Don’t raise unruly people in extreme cold weather

Chapter 378: Slow Progress in Synthetic Fibers

Many people may think that clothing is not a problem because they do not feel the difficulties that this problem may bring.

Because whether in the original world or in the current world, people do not feel any restrictions or influences on wearing clothes.

The world's industrial revolution began with the textile industry, which greatly increased the output of cloth on the market. Even the most ordinary farmers and workers could have one or two relatively decent clothes.

Even if the family is very poor, it is not to the point that they have no clothes to wear. At most, they don’t have many clothes and they need to be patched.

In the original world, it was even simpler. With the emergence of chemical synthetic fibers, clothes? That was the point where the closet was filled to the brim with clothes.

Although the clothing industry is not well developed in places like poor African countries due to their backward industries, any country with basic industries will never be short of fabrics for making clothes as long as it has a chemical fiber factory.

Even for some economically and industrially developed countries, only ready-made clothes are sold on the market, because the profit from selling fabrics is too thin and the efficiency of handmade clothes is too low.

It will gradually develop into high-end customization, rather than the daily clothing needs of the past.

However, if we go back a little further in time, many people will find that in the past most people did not have so many choices in clothes.

Even the emperors in the feudal era only wore eight sets of clothes for the four seasons. Although this meant frugality, for modern people in the original world, only eight sets of clothes for the four seasons? They were either poor or lazy.

Because even for an ordinary person with limited money, it is impossible to wear the same clothes in summer as in winter.

And no matter how poor you are, you will always have two sets of clothes to wear in rotation, one for washing and one for changing.

If you add the fact that people wear the same outfit in spring and autumn, that would make at least six sets of clothes, which is very little for ordinary people.

However, in that dark era, a family of several people only had one pair of pants, farmers had to work naked in the dark, and women and children at home had no clothes to wear and could only hide in bed...

This kind of thing is unimaginable for modern people in the original world, but such days were only a few decades away before Perfectoct traveled through time.

Even when Perfect was a child, he could only wear new clothes during the Chinese New Year, while people in remote and poor areas still had no clothes to wear.

This cannot be said to be the current situation in the North, but it is not much different.

Because in the current northern territories, due to the construction of the shelter and the early layout of Perfectcot to attract the domestic industrial system, the main industrial categories are concentrated in heavy industry, with the steel and mechanical processing industries being the mainstream.

Secondly, other industries are basically supporting these two industries. As for the textile industry, it is not that Perfect has neglected people's livelihood, but that the North cannot provide the raw materials needed by the textile industry.

In this era without chemical synthetic fibers, the main raw materials for the textile industry are only natural biological materials and plant materials. Biological materials are easy to understand, such as animal hair, wool, velvet, etc.

Plant raw materials are fibers extracted or obtained from plants such as cotton and linen.

Of course, if it is in the East, animal protein can be added to the raw materials. After all, silk is really difficult for ancient Europeans in the original world to understand. In the modern world of the original world, humans have begun to use spider silk to make textiles, not to mention the various types of artificial fibers.

In short, because the North lacks large-scale cotton and linen cultivation and large-scale animal husbandry, investment and construction in the textile industry are relatively small.

Although there were textile factories that imported cotton yarn and wool from the New World colonies and made cloth to sell to people in the North, overall the scale was still small.

The indigenous people of the North still mainly maintain traditional agriculture and animal husbandry, raising livestock for fur, and growing some cotton and linen, but the scale is not large, only enough to meet the self-sufficiency of the locals, and a small surplus is sold as a local specialty.

There was no idea in Perfecto's original plan to develop traditional agriculture and animal husbandry to provide raw materials for the textile industry.

The reason is simple. With the coming of doomsday, traditional agriculture and animal husbandry are bound to die out.

In Perfectcot's plan, future agricultural planting will inevitably adopt a greenhouse model, while animal husbandry may have a certain proportion of farms to maintain the supply of meat, eggs and milk.

But these are obviously unlikely to meet the needs of large-scale industrial production.

At most, each settlement and shelter would have a greenhouse and a farm to achieve self-sufficiency to a certain extent.

It is for this reason that Perfectoct does not pay much attention to the traditional textile industry.

Relatively speaking, it is much simpler to obtain synthetic fibers from petrochemicals and then use them as textile raw materials. At least even in extremely cold environments, this can provide factories with raw materials in a continuous and stable manner.

Instead of relying heavily on weather and natural environment like traditional agriculture and animal husbandry.

Although Perfect has not made a detailed estimate of the North's oil reserves, given the current interest rates and production levels in the North, it is unlikely that all of the reserves can be mined within a hundred years.

Especially since Perfect has only found one oil field so far, it is still unknown how much oil there is in the entire North.

So relatively speaking, the development of the oil industry is a huge benefit to the North and is also the general trend of the future.

However, up to now, even though Perfect had arranged for people to conduct research on synthetic fibers when she first left Langton, and had not neglected this matter after arriving in the North, and even provided special guidance on this after the oil was extracted, the research team she arranged has not been able to produce results that satisfy her.

This made Perfect feel very uncomfortable, but considering the actual situation that chemistry in this era was fortunately able to complete theoretical construction and separate from alchemy, let alone industrialization, this situation was not particularly difficult for Perfect to accept.

The reason why she found it difficult was because these people were unable to make synthetic fibers even after learning alchemy.

Yes, those researchers used alchemy to separate and process crude oil, and then tried to make synthetic fibers from the resulting product.

There is nothing wrong with this idea, but there are no tangible results.

(End of this chapter)