Life on other planets -- Fiction; Science fiction; Venus (Planet) -- Fiction
He found his laboratory force sadly demoralized, owing to the absence of
Quivven and himself, but he quickly brought order out of chaos, and set
the men to work on their first real construction job, to which all the
other work had been mere preliminary steps.
Quivven kept to her rooms, but one of the other maids roguishly informed
him: “The Golden One says she hates you.”
Now that his fire-bricks were ready, Myles Cabot laid out on paper the
plans for his smelting plant, all the units of which were to be lined
with fire-brick.
First he designed a furnace for roasting his ore. This furnace was to be
in two sections, one above the other, the lower holding the charcoal
fire, and the upper holding the ore. Later he planned to use the sulphur
fumes of this roaster to make sulphuric acid, which in turn he would use
to make sal ammoniac for his batteries. But at present he had not yet
figured out this process in detail.
The smelting furnace, for smelting the roasted ore into copper-matter,
was to consist of a chimney about two feet in diameter, sloping sharply
outward for about two feet, and thence sloping gradually inward again
for a height of about ten feet. Near the bottom were to be a number of
small holes leading from an air passage.
This air passage and the vent for the hot flames from the top of the
smelter were to run in parallel pipes made of hollow brick tile, to two
chambers containing a checkerwork design of fire-brick. The two pipes
were to be interchangeable; so that, when the exhaust had heated one of
the checkerwork grids to a red heat, the pipes could be switched, and
the incoming air would be warmed by passing through the heated grid.
From gnooper hide and wood he could easily construct bellows to pump in
the air for the blast.
Molten copper-matte and slag would be separately run off through two
separate openings at different levels near the bottom of the blast
furnace.
To further refine the matte, he designed a Bessemer converter, that is
to say, a barrel-shaped box of layers of fire clay, the inner layer
being very rich in quartz sand. This barrel, when filled with molten
matte, would be laid on its side; and a hot blast introduced through
holes near this side would convert the matte into pure copper in about
two hours.
The first converter which he made was rather small, as he expected that
it would not last very well without metal reinforcements, and of course
he would have no metal for reenforcing purposes until after he had run
off at least one heat.
For the extraction of iron, he made crucibles of fireclay, which he set
in deep holes in the ground.
On the second morning after the unpleasant homecoming, Quivven appeared.
All her rage had burned out, and she was meek and subdued.
With downcast eyes she reported to Myles: “I am ready to go to work
now.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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