Chapter 84: Not doing your job properly?
His Majesty Li Er left angrily without eating any food. Fang Jun would not waste it, so he brought the hotpot prepared for His Majesty Li Er into the room, and gathered Fang Quan, Lu Cheng and Fang Sihai around the table. Eat and drink with ease.
At first, the three of them refused. How could it make sense for a servant to eat at the same table as his master? However, he couldn't resist Fang Jun, so he had to sit down with both excitement and anxiety.
During the dinner, Fang Quan asked: "Erlang, you asked me to prepare something that day. What kind of nose ring should I wear for the cattle? When will I get it?"
Only then did Fang Jun think of this. It was because he was so happy when he heard the glass was fired in the past two days, and he was so busy preparing for the tasting that he actually forgot about it.
"That thing is very easy, but there is still one thing missing. We have to wait two days."
It is not difficult to pierce the nose of a cow, but later generations used alcohol to disinfect the wound. Now that there is no alcohol, you have to at least make high-strength liquor to make do. Otherwise, once the wound is infected, the life of the cow will be in danger...
These days, cattle are the most important means of production, hardly one of them.
Moreover, he had had enough of the sour wine of the Tang Dynasty. Drinking wine was like eating fruit. Who could stand it?
The distilled liquor must be distilled. Although I dare not sell it, I can drink it myself.
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When a modern person travels back to ancient times, what is his greatest reliance?
Being familiar with the historical process counts as one thing, so that you can take advantage of it and there is almost no risk of taking the wrong side.
The other is a vast amount of knowledge.
The spread of knowledge in ancient times could only rely on books, and the scope of spread was quite narrow. Especially before the Song Dynasty, due to paper, printing and other reasons, books were genuine luxuries. The number of original printed books was very small. If you want to read books, you basically rely on copying...
Coupled with the traditional conservative thinking of "teaching apprentices to starve their masters to death", people would rather bring technology into the coffin than teach it easily. Natural knowledge, science and technology have been stagnant for a long time, even in the "Qing Dynasty". At that time, there was a substantial setback.
The “emphasis on Tao but not on tools” advocated by Confucianism is the biggest stumbling block to the progress of science and technology.
All those with stable families and smart minds read the Four Books and Five Classics and wrote eight-legged essays. The study of science and technology turned into "wonderful skills" and was despised by others. The natural end was that the Europeans used the gunpowder invented by our ancestors to turn around. We smashed it to pieces...
In modern times, it's completely different.
Worldwide academic exchanges, the rise of the Internet, and the rapid spread of consulting have made it easier for people to access all kinds of knowledge.
Simply put, the cost of acquiring knowledge has dropped significantly and the channels are becoming wider and wider.
Over five thousand years of mathematics, physics, chemistry and literature, one can know the affairs of the world by sitting at home behind closed doors.
This is immeasurable for the cultivation of a person's knowledge and insight.
Just like Fang Jun, he doesn't know how to make glass, but he happens to have heard about it before or even seen related posts on the Internet. It's not difficult to make it by following the gourd and the gourd.
Let me ask you, if you were an ancient person, where would you know these steps and the required raw materials?
Don’t say no one knows, even if they know they won’t tell you...
Early the next morning, Fang Jun called seven or eight servants in the village to prepare soap.
When making glass products, there is no problem with the materials. The difficulty lies in the production process and technical proficiency.
Fang Jun had never done this work before and knew nothing about it. He could only let the craftsmen explore on their own. But he also made some suggestions, such as blowing a long pipe and you can blow out a glass bottle...
Compared with glass products, soap is more difficult in terms of materials, but the production process is much easier, because soaps throughout the ages and dynasties have always been rectangular, and just make a mold...
Fortunately, after more than a dozen servants' unremitting experiments, caustic soda was finally prepared from soda ash and lime, and it did not explode.
Fang Jun only knew that glycerin would turn into nitroglycerin when it reacts with certain strong oxidants, but he didn't know that turning glycerin into nitroglycerin would be much more difficult than making soap from animal fat...
However, the expected nitroglycerin did not appear, which made Fang Jun worry a little. Although no one was killed, after all, he was missing a weapon that could blow up the city wall to the sky in an instant...
In the open space in front of the glass-burning porcelain kiln, a large pot was set up. The fire was burning brightly, and the lard in the pot was already warm.
Fang Jun instructs a servant to pour the prepared caustic soda into the pot, and then stirs it continuously. A strange smell suddenly wafts out of the pot.
At this time, take the pot off the heat and continue stirring.
Until the lard and caustic soda are completely fused, add a small amount of salt water while it is hot. This is called salting out. Fang Jun understands a little bit...
Then, the servant in charge of stirring was shocked by the vision in the pot. He pointed into the pot, his eyes widened, and his mouth opened wider enough to stuff an egg.
?When others saw his expression, they were naturally curious. When they looked into the pot, they found that unexpected changes had taken place in the pot. They immediately followed in the footsteps of the servant, gaping, dumbfounded, and stood quietly. If the rapid rise and fall of their chests hadn't proved that they were all alive, they would have been treated as a row of statues.
Some ointment-like light yellow substance appeared in the pot. For people in the Tang Dynasty who had no knowledge of chemistry, it appeared out of thin air. It was simply a fairy-like ability, which was too hard to imagine.
Continue to stir, the oil temperature gradually drops, the light yellow sodium stearate cools and precipitates, floats on the upper layer of the solution, scrape it off with a wooden board, pour it into the prepared mold, dry and shape, and make a piece of soap.
Fang Jun didn't know what to do with the remaining dissolved glycerin, salt and unused sodium hydroxide in the pot. It seemed that these things could not only make nitroglycerin, but also fertilizer?
Of course, he definitely won't, so he can only throw it away.
Industrial wastewater is one of the "three wastes", but this wastewater is an exception because glycerin can protect plants. Plants protected by glycerin can grow well on saline-alkali soil, so there is no need to worry about causing environmental pollution.
The soap has been pressed into the mold and will be finished after it is cooled and formed. Fang Jun then thought of something again. If some spices were added to it, would it be soap?
I scratched my head, but I was too lazy to do it. Let’s talk about it next time...
In fact, the quality of the soap he made in this way was very poor. Impurities such as glycerin and a little pigment still remained in the soap.
But who says that there are no similar products in the entire Datang Dynasty?
You have to throw it away when comparing things. If there is no comparison, it is naturally good and there is no need to throw it away...
Fang Jun stood with his waist pinched, feeling very accomplished, but he was studying agricultural technology, and he actually started chemical engineering. Does this count as not doing his job properly? ********
(End of chapter)