Chapter 1 (partial)

As I took stock of my first six years in this time, I decided I had to consolidate my gains. That still made sense. What didn't make sense, after mature thought, was the start of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was the introduction of mass production. But we were lacking the workers to support mass production. More importantly, mass production meant exactly that. A lot of products would be produced. Our population wouldn't be able to absorb all the production.

Scratch that idea.

Filling in the technical gaps still made sense. We were using technology from the eighth century alongside the twentieth century.Preserved foods were high on my list.

We had ice from the ice caves, but canning would strengthen our food chain. So far, we have been lucky not to have a bad growing season, but one could happen without warning. Canning was a must, both in mason jars and metal cans. That reminded me we had to invent the can opener.

Incubators were next on my list for small animals, such as baby chicks and sickly newborn infants. I called the babies sickly because I knew some babies needed incubators, but not why. I'm sure Baroness Agnes could tell me.

We had small stills in the lab and even larger ones in our pharmaceutical production buildings. What we didn't have were large alcohol production stills. We could make whiskey using wheat, rye, or barley and scotch using rye.

Corn, as I knew it, came from the Americas and wasn't available to us yet. It was the same reason we couldn't make vodka. Potatoes came from Chile. Even so, whiskey could be a huge export for us. I thought it would be funny to teach the Scots how to make scotch. And I would insist on the correct spelling as whiskey, not whisky.

Not caring for gin, I didn't think about making any. I'm certain that someone would come up with it. They would also start distilling wine to make brandy. That I could take or leave.

Another important product to improve was paper. All we have is crude pulp. We needed smooth white paper for writing. And soft, smooth toilet paper. The stuff we had wasn't much better than the corncobs we used on the farm once all the pages from the Sears catalog were used up.

Then, we needed large transformers to introduce electricity on a useful scale. So we had to come up with a light bulb. Shades of Edison. At least we didn't have to go through the thousands of trials. Hundreds, probably, but still a lot less than his technicians. You didn't think old Tommy did all that work himself.

Improved batteries would be useful in many ways once the electrical age was started. We had large arrays of glass jars filled with acid chemicals. Wires linked them to act as batteries or chemical generators for telegraphic and radio transmissions. But we needed dry cell batteries in more portable form factors.

Flywheels. We had a start on them on our steam engines, but they could stand a lot of improvement.

Next up was the Pelton wheel. It would extract energy from the impulse of moving water, unlike water's dead weight as the traditional overshot water wheel.

The Pelton wheel would be the easiest of the changes to introduce. It was simply a different shape from the waterwheel now in use.

I didn't plan to be anything but an advisor on these projects. Some of our budding engineers were showing promise, so they were going to get a chance to show their stuff. There was one project I was interested in. Making plastics from oil.

We were still using cow's milk to produce casein. But we didn't have enough cows to meet the potential need. Mirrors alone were taking all the casein production. And there weren't enough cows in the whole of England to meet the needs I foresaw.