I want to be emperor

Chapter 945 Telegraph Construction

With the large-scale construction of telegraph lines launched in Chengshun 41, the production capacity of major components such as telegraph lines could not keep up. Therefore, the industrial sector of the Dachu Empire also kept up with the construction of related production capacity.

The first thing to bear the brunt was the production of telegraph machines. Before this, there was actually no telegraph manufacturer in the Chu Empire. The telegraph machines tested before were all handmade by teachers and students at the School of Electromagnetics at the Royal Institute of Technology!
In the case of large-scale construction and application, it is naturally impossible to continue to use laboratory manual production as before. For this reason, under the leadership of the Ministry of Industry, Dachu Empire Yingtian Mechanical and Electrical Company, Songjiang Electric Company, and Xuzhou Electric Company all obtained telegraph The patent for the machine was fully authorized, allowing authorized production and technical improvements based on the existing telegraph machine.

It is worth noting that although these three electrical companies are all government-owned enterprises and are affiliated with the Ministry of Industry, they were all very small before. They were all subsidiaries of large enterprises directly under the Ministry of Industry.

They did not produce telegraph machines before, but produced hand-operated generators, electric motors, chemical batteries and other equipment for scientific research and popularization of science. Because the current technical reserves are still insufficient, and basic fields such as materials are not enough, these generators they produce Things like electric motors and batteries are not very good, and they are extremely expensive.

It has been half-dead for many years and belongs to a niche industry within a niche. Therefore, the output is extremely limited and the scale is small.

However, in the context of the large-scale promotion and construction of telegraph lines, these three electrical companies also quickly ushered in spring, with funds, technical personnel, equipment and factories needed to build production lines all pouring in.

Although these three companies were half-dead before, they were all companies affiliated with the Ministry of Industry. They themselves had no money, but their parent company did.

The parent company of Songjiang Electric Company is Songjiang Precision Machinery Company, and the superior company of Songjiang Precision Machinery Company is Jiangnan Machinery Company, one of more than ten super-large comprehensive machinery manufacturing enterprises directly under the Ministry of Industry.

In order to complete the task and seize the electrification market, the head office of Jiangnan Machinery Company directly invested heavily in Songjiang Electric Company and transferred hundreds of engineers in various fields from its more than 20 subsidiaries.

With the strong support of the superior parent company, Songjiang Electric Company successfully produced the first wired telegraph prototype based on the technical data of the Royal Institute of Technology in just one month.

This prototype is not a toy or experimental product hand-made by a large number of senior engineers, but produced in a production line using ordinary technicians and mechanical equipment.

In other words, this is not only a prototype, but also a prototype for industrial mass production, and its practical significance is not small.

After the prototype was built, they conducted intensive testing. The performance of the prototype was very good. They invited people from the newly established telegraph company under the General Post Office to test it, and achieved very good results.

People from the telegraph company placed an order for a hundred units on the spot, preparing to use them in various telegraph rooms in the early construction.

Songjiang Electric Company won the first city, and the other two companies were not willing to lag behind. They were also allocating funds and manpower to carry out technical research, hoping to obtain orders from the telegraph company.

The competition between these three electrification companies will effectively accelerate the technological research and development of telegraph machines, allowing telegraph companies to obtain telegraph machines with better performance and cheaper prices.

Allowing a number of enterprises to engage in healthy competition has always been one of the methods used by the senior leaders of the Da Chu Empire when planning new industrial layouts.

This was what was done in the field of high-pressure steam engines back then. The direct result was that there were three major steam engine manufacturers competing with each other. In the past 20 years, the three major steam engine manufacturers have been playing tricks on each other... and in this case, the Chu Empire What benefit did the empire gain?
On a smaller scale, cheap and abundant locomotives were obtained in the construction of the railway network, and the navy obtained cheap and high-performance ship-based steam engines.

On a larger scale, it effectively promoted the industrialization process of the entire Chu Empire!
A small and expensive steam engine has no practical use for a huge industrial system!
For an industrialized country the size of the Chu Empire, hundreds and thousands of steam engines are of little use, because the empire needs dozens or millions of various steam engines!

The number of steam engines and locomotives used in the train field is tens of thousands... and the steam engines used in the ship field are even more. In these days, whether it is an ocean-going ship, an offshore boat, or an inland river boat, Steam engines will be installed.

This is a lot of money!
Every day, a huge number of steam engines drive trains and ships across the vast territory of the Chu Empire and overseas!
The steam engines used in the field of transportation are actually small!
In fact, the use of steam engines is more in the field of industrial production... Steam engines are used as a source of power in countless factories, and their usage is extremely large.

Even in non-transportation and industrial production service industries, steam engines have begun to be used.

The most typical ones are elevators and refrigeration equipment... In recent years, elevators have been used in high-rise buildings. They do not use electricity as they did later, but are powered by steam engines. The same is true for refrigeration equipment, and its power source is also a steam engine. .

In addition, central heating equipment also uses steam engines to drive hot water for circulating heating.

So you can see steam engines in the tall buildings of the contemporary Da Chu Empire!

There are so many steam engines used in all walks of life.

And on what basis is such a huge steam engine application based?

It is based on the huge steam engine output and relatively low price.

And what are the huge output and low prices based on?It is based on the mutual competition of multiple steam engine manufacturers.

Without the competition between the three major steam engine manufacturers, it would not have been possible to develop the steam engine from the most primitive single-cylinder engine to the current triple expansion machine in just 20 years, and it would also be impossible for the boiler to develop to the current state in a short period of time. Small water tube boiler form.

The price cannot be as low as it is now.

The same situation actually occurs in many other industries. The senior leaders of the Dachu Empire have always liked to engage in healthy competition in new industries.

Especially when you want to quickly promote an industry on a large scale.

The same is true for the current telegraph industry. There are not only three major manufacturers of telegraph machines, but also several manufacturers of batteries, and wires are no exception.

After all, it will be difficult for Tongling Special Materials Company alone to supply the huge wire consumption in the future, and without competitors, it will be even more difficult to effectively reduce prices and improve performance.

Therefore, the Ministry of Industry also supports other companies to enter the wire industry.

However, as a pioneer, Tongling Special Materials Company still has great advantages. After all, they have a lot of technical reserves before, and their research in the field of wire insulation is relatively in-depth, and they have already begun to use rubber insulation.
As the only wire supplier at present, they obtained massive wire orders from the Telegraph Company, a subsidiary of the Postal Service.

In order to meet the needs of the market and to complete the political task of assisting the General Post Office in completing the construction of telegraph lines, Tongling Special Materials Company, as an enterprise affiliated to the Ministry of Industry, naturally followed up quickly.

Not only did they temporarily add machinery and equipment to the original factory and work overtime to start large-scale production, they also urgently rented a new factory and purchased a large amount of equipment to build a large-scale professional wire production factory.

Not only Tongling Special Materials Company, but also several other large-scale related companies affiliated to the Ministry of Industry have also begun to enter the wire business, and their actions are not small.

After all, the Chu Empire was vast and rich in resources, and the scale of telegraph line construction would be extremely large. The preliminary planning alone could reach tens of thousands of kilometers.

The overall long-term plan has reached a huge scale of hundreds of thousands of miles.

This will inevitably create market demand for extremely large telegraph-related equipment, such as telegraph machines, batteries, wires, etc.As a result, whether it is for political tasks or market demand, many domestic companies, especially some mining companies that produce copper materials on a large scale, have followed the example of Tongling Mining Company and began to lay out copper wires on a large scale. R&D and production.

In the three major fields of wires, telegraphs and batteries, more than 20 companies directly under the Ministry of Industry have entered and invested in related industries.

This will be an important milestone in promoting the electrification of the Dachu Empire!
With the important electrification application scenario of telegraphy, we can truly promote the development of electrification, instead of just doing scientific research as before, and the companies that invested in the field of electrification in the early stage were unable to do so.

In the early days, many bosses saw the huge prospects of electrification and invested in this field. Unfortunately, many of them died before dawn...

The DC generator industry is a typical example... It has been 13 years since it was launched. Many manufacturers have obtained patent authorizations to enter this market, but basically none of them can continue. There are only a few subordinates of enterprises directly under the Ministry of Industry. Companies struggle to stay afloat by relying on niche market demand in scientific research.

In another two years, the basic patent for this DC generator will expire...

Fortunately, after struggling for so long, although they failed to make it in the field of generators, they caught up with the spring breeze of telegraph machines... As one of the few remaining domestic companies with relevant experience and talents in the electromagnetic field, In the end, it was selected as the authorized manufacturer of telegraph machines, and it began to gain new life on another track, and gained extremely huge development prospects.

In March of Chengshun 41, the wired telegraph line from Jinling City to Songjiang was officially constructed, and its construction progressed extremely quickly.

After all, it is just a matter of setting up electric poles along the railway line and pulling the wires up. There is no technical difficulty and the workload is not large. Moreover, the laying is started at several points at the same time.

In addition, as the first long-distance official-civilian dual-use telegraph line, this line also has strong political significance... It can be said that the senior counselors above and even His Majesty are personally watching it, and the specific person in charge is naturally also very important. I take it seriously and wish I could have food and accommodation on the construction site.

Coupled with the construction of a few hundred kilometers of lines, the total demand for telegraph lines and telephone poles is not large. Although the empire's current wire production capacity is less, it is enough to meet the demand.

Therefore, the construction of this telegraph line progressed very quickly, and it took only three months to complete the line laying.

During this period, the preliminary construction of telegraph rooms along the route was completed, and telegraph machines produced by Songjiang Electric Company were installed.

After the initial construction was completed, several tests went very smoothly.

Under such circumstances, on June 41, 27 AD, the Chu Empire's first long-distance telegraph was officially put into operation for both official and civilian use, and the telegraph rooms along the route were officially opened to official and civilian operations.

The first long-distance telegram was not a commercial telegram, but a military telegram with extremely strong political significance. The palace telegraph room sent a condolence telegram from Luo Zhixue to Wusong Naval Base.

The Chaobao Department of the Ministry of Etiquette and Education subsequently made a special report on the matter in the Chaobao.

With the completion and operation of the first long-distance telegraph line, the telegraph company affiliated to the General Post Office also formulated various systems and rules for telegraph communications, and even set the prices of civilian telegraphs.

After the long-distance telegraph line between Jinling City and Songjiang was successfully put into operation, the previous telegraph line from Jinling City to Dangtu was also connected, forming a long-distance telegraph line from Dangtu-Jinling-Zhenjiang-Changzhou-Suzhou-Songjiang. In addition to meeting official needs, it is also open to the public.

After the telegraph started operating, the telegraph company had a mixture of joy and sorrow...

Because as soon as the telegraph started operating, the business volume was instantly full. Officials and even the military in various places along the way began to use telegraphs to transmit official information... Although the number of individuals using telegraphs was very small, various commercial organizations responded quickly and began to use them. The telegraph conveyed business information.

The number of official telegrams and commercial telegrams alone is extremely large, making the existing telegraph lines overcrowded for sending and receiving...

This telegraph communication requires lines. A wire can only carry out one-way information communication, and the information capacity is limited... Even if simultaneous multi-channel communication channels were considered at the beginning, how many telegraph lines were built from Jinling to Songjiang? Channel wires... Well, to put it simply, they are multiple wires set up on one wire pole at the same time.

But it is still difficult to meet the huge demand for telegraphs... so much so that less than half a month after the completion of the telegraph line from Jinling City to Songjiang, the telegraph company began to upgrade the telegraph line non-stop, adding multiple Wires, and began to use the multi-strand insulated wires just developed and launched by Tongling Special Company.

This kind of wire is composed of multiple thin copper wires. Each thin copper wire is insulated by a separate rubber skin, and then multiple insulated thin copper wires are combined together to form one large wire.

Of course, this thing is incomparable to the thick cables of later generations. It is just a combination of multiple thin copper wires.

Because of the many problems exposed on the first long-distance telegraph line, the telegraph company had to temporarily increase the number of channels on other telegraph lines under construction, especially the backbone lines.

The telegraph network is also divided into a backbone network and a branch network. The backbone network has a huge demand for channels. However, the previous channel design was seriously insufficient based on the conditions of the Songjiang and Jinling telegraph lines, forcing the telegraph company to conduct Channel upgrade.

Although this will increase investment, it doesn't matter... anyway, these investments will be borne by Telegram users in the end.

Regardless of whether it is an official or private telegram, it costs money, and it is not cheap!

This telegram is priced based on the number of words, so it’s very expensive!

After the construction and operation of the Jinling-Songjiang telegraph line, the telegraph company boasted that it had gained some experience, so on July 41, [-], Chengshun officially announced the start of the construction of the first batch of telegraph backbone networks.

The telegraph company hopes to lay the backbone telegraph lines to every land-connected provincial capital city in the region within five years, and initially build the empire's backbone telegraph network to complete the tasks assigned to them by the empire's center.

At the same time, relying on the telegraph branches established by the provincial post offices, we began to construct telegraph lines in each province according to their own conditions.

In the early stage, the construction of the backbone network alone started with tens of thousands of kilometers. As for the construction of branch telegraph lines in each province, it is conservatively estimated to be tens of thousands of kilometers.

After all, telegraph lines are actually relatively simple to build and have low investment costs. They are not as expensive and heavy in construction as railways.

Even in places where it is difficult to build railways due to long distances, especially in border areas, telegraph networks can be quickly laid out.

If nothing else goes wrong, in the Great Chu Empire five years later, telegraphy will become an important tool for the Great Chu Empire to rule a wide territory, and its strategic role will be no less than that of an army of 100 million!

For a small country, things like telegraph may be just a new toy and not of much use. After all, the country is too small. It is much faster to just shout out something than to send a telegraph.

But for a huge country like the Chu Empire, whose territory alone spans East Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and Siberia, from the Bering Strait in the east to the Ural Mountains in the west, even if there are trains and ships, all transportation is based on Calculated in months, information transmission is extremely troublesome and the delay is extremely high.

In this context, the role of the telegraph for the Chu Empire will be strategic!

(End of this chapter)