincing one of them to manufacture thin glass bulbs would be difficult.
Not impossible.
Vacuum pumps were another matter entirely.
Precision valves.
Seals.
Pistons.
Pressure differentials.
The tolerances alone would give half the kingdom’s workshops nightmares.
Even so, he understood the principles.
Pressure could be manipulated.
Air could be removed.
Machines could be improved.
The filament was different.
The filament belonged to chemistry.
Material science.
A field with an irritating tendency to ignore optimism.
He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.
The first successful light bulbs had not used tungsten.
Not platinum.
Not any metal at all.
Early inventors had experimented with almost everything they could force electricity through.
Cotton thread.
Paper.
Horse hair.
Wood shavings.
Plant fibers.
Thousands of failures.
Thousands of burnt fragments.
Thousands of dead ends.
Somewhere inside that mountain of disappointment, one material had performed surprisingly well.
Bamboo.
His chair scraped softly against the floor as he stood.
A moment later one of the provincial maps lay open across the desk.
His finger moved southward.
Trade routes.
Coastal towns.
Rivers.
Ports.
There.
Port Harrington.
He remembered seeing bamboo groves near the southern coastline during one of the early soap distribution trips years ago. Not forests.
Certainly not enough for construction.
Enough for experimentation.
He immediately reached for paper.
The first letter went to merchants operating near the southern provinces.
The second went to estate owners.
The third went to local administrators.
Request:
Samples of local bamboo species.
Mature stalks preferred.
Various diameters requested.
Compensation guaranteed.
By the time the final seal cooled, the office smelled faintly of wax and ink.
Now he waited.
Three days later the first shipment arrived.
Then another.
Then another.
Apparently offering generous payment for plants motivated merchants far more effectively than he expected.
Bundles of bamboo began occupying corners of the workshop.
Some stood taller than a man.
Others were barely thicker than a finger.
Green.
Yellow.
Dark brown.
Smooth surfaces.
Rough surfaces.
Thin walls.
Thick walls.
By the end of the afternoon the room looked less like an engineering workshop and more like someone had attempted to relocate an entire forest indoors.
Ernest stood in the middle of it and rubbed his forehead.
This had happened before.
Soap production somehow led to agriculture.
Steam engines somehow led to mining.
Hydroelectric stations somehow led to botany.
Industrialization apparently had a strange sense of humor.
The first tests focused on structure.
He cut sections apart and examined the fibers.
Measured wall thickness.
Compared densities.
Recorded flexibility.
Some samples cracked almost immediately.
Others splintered during cutting.
Several looked promising until heating transformed them into useless fragments.
One species collapsed entirely during processing.
Another shattered before he even finished mounting it for testing.
The results filled page after page of notes.
Failure after failure.
Exactly as expected.
Then one sample caught his attention.
The internal structure looked denser.
The fibers appeared more uniform.
Fewer imperfections.
Fewer voids.
Interesting.
He set it aside.
Very interesting.
Carbonization came next.
The process sounded simple enough.
Remove oxygen.
Apply heat.
Wait.
Reality, naturally, disagreed.
The first sample burned completely.
The second became ash.
The third survived heating only to crack during cooling.
The fourth snapped while he attempted to handle it.
The fifth disintegrated before it even reached the workbench.
By the sixth attempt the workshop smelled permanently of smoke and burnt plant matter.
Then finally—
Success.
The black strand resting on the table looked almost insignificant.
He picked it up carefully between two fingers.
It survived.
Carbonized bamboo.
Several centuries ahead of schedule.
A laugh escaped him despite himself.
If someone from his previous world had told him he would someday celebrate successfully burning a plant in a medieval workshop, he would have questioned their sanity.
Now it felt like progress.
Real progress.
He placed the filament carefully beside his notes.
Glass bulbs existed.
Copper wire existed.
Now filaments existed.
Only one obstacle remained.
Vacuum.
Always vacuum.
His eyes drifted toward the workshop windows.
Beyond the estate walls, roads stretched toward Beryl District where workers dug foundations for turbines that had no business existing in this century.
Surveyors marked routes.
Stone masons raised walls.
Wagons hauled timber across roads that had not existed months earlier.
The power station moved steadily toward reality.
Inside this workshop, the machines that would consume that electricity slowly began taking shape as well.
Perhaps that was fitting.
Generation and consumption growing together.
Supply and demand arriving hand in hand.
The same path history had followed once before.
Only faster.
Much faster.
Ernest looked down at the fragile black filament resting on the table.
It still resembled burnt spaghetti.
Unfortunately, history occasionally looked ridiculous while it was being made.
Engineering had never been a discipline built on confidence.
Engineering was failure with documentation.
Failure repeated often enough that eventually one version refused to break.
Judging by the shattered glass and burnt bamboo already accumulating in the workshop, there would be many more failures waiting ahead.
That was acceptable.
Somewhere between bamboo, copper, glass, and vacuum, humanity had once figured out how to force darkness out of a room.
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