Chapter 280 The Magical Industrial Age of the 19th Century

From the perspective of profit alone, heavy industry cannot be compared with light industry. Take clothing and cosmetics, two daily necessities, for example. It is no joke that manufacturers earn tens, hundreds or even thousands of times the exaggerated profits.

But if we completely remove the value and role of heavy industry from the process of industrialization of a country, what will be left?

In a word, industrialization without heavy industry is like a castle built on the beach, with golden jade on the outside and rotten cotton on the inside, which can be said to fall down at the touch of a finger.

Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, Americans have been engaged in deindustrialization for decades, and in the end they can only rely on looking for exaggerating the so-called external threat theory to divert the attention of the people and recover their decline through more crazy plundering.

The role of heavy industry is that it can transform industrial raw materials into semi-finished products through processing, and then provide them to light industrial factories for use.

In addition, the former can also produce various parts and hardware equipment through mechanical manufacturing to deliver supplies to the supply chain.

In general, only when a country truly establishes a relatively complete heavy industry system can it complete the first step of not being strangled.

The outbreak of the First Austro-Vietnamese War meant that Austria had stepped into the door of industrialization.

Over the years, with the continuous deepening of railway construction and industrial development, a large number of steel mills have thrived in the empire like the sleeping earth reviving after the spring rain, and steel production has also been rising steadily.

However, for the ever-expanding demand gap, this scale is still a drop in the bucket. Faced with the snowflake-like letters from factory owners, merchants and capitalists, the senior officials of the imperial government had to consider importing steel from Luxembourg and Prussia to fill the domestic shortage.

The amount of capital required for the development of heavy industry has always been large, and the long payback cycle and slow results are also extremely testing the patience of the rulers.

This is why most of the countries that started industrialization in Europe first relied on colonial plunder to accumulate their first pot of gold, the most typical of which are Britain and France.

Of course, countries that cannot take the path of external colonial expansion have to rely on squeezing the internal to obtain precious funds, such as the later bears.

However, with the development of industrialization and the increasing demand for capital, modern finance was born and derived to help heavy industry finance, such as Belgium, Luxembourg and the United States.

(The Americans are very pitfalls, but they are also the first country to reap European capital in reverse.)

In history, the US government and its local consortium have frantically raised funds from Europe several times, and repeatedly insisted that their potential is far higher than Belgium.

Then they invested in some projects, and the remaining resources were invested in real estate.

After a series of economic crises, these projects went bankrupt one after another. At this time, European capital tried to withdraw from North America, but the cunning Americans took various measures to restrict and refuse capital outflows in order to transfer the economic crisis, and then the British fell into the trap together.

The British, who are unwilling to be lonely, will certainly not sit idly by and watch themselves suffer while other countries watch this happen. As a result, almost all of Europe was dragged into the water and became victims of economic crises to varying degrees. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the economic crisis mentioned in the previous book, so I won’t go into details here.

But no matter what, the ultimate beneficiary is America. These capitals did fall into their hands in the end, and our protagonist Franz just took the opportunity to share a piece of the pie because he knew about this past.

Anyway, Europe was in a capital surplus at that time, and it would be a waste if this leek was not cut. And this account will not be counted on the Austrians, after all, it was the Americans who directly introduced a bill to forcibly retain the money bags of those Europeans.

Besides, no one in history has retaliated against them, and not even a symbolic sanction has been introduced, so Franz took advantage with a clear conscience.

There is also a fourth way, which is to slowly promote industrialization through the country's own market, such as Prussia and Austria.

However, the future Prussians successfully counterattacked with the help of the British, even if they later received huge war reparations from the French, but they still did not change their inherent deficiencies as cripples.

Compared with this northern neighbor, the Austrians' path to industrialization is much more miserable. Because they have not received help from foreign capital and domestic capital has been madly flowing to Prussia and France, their industrialization progress has been extremely slow.

(In history, a French consortium intended to support Austria, but was stopped by Napoleon III.)

In this life, due to the sudden appearance of Franz, a man born out of nowhere, Austria gained some overseas colonies to help it expand its trade circle, but it was too wishful to expect that these few regions could allow a big country to complete industrialization.

In addition, due to the tossing of this butterfly, foreign capital can be said to have basically no chance with Austria. Neither John Bull nor Gallic roosters want a Central European empire to become strong due to the revival of its strength.

And countries such as Prussia and Belgium, which are still in the process of industrialization, have no spare energy to help. As for the huge bear in the east, it really wants to lend money to this important ally of the three northern courts, but it is really unable to do so.

Now, both the domestic and external markets can be said to have expanded to the limit. If you want to expand further, you can only rely on war or colonial means.

But for Franz, who has always been prepared for any eventuality, Austria has the confidence to own the two major markets of Germany and the Apennines.

However, in addition to the four roads that have appeared in history, as a time traveler, there is also a fifth road to choose, that is, technological innovation.

"Science and technology are the primary productive force." Franz firmly believes in this.

The current mainstream steelmaking method in Europe is still the crucible method invented in the 18th century. This method is to cut the carburized iron into small pieces and place them in a closed clay crucible. The iron material continues to absorb the carbon in the graphite and melts into high-carbon molten steel. It is cast into small ingots and forged into the required shape.

This is the first method of producing liquid steel in European history, but the disadvantage is that the content is small and the cost is quite high.

In addition, there is also the bubble steel method; that is, to use a good iron rod in a furnace and heat it with charcoal for ten days to increase the carbon content. After reaching a certain hardness, bubbles appear on the surface, which is called "bubble steel". If you want to improve toughness and strength, you have to work hard on heating and hammering.

Although there were already "bubble steel" methods using carburized iron and "cast steel" methods using crucible steelmaking at that time, the production of "bubble steel" required a 10-day carburizing process, and the output of "cast steel" was only a few dozen kilograms.

Moreover, both methods have the defects of high cost, unstable quality, low efficiency, and limited output. A large amount of scrap steel flowed into the market and was made into inferior steel cannons. This seriously hindered the development of military technology at that time. After all, every test of the cannon could be the last time in a lifetime.

At this time, the output of steel was less than one-fortieth of that of iron, and the price difference was huge. At that time, the price of steel per ton was around 60 pounds, while the price of pig iron was only 3 pounds, and the price of wrought iron was only 9 pounds.

At that time, in order to cope with the shortage of steel production, Europeans invented a third steelmaking method, the stirring method.

This method was even praised by the great mentor, who called it a great progress in human history, but it was just an old road that the East had taken for two thousand years. The stirring method was just an upgraded version of the Han Dynasty frying steel method, and it did not fundamentally improve the efficiency of steelmaking.

In the magical era of the 19th century, there was nothing these people could not do, except what you could not imagine. The magical steelmaking method that spanned thousands of years became the mainstream of society again, which made people sigh at the wisdom of the ancients and feel sad for the people at that time.