Herald of Steel

Chapter 683 Printing Press

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Alexander knew that even tutors of nobles used the ground as a cheap and easy blackboard because using things like papyrus, valium, or parchment for little children to doddle and practice on was too wasteful.

And though this type of teaching was very similar to a blackboard, where the writing was also periodically rubbed off, the most easily identifiable problem with that was that writing on the ground limited the number of people who could see it.

Basically, only the very first rows could clearly see it.

This might have worked when there were only two or three kids, but would not work for a class of twenty five.

Hence Alexander decided to splurge on the blackboard and consumable chalk.

Though it was not really splurging given the blackboards were just a cheap, slab of wood and the chalks were made from gypsum which was already being mined in huge quantities to be used in cement products.

So compared to their use there, its use in writing was not even a rounding error.

And these things were quite convenient to use, being able to be easily removed by simply wiping over it, or at worst using a wet cloth.

Speaking of expense, Alexander did do the maths regarding the cost of running his school and found them to be truly eye watering.

The thirty teachers (30) with a monthly wage of three hundred (300) ropals and the ten (10) staff with 200 ropals netted a bill of 132,000 ropals annually.

The yearly cost of the food provided to the students every 4 days of the week came to 350,000 ropals a year.

And then came the absurd cost where Alexander had to pay the kids' parents 8 ropals a week per child just to convince them to send their children to school.

That was also around 350,000 ropals annually.

Then there was the setup cost, i.e.- the cost of building the school, furnishings such as the carpets, blackboards, etc., as well as the value of the land the school was on.

And lastly, there were the running costs, such as maintenance, the provision of stationery such as chalk, registers, etc., and free books for the children.

Alexander combined all the costs to find it cost him approximately 850,000 to 900,000 ropals a year, or an average spending of about 900 per student annually.

To give one example of just how expensive this was, well. a Talukder (Viscount) earned about a million ropals per year.

And with that money, you could only get a thousand educated people. 

Also, it had to be remembered that this was only the first batch of students, meaning Alexander's expenses would double the next year, and then triple the year following that.

It was also because of that that instead of the standard 16 years learning course of modern times, 

Alexander planned to have a much more manageable four-year term, like a university's, or at best extend it to five years if circumstance then allowed. 

Alexander neither had the money nor, frankly, the time to do anything more.

And this was considering that what should have been Alexander's biggest expense, the textbooks, were cheap, comparatively cheap as water in fact.

Because compared to what it would have cost to produce them by hand, by inventing the printing press and churning them out mechanically, the cost fell by a few hundred times.

This was a fairly simple device to make, with the clue being in its name, 'printing' and 'press'.

And its invention was made quite a bit easier for Alexander as he could take inspiration from the already existing stamps, which when inked and pressed against paper, would leave a particular pattern on it.

So the basic trick to making a printing press was to make a 'stamp' of an entire page, and then if one could be made for all the pages of a book, voila, you got a mechanical way of writing that entire book. 

Well, that was the basic idea, though in reality there were many small details that needed ironing out before you could get a working product.

As they say, the devil is in the details.

And it was because of those details that a lot of time was needed in ironing out the details, which was why Alexander needed almost three years before he could get a good, working press.

To make it work, Alexander first made metal molds of all the letters, numbers, and signs one would use.

And then invented a kind of metal bed where he could insert and arrange these molds in the proper order to spell out what he wanted to say.

In this way, Alexander could 'manufacture' a page, or the template for a page.

This method also avoided the problem of needing to cast separate molds for each and every page Alexander ever wanted to print.

He could simply use the basic letters to make one as he wanted and then disassemble it when done.

And since he would be just placing the letters instead of writing them, it was much faster to reproduce a page.

It was also because of that the new blacksmiths from Galiosos were put to work making many many molds of those same few individual symbols because just to 'write' one page, one needed a lot of repeating letters.

After the template is made, then it was inked, a page was placed on top of it, and then using a wooden press, such as the one used to press grapes to make wine, the page would be pressed against the template, making the ink transfer over to the page, and that's it, a page would be printed.

And it was because this pressing mechanism was used to produce the page that the contraption was called a printing press, i.e.-  the printing was literally done by a press.

Now, this was a very simple overview of the mechanism, whereas in reality there were a lot of tiny small problems.

The first problem was the metal molds.

When cast, they had to be made of the kind of metal that did not shrink too much when solidifying.

This was to ensure all the molds were of equal size and more critically height, which was important to make sure the ink stuck evenly to all the letters.

If they were to be uneven, the ink would be too much on the taller ones, but minuscule or even missing on the shorter ones when the operator coated them using a specialized leather tool.

That was why Alexander could not use iron because liquid iron shrunk by different volumes depending on its cast shape,

So a mold representing the letter A would shrink differently to a similarly sized mold of the letter B.

Thus Alexander could not simply assume that all the molds will shrink equally and that the net result would still be the same.

Hence instead Alexander decided to use an alloy of mainly lead and tin with tiny bits of iron.

This caused very little shrinkage, being within tolerable limits.

And this was also one of the reasons why it took the world in his previous life 500 years to go from stamps to the Guttenburge printing press.

One of the German inventor's greatest innovations was inventing an alloy of tin, lead, and antimony to solve that shrinkage problem.

Alexander could not find any antimony, so substituted it with iron.

He thought this was reasonable because the main purpose of the antimony was to give the mold strength. 

Both lead and tin were soft metals, so if only those two were to be used to make the molds, those risked breaking under repeated presses.

Thus Alexander hoped the iron, though not perfect, as it shrunk unlike antimony, could do a similar job.

And to his great relief, Alexander did find the result to be acceptable.

Though not as flawless as he would have liked, Alexander could work with a few missing letters here and there.

Besides, it was not like he would never be able to find antimony.

He could easily switch them.

Or if his luck was truly bad, and the problem became too large in the future, well then he could switch to wooden molds.

He did not use those initially because compared to carving out a mold by hand on a small piece of wood, it was much faster and cheaper to cast them using metal.

Furthermore, wood was relatively soft, so if he did that. molds would need to be more frequently replaced.

But those future concerns, for now, Alexander had indeed solved one of his biggest problems.

Then came another problem- the paper.

  It was found that the currently produced ones were too oily and did not particularly stick well to the ink through this pressing method, causing it to not imprint properly and smear.

So Alexander at first tried parchment and papyrus, but those smeared even more.

Finally. it took Alexander quite a few tries to find that the problem could be solved by simply very slightly wetting the paper with tiny sprinkles of water.

And the last surprising twist to his problems came in the form of the arrangement of the letters. 

Alexander found that when the letters were arranged normally, the letter on the paper would come as being reversed.

This was of course natural, because, remember, the way it was designed, the paper was getting a reverse imprint of the template.

So Alexander had to flip the molds to get the correct orientation on the printed paper.

But with all those problems solved, Alexander could finally print his books.