Ever since I was a kid, the raw buzzes and snaps of loosely-harnessed electricity fascinated me. The love affair was kindled the first time I watched Frankenstein with my dad at the dollar theater and I realized what I wanted to be when I grew up. Of course, six weeks later I nearly burned our house down with an electrical short, and I was banned from watching movies about mad scientists.
Sally had an honest-to-god generator going, and had wired it up to a primitive electric motor. Unfortunately, lacking solder, she had used goblins to hold the wires to the contacts with very, very predictable results to anyone except, apparently, the goblins holding the wires.
“We’re going to need a commandment for this…” I muttered, looking around at the carnage. Sally at least had the decency to look embarrassed at having vaporized three of her tribe mates. She quickly choked off the engine, but I could already see the new technology propagating through the tribe as they took on glazed expressions. Still, electricity generation was something I’d wanted to get going weeks ago—almost as soon as I’d realized I had an electrolytic solution in spitting distance of Village Apollo. But it turns out being a leader is mostly putting out fire after fire after fire. Better late than never. And as far as I knew, no one else on Rava had working lights or gas motors, so we’d already outstripped the locals on both fronts.
“No more electricity for you,” I said. “Have your engineers start coating wire with rubber for insulation and then help Promo with the glass-making.”
Sally saluted and ran off.
Glass-making had a lot in in common with ceramic-making, and like ceramics, most of my knowledge of the process was second-hand from a girl in college dragging me to a glass-blowing class, fallaciously believing I had an artistic bone hiding somewhere amongst the 206 actual bones in my body.
Never in a million years had I thought I would have to reinvent the incandescent bulb, but here we were. Not only that, but glass was critical to a bevy of space-age technology as well as being more scratch-resistant than mild steel (though less resistant than ceramic). Plus, it was transparent. And I was getting tired of the dry eyes from flying. I wasn’t the only one, either. I’d seen other pilots rubbing red eyes after long flight sessions.
As far as the ingredients go, glass is actually one of the least material-constrained to acquire. Sand with high silica content lined small beaches along the river north of the village, and sand with high quartz content lived in the badlands. It was just a matter of sifting them together, firing molten glass, and shaping it. Syrians had been blowing glass into jars and vases since the days of the Roman Empire. While sheet glass was a tougher process, it wasn’t out of reach. But blown glass was what we needed now.
I explained the process to Promo and Sally, who looked at me as though I was crazy. But Promo set a few of his igni to the task. The good news was that we could use the kilns we already had to process the silica sand, so by early evening we had dozens of goblins with metal pipes ready to dip into the molten glass.
I took the first one and dipped the tip into the glowing solution inside the kiln, pulling it out and putting the end of the metal rod to my lips. I puffed, forcing air down the tube and into the glass to give it shape, spinning the pole as I did. The glass cooled quickly. More quickly than I’d have thought. And I realized I didn’t know how to actually detach the glass from the end of the pole. They’d done that for me in the class.
No worries. I let it cool still attached. I had hoped for a clear bulb shape, but it ended up looking closer to a diseased eggplant of a dusty yellowish color.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
I beheld my creation at the end of my pole, lamenting the imprecise nature of the Goblin Tech Tree. This would make a terrible light bulb. Though, in retrospect, this wasn’t too dissimilar to the product of the ill-fated aforementioned glass-blowing class.
Shut it, System!
Still, the technology propagated through the tribe, and the goblins around me fought to be first to dip their hollow poles into the molten solution—near to the point of shoving me into the kiln. I managed to get back through the press, admittedly applying the pole in my hand to some effect in the effort. Breaking free, I looked at the end of the pole. Promo waddled over, his own tube in hand waiting for a turn at the forge. His bonus to heat crafting would make him and the other igni skilled at glass blowing, I had no doubt.
“Don’t think it’s supposed to stay on the pole, boss,” he said.
“Yeah?” I asked. “Well, you just got the technology. How would you get it off the pole?”
Promo held out his hand, and I gave him my eggplant bulb. He waddled over to a workstation for a couple minutes, and came back with the bulb—still with a bit of the pole attached, but it had been sawed off a couple inches below the point of the glass.
“Huh.” I said. Actually a somewhat elegant solution that made it look even more like a light bulb. At least it made a natural place to connect a ground lead. Maybe we had a chance of this.
A squawk of alarm drew my attention, and I turned around to see a flaming goblin running toward the water tanks, arms wind-milling above his head. He was still holding his pole, and his flailing flung droplets of molten glass every which way, inciting a near riot at the kilns. The smell of smoldering fur burnt in the air.
Maybe a chance was generous.
Toward the evening, we had everything we needed to put it all together. Sourtooth had made a trio of shallow draft boats using the whistler carapace metal (which I’d taken to calling whistlite) with fans and pylons to mount the new lights. The bulbs themselves used a simple circuit, feeding current through a teased filament of the whistlite between two copper wires. We arranged the bulbs in a cluster, inside a polished, copper-lined cone.
“Fire it up!” I shouted.
Sally dropped a rockette into the new generator, and a shower of sparks shot out of the wiring terminal. One side of the generator pumped current into the incandescent bulbs, several of which flared white-hot and then burst immediately. The rest glowed with a fiery orange light that, at first, I worried was fire. But it was just the flicker of a cluster of unevenly burning bulbs in a copper mirror.
On the other end of the boat, the electric motor connected to a lightweight fan blade kicked on, spinning the propeller and kicking up a storm. It continued to spin faster and faster as the motor whined and sparked. With no electronic speed controller, the motor’s speed was simply a factor of the current being pumped through the terminals. Although, it shouldn’t have worked at all. The generator was putting out AC power at an inconsistent frequency and the motor wasn’t tuned at all. Yet, it was still spinning. That’s the Goblin Tech Tree for you.
Spinning too fast, if anything, now that I thought about it. Faster than it would be if hooked up to the engine shaft directly. The boat began to rock, and then tipped forward, digging its nose into the ground. Mud began to fly, churned up by the fan and flung out in a dirty, brown spray that coated several of the Huntsville structures.
“Shut it down!” I yelled, but no one was willing to approach the vessel. I watched as the fan motor shook itself loose from the housing, warping the whistlalloy hull from the torque. It cleaved through the housing and whipped through the air a few meters overhead. Most of the goblins watching dove for cover. The fan blade whirred a tight circled, pinged off a brick tower, and shot out into the swamp. The sounds of its spinning away lasted long after it had left sight.
The boat, meanwhile, had tipped completely over, smashing the bulbs. Loose wires whipped and sparked, and at least one of them sliced across the fuel bladder for the engine. The whole ensemble burst into a roiling inferno of intense heat. But the engine finally gave out, and the thing turned from a rattling, vibrating deathtrap to just a burning one.
I pushed myself up off the ground and surveyed the remains of our first patrol boat. “Alright,” I said. “That design had issues. But we’ve still got some daylight left. Let’s iterate.”