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December is approaching in the blink of an eye, and in the middle of winter, almost dripping water turns into ice.

Xianyang is different from Nanyang, and it is completely different. Since October, it will snow every now and then, and it is full of heavy snow. Sometimes it takes several days, and then finally the snow stops and melts. Before anyone can get happy, he wakes up all night and covers a thick layer.

After December, the snow almost never melted, layer by layer, and the Wei River outside the city was completely frozen, so cold that it was completely impossible to go out. If you urinate, you would freeze into popsicles.

"Damn, I can't stay anymore, I can't stay anymore! What kind of chicken is broken place!" Chen Xu cursed the ghost place of Xianyang over and over again.

Although later generations have experienced this cold winter and experienced two heavy snow in Xiaohe Village last winter, it is completely a slight witch with the endless heavy snow in front of you.

"Mr. Marquis, this is the case in Xianyang every winter. Why bother to be anxious? It's cold and freezing, and you just happen to play mahjong at home to enjoy it. If Marquis still feels boring, I will ask the dancer in the mansion to sing and dance to relax!" The housekeeper of the Marquis' mansion said with a smile.

"Forget it, I'll go to the Academy of Sciences. By the way, I'll buy a dog and eat dog meat hotpot tonight!" Chen Xu got off the kang and called a few followers to prepare for the carriage to go out.

Last winter, he was still in Xiaohe Town. When it snowed heavily, he played mahjong with Wang Wuwang Qi Yu Wuya and others. Xing'er and Yu Ji sang and danced on the kang. Shui Qingrou and Chen Jiang sat on the kang knitting sweaters. Tianqing walked and climbed the mountain by the river, digging some yams and medicinal materials, and life was peaceful and happy. Unexpectedly, after coming to Xianyang, the family was separated by thousands of miles, and they gradually lost interest in everything they did. I don’t know what my mother and Xing'er Shui Qingrou were doing at home?

Chen Xu sat in the bumpy carriage and missed his relatives in the distance. He arrived at the Academy of Sciences for more than ten minutes later.

The current Academy of Sciences is completely different from the beginning, and there are several additional departments.

One is the hydraulic engineering office, and the person in charge is Hu Kuan, and Chen Xu also appointed him an official position in Jiangzuo Shaofu, and he is a real civil servant. So recently, Hu Kuan was like injecting chicken blood and was soaking in the office all day long. He even worked tirelessly to run to the factory outside the city every few days, and took a few men to measure the river embankment and river channel with a few men, and began to design the location of the dam and water truck according to the water truck sketch drawn by Chen Xu.

Chen Xu was just a completely immature idea because he didn't know what to do. The only thing he was better than the Qin Dynasty was that he knew that dams could be used to control the water flow to drive the water truck, and even how the water truck could be used after it was able to operate normally was still a bit numb, but this did not hinder future development. As long as the water truck was made, the application principle was proposed and the craftsmen could work together, and they could always solve the problem and devote it to practicality.

The Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period were an unprecedented period of various theories of Chinese civilization.

The Qin and Han dynasties were the most prosperous period when a large number of theories developed to practical applications, especially the development of smelting and agriculture, which can be said to have laid a strong foundation for the prosperity of Chinese civilization.

In other words, the Qin Dynasty is currently in a huge turning point in Chinese civilization. After entering unification from a scattered war era of princes, there is no war year after year. Although there is only more than ten years of unification, a large number of theories have begun to transform into practical results. Coupled with the Qin Dynasty's attention and rewards to craftsmen and farmers, the primitive agricultural civilization is rapidly changing to a intensive cultivation method. If this process is not interrupted after Qin Shihuang's death and the population has not experienced a cliff-like decline, a hundred years later, the Qin Dynasty will inevitably develop to a very prosperous and prosperous stage.

Therefore, with the slight push of Chen Xu, the little butterfly, the process will develop faster and faster.

So with the support of Qin Shihuang, Chen Xu was not worried at all that he could push the carriage of Qin to run forward quickly, but the premise was that the Qin Empire could not collapse.

In addition to the hydraulic engineering research and development led by Hu Kuan, there is also a movable type printing institute, an optical institute and a gunpowder institute.

Both theory and application of movable type printing are very simple, and the main difficulty lies in a creativity. Chen Xu simply put forward his own ideas and threw them to the manager and a group of craftsmen for research. The main reason is that making movable type is more complicated, and all of them have to be carved with small seal scripts. But this is not a problem. There are many craftsmen in Xianyang who are proficient in writing and carving. They first carve out movable type with wood, and then type printing can see the effect.

But this matter was still in secret. Chen Xu was about to start promoting it after spring. The opportunity was when 10,000 new-style pawns were wiped out. At that time, he summoned some novelists like Huangfu Que and literati with culture, knowledge and ideals to go forward with the army to interview, write the things that happened on the battlefield into articles, and then run a newspaper to promote the current affairs news on the battlefield every now and then, in this way, promote the bravery and fearlessness of the Qin soldiers, and at the same time make the people all over the world feel proud and glorious about the Qin martial arts.

Public opinion propaganda is the most important means to unite the people's hearts. At the same time, you can also use newspapers to promote some of your own theories to create momentum for more reform propaganda in the future.

Chen Xu first visited the Printing Institute and saw seven or eight craftsmen and more than ten helpers in the two rooms inside and outside.

The carpenter made fine and flat wood into wood blocks one inch tall and five minutes long and width. The helper used sharpening stone to polish the surface smoothly. Finally, he used a simple vernier caliper to measure it. The error could not exceed half a minute. If qualified, he would give it to the carving craftsman to carve the text on it. After the carving was carved, he handed it over to the supervisor to inspect and enter the warehouse.

In order to cooperate with printing, Chen Xu also designed a set of search methods according to radicals, and then imitated the classification method of hospital pharmacies, and made a three-story turntable type storage device. These movable types are classified according to the radical logo. When using them, you can quickly find the words to use according to the map. Of course, these are Chen Xu's original designs. Once large-scale printing is needed later, the situation will definitely be much more complicated. A book has dozens or hundreds of pages, and at the same time, the layout printing may require dozens or hundreds of sets of repeated movable types. Moreover, because many characters are different in frequency and the number of them will not be the same. Therefore, it seems simple in theory, but if it is really practical, it is still complicated to force it.

It is said that everything is difficult at the beginning, but in fact it is difficult at the middle and behind!

However, Chen Xu gave the difficult things in the middle and later things to the supervisor of the Printing Institute all the time. He was Einstein of Daqin and was only responsible for proposing methods and guessing the ending. He was not responsible for the verification problem in the middle. That was the craftsman's business, and he only had the result.

After walking around the Printing Institute and encouraging all the staff inside, Chen Xu went to the Gunpowder Institute.

Chen Xu is in charge of the management of the Institute of Optics and Gunpowder Research, because these two are really difficult.

The gunpowder Chen Xu was successfully developed in Xiaohe Village, but due to the limited output and purity of sulfur and potassium nitrate, the output was limited. Moreover, Chen Xu had seen that the black gunpowder of the earth gun was granular as the size of cat litter, so the energy released when burned was relatively concentrated, and instantly produced a powerful explosion effect. The Taiyi divine thunder that fooled Qin Shihuang last time in Wancheng was because the powder-shaped fireworks gunpowder explosion was low, so he used up all the dozens of kilograms of gunpowder made by Chen Xu, and he also tampered with many hands and feet on the private houses, but it only achieved the expected effect.

However, it is not easy to obtain uniform granular gunpowder. Some coagulant must be added to the powder gunpowder and stirred and dried. However, in this process, you need to be very careful. A little bit of Mars may cause irreparable major losses. Therefore, Chen Xu's conducting was more secret and cautious, and it was specially carried out in a separate warehouse of the Academy of Sciences. All the utensils were made of bamboo and wood, and metal and flames could not appear. There were only two helpers for the time being, two dumb slaves bought from the slave market.

Seeing Chen Xu come in, the two mute slaves knelt on the ground and kowtowed together, and then pulled Chen Xu and Chen Xu to see their production results.

There were several bamboo plaques on the slightly hot kang, with a layer of black gunpowder spread inside, some of which were grainy and some were half powder. Chen Xu pinched the gunpowder from several bamboo plaques and checked them with his hands. Some had dried and some were still wet. The formulas of these gunpowder were similar, seventy-sevenths of potassium nitrate, two parts of charcoal and one part of sulfur. This ratio was adjusted by Chen Xu after many tests in Xiaohe Village. The higher the potassium nitrate content, the better the explosion effect of the gunpowder, but the higher the higher the potassium nitrate content, the more unstable it is. Therefore, Chen Xu dared not experiment with the higher potassium nitrate content.

Chen Xu finally chose several types of gunpowder that looked good in size, put them on the workbench, and sifted them through two handfuls of bamboo of different thicknesses. What was left was granular black gunpowder that looked relatively uniform in size.

This is already a genuine black gunpowder, not the so-called firework gunpowder, which already has a very powerful explosion power. It only needs to be tested and confirmed based on the different explosion effects of the coagulant.

"Get a few pots of pottery!" Chen Xu grabbed several kinds of gunpowder particles with his hands and looked at them and then ordered.

A mute slave quickly took a few red pots that were slightly larger than his fist.

This is specially made by Chen Xu, with a big belly and a thin mouth. The diameter of the bottle mouth is less than an inch and the capacity is not large. It can hold about three taels of gunpowder.
Chapter completed!