I want to be emperor

The cable telegraph construction plan promoted by the Dachu Empire in Chengshun 41 caused great shock among the high-level officials.

However, limited by the general public's level of knowledge and the scope of matters they are concerned about, many people actually have no idea about this telegram.

At most, I thought that I could send a short telegram when communicating urgent information with my family in the future... The telegraph construction plan was aimed at commercial use from the beginning. After all, the telegraph needed to form a huge wired telegraph network to be of great use. role, and the cost would be too high if it was purely official... Telegraph-related equipment in the early stages of development is still very expensive.

Therefore, telegraph construction requires more funds to support.

Commercial use includes providing telegram communications for ordinary people or private organizations, as well as providing telegram communications for official organizations... and the government also has to pay the telegraph company for sending telegrams!
Just like the previous delivery of ordinary official documents, stamps are also required to be sent out. Naturally, these stamps need to be purchased from the post office under the Postal Service.

However, even charging official agencies for letters is difficult to maintain. Therefore, it is necessary to open paid postal services to the outside world to obtain more revenue to maintain the operation of the entire postal system.

According to the wired telegraph construction and operation plan drawn up by the senior officials of the Dachu Empire, the related construction and operation of wired telegraph will be handled by the General Post Office of the Ministry of Communications.

The General Post Office is actually the former Postal Department of the Ministry of Transport, because the Postal Department is not a simple management agency, but is responsible for specific postal services. It even has a postal bank under its umbrella, which has banking services such as savings, remittances, and loans.

Therefore, in order to better manage postal services, the Postal Department was officially reorganized into the General Post Office in the 34th year of Chengshun.

The General Post Office has major businesses such as banking, letter mailing, and parcel mailing. A major feature of its banking business is inter-provincial remittance business. Its coverage and capabilities far exceed those of other domestic banks!

The letter business and parcel business are also suitable, covering almost every corner, and providing all kinds of services to the military, government agencies, commercial institutions, and individuals at the same time.

In other words, as long as you can afford the money, you can personally send a [-]-mile expedited letter... This [-]-mile express letter can be divided into separate express and enclosed express. ,
Expressing the letter with the letter means that your letter will be brought to you along with other official urgent letters... The speed depends on luck. If you encounter the [-]-mile or [-]-mile express along the way, If you receive an official urgent letter, then your letter will be able to fly towards the destination quickly... If you are unlucky and there is no official urgent letter along the way, then you can only send it at the normal speed with other ordinary letters. Send them together.

But there are also separate express services... This thing is really cruel. The official will directly send you all the way according to the treatment of the official urgent letter... Well, it is the legendary kind of countless postmen who alternately ride horses and steam boats all the way. , the train rushes forward... without any stop in the middle. When the letter arrives at a station, there will immediately be a dedicated person carrying your letter to the next station through various modes of transportation... until the letter is delivered. Get to the destination location!
But the price is also sky-high... Not to mention ordinary people, rich people who don't have much money have to take a breath when they see the price... It's too expensive.

Even the ordinary administrative agencies of the empire will not expedite five hundred miles without authorization unless there is an emergency...

Because even if the official express mail is [-] miles, you still have to pay. Although it only costs the cost price, it is still very expensive... But even if you don’t have the money, the [-]-mile express is still the [-]-mile express, anyway. You can start with credit, and then let the higher-level officials take care of the whole thing.

Under no circumstances can the post office refuse an urgent letter of [-] yuan from official agencies, especially the military...even if the other party really doesn't pay.

After all, the original intention of establishing the post office was to deliver official documents and military information, especially emergency military information... As for many other businesses, including official document delivery charges, the ultimate goal is to maintain such a large and convenient emergency information delivery system!
Therefore, don’t think that the General Post Office of the Da Chu Empire is just for delivering letters, couriers, and banking... In fact, it is not. These businesses are incidental, or they are used to earn funds. Then what are these funds used for?

What else can it be used for? Of course it is used to support the expedited delivery of urgent official duties and military information... The five-hundred-mile expedited system covering the whole country is very expensive!

For example, in any land post office, there will be at least one postman on duty within 24 hours, and a horse in good condition, ready to deliver urgent letters for five hundred miles at any time.

Just to do this, you need to spend countless funds!
The former Postal Service and now the General Post Office, everything they have done in the past 40 years has actually served this core goal.

In other words, it would be more accurate to call the General Post Office the 'National War Readiness Emergency Information Delivery System'!
As for the ordinary letter-sending business, it is all incidental or profitable.

The characteristics, or tasks, of the General Post Office's war-prepared emergency information transmission are naturally more suitable for the construction and operation of fast information systems such as telegraphs.

Of course, the telegraph business that the General Post Office is specifically responsible for operating will be ordinary civilian and grassroots official telegraph information, while high-level official and military affairs will build special dedicated telegraph offices on the telegraph system.

For example, a telegraph room is planned to be set up inside the palace for the sending and receiving of telegrams. At the same time, various important Gyeonggi agencies will also set up special telegraph rooms for the headquarters' telegrams.

However, in addition to the dedicated lines to several important military agencies, most of the telegraph lines used by these official telegraph rooms must be connected to the wired telegraph network built by the General Post Office.

After all, you can't have several different telegraph networks.

Not to mention these high-level official affairs, the telegraph affairs required for military affairs, but also the operation of ordinary official affairs and civilian telegraphs, all of which have to rely heavily on the existing postal system of the General Post Office.

Today's General Post Office of the Dachu Empire is strictly speaking a very large logistics network. It only delivers letters and small parcels, and its terminal transportation capacity is quite powerful.

The basic post offices of the General Post Office cover all the controlled areas of the Great Chu Empire, and their coverage density is very high, extending widely into rural areas.

In any administrative village in the local area, there will be at least one post office station that provides postal services, usually a grocery store or other store in the village. The owners of the grocery stores in these villages are often simply postmen... Money comes naturally It's impossible to have many. Most of them provide stamps to the boss for sale. The boss earns profits from retail stamps, but it's not much.

The main reason why more grocery store owners are willing to do this part-time job is that it requires no effort, let alone any cost, and can just create a small corner to put letters or packages.

In addition, after becoming a postal station, it will be easier to gather people and become the village's information exchange center... It will also become the village's material distribution center, which will also be helpful to the boss's own grocery store business.

Of course, there is not much profit in this part-time model, so bosses often don't take it too seriously... at least don't expect people to deliver letters to your door. This is impossible.

When your letter comes, if you are close, I will give you a shout. If you are further away, let the villagers bring the news to you and let you pick up the letter. If you want to send the letter, you have to go directly and buy stamps to send the letter.

These part-time post office stations in a wide range of rural areas allowed the postal system of the Dachu Empire to penetrate into every administrative village and truly reach the grassroots level.Above the post office sites in these rural areas are the real post offices, that is, the post offices in each town. The post offices in the towns regularly dispatch postmen to each village to send and receive letters and packages.

There are also postal institutions at the county, prefecture, and provincial levels. Post offices in counties, or in large towns with large populations or economically developed areas, will also have branches of the Postal Bank to provide savings, loans, and Banking services such as remittances.

A tree-like management and operation system was formed, and it was deeply rooted in the broad grassroots of the Da Chu Empire.

Relying on the existing huge and almost comprehensive logistics network of the General Post Office, the promotion and construction of limited telegraph can also catch up with the trend.

At least you don't have to worry about telegram end delivery.

After the telegram arrives at the destination telegraph station, the telegraph operator will translate it into a telegram, put the telegram into an envelope, and let the postmen carry out final delivery with other letters.

In this way, messages can be sent directly to every corner of the Chu Empire just like ordinary letters. As long as the message received is accurate, it can be sent to any place and to anyone.

This is why the telegraph has to be handed over to the General Post Office, because at present, unless a terminal transportation system for telegraph is re-established, it can only be done by the General Post Office.

It is absolutely undesirable to build a new terminal transportation system, which is a serious waste of resources.

After taking over the construction and operation of wired telegraphs, the General Post Office directly launched the construction of the telegraph network from Jinling to Songjiang, and the laying speed was extremely fast.

This telegraph line is hundreds of kilometers long. It seems quite long, but in fact it is laid all along the railway line.

To put it simply, it is just a matter of erecting a pole for the telegraph line and then pulling up the wire. There is no major infrastructure project.

The only limitation on the speed of laying telegraph lines is not the construction capacity, but the production speed of telegraph lines...

Currently, there is only one factory in the Chu Empire that produces wires in batches, which is Tongling Special Materials Company, which previously provided wires for experimental telegraph lines to the Royal Institute of Technology.

The company is affiliated with Tongling Mining Company, which is a very large metal surveying, mining, smelting, and copper alloy production enterprise directly under the Ministry of Industry. It is also the largest copper product manufacturer in the Chu Empire.

Although it sounds a bit strange to ask a mining company to produce wires, the wires used in the Dachu Empire today are made of copper, so it is not surprising that Tongling Mining Company was chosen... After all, Tongling Mining Company It produces the largest amount of copper among the many mining companies in the empire, and it also conducts in-depth research in the field of copper alloys.

In the era of smoothbore cannons, Tongling Mining Company has always been the main supplier of copper artillery materials to the Da Chu Empire... and the main supplier of copper materials to the Mint of the Da Chu Empire!
In copper-related fields, Tongling Mining Company says it is second, but no one dares to say it is first.

Therefore, it makes sense that the Royal Institute of Technology approached Tongling Mining Company and asked them to develop and produce copper wires that can be used to transmit electric current over long distances.

In fact, Tongling Mining Company has also carried out research and production of wires before, mainly for small-scale use in scientific research.

Before the telegraph came out, major research institutions in the Chu Empire had actually carried out electromagnetic research for more than 20 years, during which various electrical equipment were developed.

There are actually DC generators, electric motors, etc... but they are all very primitive and crude. They are still in the laboratory research stage and have no value for large-scale mass production applications.

In this long history of research related to the electromagnetic field, there is naturally a demand for various electromagnetic-related components, and wires are one of them.

It's just that the demand is extremely small, the production capacity is not large, and the technical level is also very low... For a long time, the wire used was simply a thin copper wire with no insulation layer.

It was not until the telegraph was developed that the production and performance requirements for wires increased due to the need to transmit electrical signals over long distances. Only then did copper wires with lacquer insulation and rubber insulation come out, and the conductivity was better. of brass alloy.

However, before the beginning of the year, the output of Tongling Special Materials Company, which produces wires, was still very small... In fact, the company's main business is the production of various copper alloy products... Wires are only a small part of their business. .

However, as telegraph construction was rolled out, the demand for wires was massive. Tongling Special Materials Company has urgently expanded its production lines, but its production capacity is still limited.

However, there are no restricted exclusive patents on wires, because electromagnetic research began more than [-] years ago. After many things were originally invented and applied for patents, they have now expired or are about to expire... More importantly, these Patents are basically in the hands of the Royal Institute of Technology or various universities, and these teaching and research institutions have a different attitude towards patents than companies. Basically, as long as you pay enough, the patent can be licensed to you.

For example, the hand-operated DC generator was developed by researchers from the Royal Institute of Technology 13 years ago, and has been patented by more than a dozen companies... However, the technology is still too primitive, and the empire's industrial development has not To that extent, electric power application is almost impossible, so the companies that purchased these patent licenses in the early years basically did not use this thing for large-scale commercial operations!

Because the market is too small, only some research institutions buy this thing!
In the past ten years, including now, DC generators have been classified as scientific research equipment or popular science teaching instruments, and there is no commercial application.

In another two years, the basic core patents of DC generators will expire...

This is also a common example of the development of electromagnetism in the Dachu Empire. That is, the theory is relatively advanced and there are many laboratory results, but it is difficult to apply it on a large scale...

Many bosses who claim to have unique vision and have invested heavily in electromagnetic related fields early on and want to repeat the great development of high-pressure steam engines in the early years have lost their pants...

As the saying goes, someone who is half a step ahead is a genius, and one step ahead is a fool. This is also applicable in the industrial field...those who enter the market too early often become stepping stones for latecomers.