After Alexander finished his lunch with Gelene, he had asked her to choose a name for her shop, to which Gelene replied, “Master, it would be my great honor if you could choose the name for me.”
“Okay, I will think of a one,” Alexander then promised.
And then leaving her to her work, Alexander called his bodyguards and decided to move on to the last existing workshop, the glassmaking plant.
On the way, Alexander could not help but think back on the Ashford spinning wheel.
But he was not thinking how great it was but in fact the opposite.
He was thinking that instead of the spinning wheel, Alexander could have made the spinning jenny, which was basically a few spinning wheels combined into one.
One could say it was a spinning wheel on steroids, able to make forty times the yarn a person would make using just the spinning wheel.
In fact, it is said it was the spinning jenny that really gave birth to the industrial revolution as it allowed for the first time to have machine-spun fabric.
The spinning Jenny allowed James Watt’s steam engine to be used commercially to spin yarn and weave fibers, which could be sold for profit, thus initiating the age of the machines. ．
And Alexander had seen this device in a museum that had come with a video augmentation and according to that, the mechanism seemed simple enough that Alexander was confident that he would be able to build one if he really put his mind to it.
So why did not he?
Because he felt giving Gelene such a powerful tool would not be wise.
He was still cautious of her and would only gift her such a revolutionary tool once she had proved herself.
Or perhaps Alexander would start his own clothing brand.
He had not decided.
But for now the spinning wheel was adequate and he felt that he would switch of the spinning Jenny once he had sold the secrets of the spinning wheel.
Alexander had such thoughts running inside him as he approached the glass workshop, which he had given a level – 5 clearance, that represented it as being absolutely critical to the economy and something that Alexander would never sell the secrets to.
The reason for this was obvious.
Glass was cheap to make but very technical to make.
Meaning once someone figured out the formulae to it they could make a product only they had access to, thus making them impossibly valuable, and the profits margins astronomical.
They were so high in fact that Alexander could assume that when any glassware was sold, almost the entirety of it could be counted towards his profit, as the cost were negligible in comparison.
At the gates of the workshop, the smartly dressed Gajopk with his immaculately styled mustache was there to greet Alexander as he cheerfully called out, “Ahh, my lord, welcome, welcome. We were very much expecting you.”
And Alexander responded in kind with the usual greetings, after which he was escorted inside.
“We have practiced how to shape glass for the whole of last one and a half months my lord. And I can finally say we are starting to get the hang of it,” Gajopk informed Alexander as the latter observed the surrounding changes.
Out of all the workshops, the glass workshop seemed to have changed the least, which was expected given the skill-based nature of the job.
“That’s good. I too am eager to see the new glassware,” Alexander smiled at Gajopk, and soon they arrived at the workshop.
“Please, my lord,” Gajopk gestured for Alexander to enter, and once inside, he found the place virtually unchanged from the last time he had visited it.
The men were all at their stations, each operating their individual furnaces, having their own rolling tables and set of glass-making tools, and were hard at work shaping and molding the hot, glowing dough.
“My lord, these are the glassware we have managed to produce,” Gajopk then pointed to a large table at the center of the workshop where all their manufactured products were displayed and it involved a large number of glass cups, goblets, plates, and dishes.
They were all the same shape and with similar intricate designs of curves, waves, and spiraling twists carved into them, with the only difference being their color, which ranged from a green tint to translucence to being completely transparent depending on the type of flux used.
“They are pretty good,” Alexander commented as he picked up these glass products and tried to look through them to see how much light they would let pass through them.
He was also impressed by the intricate artwork done on the surfaces, and could not help but trace his fingers along them.
“Thank you, my lord,” Gajopk lightly bowed at this praise.
“So how many of these have you made?” Alexander then inquired.
“All the good ones are displayed in front of you, lord pasha,” Came Gajopk’s reply.
He had others as well but those were all practice pieces and not presentable.
“Hmmmm, then can you finish all the orders on time? My wedding is in two weeks?” Alexander had asked Gajopk to make a large number of completed glassware to display during his wedding as a form of advertisement.
It would include not only dishwares such as glass, plates, and bowls but also decorative pieces to be put on the table such as a swan, heron, elephant, or some other kind of showpiece.
“That….if we push ourselves….then …we are confident we will be able to do,” Gajopk forced out the reply.
‘Well you do not sound confident,’ Alexander raised his eyebrows internally.
But he knew he could not really complain.
Gajopk and his men were trying their hardest and it was already impressive that they had made such good progress in such a short period of time.
Alexander could ask little more from them.
‘Hmmmm, what to do?’ Alexander thus mused as he thought out loud while looking at Gajopk, and saying, “Demand for glass is bound to skyrocket after my wedding day. And the twenty-odd men you have under you will never be able to meet this demand on their own.”
Alexander’s words made Gajopk nod in silent agreement.
He too shared this concern.
But according to the glass maker, recruiting more people seemed to be a problem due to security concerns about the glass recipe leaking.
Alexander thought about the problem for a while, and then finally reached upon a solution.
“Okay, we will do it like this,” Alexander loudly started, and then delineated,
“The secret to the glass recipe relies on its ingredients and the temperature over which it’s made. So, we will make the raw glass, and then transport this molten glass to various blowing sheds where hundreds, if not thousands of blowers can work on them.”
Alexander reasoned that glassblowers did not need to know how to make glass.
Only how to shape and form it.
“That…um….hmmmm, that should work, if we can get the glass quickly enough that it stays molten.” Gajopk at first had his reservations, but after thinking it through for a while, found the proposal quite possible.
Gajopk’s concern about keeping the glass liquid was valid because if the glass were to be solidified, most of it would become basically useless.
What was meant by that?
It meant that only ‘pure’ glass, i.e- glass made of only quartz sand, and limestone could be melted, solidified, and then resmelted without any changes to the property.
Whereas other types of glass, like crystal glass, or glass to which other substances like powdered metal have been added, they cannot be allowed to solidify or else they would transform back into the regular glass.
This was evident in even Alexander’s previous life, where only glass bottles were recycled but glassware, window panes, or glass windshields could not be as they contained other substances that the recycling process could not separate.
So these types of glass had to go through a new kind of complex refining process to be made reusable again.
A process that Alexander could not replicate with the primitive technologies with him.
Hence Alexander came up with a way to prevent such solidification.
“That should not be a problem.” Alexander declared while swinging his muscular arms as if blowing away all the concerns as he elucidated his setup.
“We will put the molten glass on large, say twenty- thirty kg concrete crucibles and load them into huge horse carts. These will be special carts which will have heating mechanisms underneath them so they don’t freeze.” Alexander proposed.
And then he finished by saying, “And we will make the road from here to the blowing workshops entirely of concrete so that the horse can run as quickly as possible.”
All these sounded very agreeable to Gajopk and he very enthusiastically nodded his head and said, “Excellent, my lord, excellent. That will work excellently.”
And with this, Alexander’s promised Gajopk that he will get him his special cart and roads as soon as possible while instructing him to start recruiting potential candidates for glassblowing from among the city folks.
And with this, his glass shop visit came to an end.
But surprisingly was not the end of the day for him.
For he still had two workshops to look at.
Shops that were not yet operational, for the raw materials were still in the fields growing.
They were the sugar workshop and rubber workshop.
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