When the Saint comes, she does not collect food

Chapter 1166 The Holy Mechanized Court, The City of Never-Ending Clockwork (Continued)
Despite its name, Crystal Palace is actually a commercial street, so the buildings on both sides are commercial properties.

The unique triangular structure prevents rainwater from accumulating on the glass, instead allowing it to flow onto the rooftops of the buildings on either side.

Rainwater will then flow along the metal pipes to both sides of the Crystal Palace, and be discharged into the sewage pool through the underground water system of the St. Regis Palace.

The Crystal Palace building has three floors, which are accessible only to staff.

The person in front of them, however, could easily step onto the mortar floor of the steel frame and walk onto this second level.

This is because it is none other than His Holiness the Pope of the Holy Alliance, His Majesty the Holy Grandson.

Picking up a bottle of peppery soda, Horn, dressed in a high-necked spiderweb monk's robe, stood between the high windows and looked down.

The pedestrian street on the first floor of the Crystal Palace is about 250 meters long and 24 meters wide, and can accommodate about 3000 to 5000 visitors per day.

As for the second floor, a 4-meter-wide wall-mounted platform was built on the basis of the first-floor pedestrian street using stone-columned arcades.

The arcade platform serves two purposes: it allows visitors to access the second floor, and it also provides shade for the exhibition halls on the first floor.

Nestled between sky-blue walls and bluish-gray floors, tourists and visitors dressed in various colors come and go in an endless stream.

Beneath the glass dome, you can see tall, green plants, many of which are rare tropical trees from Black Snake Bay.

Many naturalists of the empire, gazing at these plants that stretched out from the dome, would always exclaim in admiration, "Tall plants!"

People of all ages were coming and going among the flowerbeds and trees.

In the middle of Crystal Palace Street, there is a row of booths for engineers or inventors trying to attract investment.

As for the exhibition halls with their doors wide open on the first floor of the two buildings, they are filled with various exhibits sent by the Holy Alliance, local companies, or monasteries.

These exhibition halls are decorated with all sorts of signs, some selling various seeds and new crops, some selling simple machine tools to craftsmen, and others selling all kinds of new tools and even weapons.

There are even exhibitions of ancient artifacts, books, exotic plants and animals, and even sacred relics such as the Black Dragon Head and the Ark of the Sacred Relics.

Various types of agricultural machinery are included, including threshers, seeders, and harvesters from different brands.

These agricultural machines, weapons, and armor are the core of this Holy Alliance expo.

Those steel-framed glass domes and those intricately designed machines were just prototypes.

Their costs are not commensurate with their demand compared to mass production.

In Shilff's words, it's just for fun, a big toy.

As for these agricultural machines, they are the ones that the Empire, or rather the Eastern Continent, needs most right now.

One of the most famous is the horse-drawn harvester designed, developed, and assembled by Saint-Union engineer McCormick.

Even with updated sickles, traditional manual harvesting only yields 2 to 3 mu of wheat per person per day, and manual bundling is still required afterward.

McCormick's horse-drawn harvester relied on three new structural elements: reciprocating blades, reel, and conveyor belt.

With two horses pulling it, 60 mu (approximately 2 hectares) can be harvested per day, equivalent to 20 to 30 laborers.

However, despite being powered by animal power, the completion of complex functions led to a demand for complex parts.

Gears, bearings, hinges, screws...

How many workshops of the Holy Mechanism are involved in manufacturing this? And how many jobs in Hot Springs Castle and Jeanne d'Arc Castle will this create?
For investors in Franco and Leah, the potential returns would be enormous, provided the machine is indeed viable.

In today's market, although public landowners and tenant farmers are not allowed to buy and sell, they often do so through land transfers and recruitment.

The recruitment price for a public farmer or tenant farmer is mostly around half a dinar per day, including room and board.

Higher prices are only available during harvest season or for skilled farmers.

This price has been decreasing every day for the past fifty years.

The reason for this was the importation of cheap grain from the royal court. Even with high tariffs, grain cultivation became an extremely costly business.

Apart from the oldest and most powerful inland nobles with vast lands, almost no one makes money solely by growing grain anymore.

From the nobles' own perspective, they were also aggrieved.

If commodity prices rise while food prices fall, then the only option is to reduce labor costs, right?
If we can sell them, you'll at least have food to eat; if we can't, we'll all starve. How can you commoners not understand the plight of us nobles?

Now that we have this horse-drawn harvester, what do we need farmers for?
The lords could easily calculate which was more expensive: two horses and a harvester, or 20 tenant farmers.

Besides, the harvester can't talk, so it's much easier to take care of than the tenant farmers.

If a horse-drawn harvester can last for five years, the rest is pure profit.

There are seeders during the sowing season and harvesters during the harvest season.

Apart from hiring a small number of tenant farmers for some odd jobs, there is basically no need for many people or labor costs.

That's great news for those lords.

As for where the tenant farmers who lost their jobs went, that's none of the lords' business.

Many citizens who originally came just to watch the spectacle, after discovering the huge business opportunity, immediately began to organize their fellow villagers to raise funds to purchase the goods.

According to information obtained by Horn, as the expo progressed, orders for horse-drawn harvesters had exceeded one hundred units.

Don't think that 100 units is a small number; for conservative and cautious businessmen and citizens, this is already a great trust.

Only after the first batch of harvesters is delivered and their effectiveness is demonstrated will there be a second and third wave of orders.

In addition to the machines installed in the apartment exhibition hall, there were also parade machines created by inventors in the crowd.

Brass-colored machinery moved back and forth against the flow of people, interspersed with the creaking and groaning of turning machines.

Mechanical dogs, mechanical monkeys, mechanical horses, self-propelled boats, unicycles...

The "inventors," dressed in overalls, deliberately tucked wrenches into their back pockets and wore leather glasses with embedded glass on their heads.

This outfit is mainly featured in the promotional illustrations for engineers by the Holy Alliance.

As a result, many engineers who weren't dressed in this outfit had to change into it to give investors confidence.

As for where this stereotype comes from, we'll have to ask the great saint's grandson.

After taking a sip of his peppery soda, Horn took two more steps forward and went to the window.

His gaze swept through the crowded throng, searching for the shadows of the wind-up machines.

These clockwork mechanisms are ingenious, involving linkages, gear transmissions, and the unfolding and tightening of spider silk and springs.

However, they all have one characteristic.

A palm-sized clock tuner made from broken dragon bones is mounted on the side of the spring magazine.

Engineers or manufacturers need to manually or semi-automatically control the output of the spring from time to time.

Once the mainspring has been wound up, these mechanisms will stop in place, waiting for their owner to turn the tuner's mainspring key.

This spring-loaded key is merely an initial power source for the tuner's vibration; it's purely decorative.

To outsiders, it looked as if they were using a small spring-loaded key to wind up a huge orogen spring.

Those unfamiliar with the workings of ether and energy transfer might mistakenly believe that the power of a clockwork mechanism is provided by manual winding.

In his reports to Horn these days, Cheka mentioned:
Many local artisans bought some orchard copper and confidently prepared to make their own.

Upon hearing this news, Horn himself was left speechless, both amused and exasperated.

It is estimated that these craftsmen saw that the parts were exposed to the air without any obstruction, and could be seen directly with the naked eye, so they believed that what they saw was what they got.

But they forgot that it was designed to make it easier for engineers to debug.

The reason why Horn doesn't sell these somewhat modern machines in large quantities is because they would become scrap metal as soon as they left the Holy Mechanism Court.

If you want them to be usable outside the Holy Mechanism, not only will the price increase, but their size will also increase tenfold!
The required amount of mercury damping fluid is astronomical.

Aside from a few nobles and the super-rich who can collect them as toys, ordinary people simply can't afford to buy or use them!
At that moment, Horn couldn't help but mourn for the artisans' wallets.

(End of this chapter)