Anyway, we have copper and zinc.

Well, Lin Hai thought for a moment. If he could make dilute sulfuric acid himself, then use a crucible to make carbonized cotton thread, he could indeed make a light bulb by hand. It would be a crude light bulb, but at least it would work. After that, well, it would be useless.

Yes, without any supporting facilities, if you don’t want to make explosive news or create something like a “miracle”, rubbing a light bulb with your hands is almost useless.

After taking stock of the resources at hand and calculating the development trajectory, Lin Hai decided to start with glass and cement, since there was an abandoned brick kiln outside the city.

Although the brothers felt that it was too early to start burning bricks now, after all, the current population did not even fill the empty houses in the county town, and everyone really did not have the need to burn bricks to build houses, but at Lin Hai's strong request, everyone still felt that they could let Lin Hai give it a try.

In Yin San's words, "Who doesn't have some fun when they're young? How else can you release such vigorous energy if you don't have some fun? Are you going to send them some fancy clothes?"

Since the case of the flowery clothes has been investigated, she was considered a top-notch prostitute in the neighboring county's brothel before the war, but she only had a small reputation in a small place. Later, she relied on her rich experience in the industry to entertain people with her sex life and survived to the present day. In the end, she was warned not to return to her old business, but was allowed to make a living and was released from prison. Now, it is said that she has removed her makeup, changed into coarse linen clothes, and makes a living by washing clothes for others. In Lin Hai's words, she has become a self-reliant woman of the new era.

Well, no one knew what a new-age woman was, but they also thought that Huayi had turned over a new leaf, so there was no need to mention sending her to someone, so there was no obstacle to opening the brick kiln.

A small group of militiamen served as guards, watching over the heinous bandits captured by King Zhentian Lu You through a gunfight as laborers, and Lin Hai's plan to burn glass began.

The first step was easy. The brick kiln was already overgrown with weeds, so Lin Hai, under the guise of cleaning the kiln, had the laborers weed it. The only odd thing was that they had to collect all the weeded grass, pick out the dry grass, and burn it, leaving the ashes. Although the laborers were very confused and thought Lin Hai was deliberately making things difficult for them, after a beating, everyone understood. After all, it was work, so what was the difference? Could weeding and burning grass be more tiring than the endless pounding of rice in the city?

After a few days, when the brick kiln was clean, Lin Hai obtained a considerable amount of ash solution by cleaning and filtering the ash. The next step was to slowly boil the solution dry.

Meanwhile, Wang Liang, in charge of making several crucibles out of copper and clay, had also finished making them. He felt it was a bit of a waste of copper, but he didn't mind. The county still had plenty of copper, and if things didn't work out, he could just go and suppress the bandits a few more times. It wouldn't be a big deal.

"Come, put all this dried white powder and sand into this crucible, yes, this copper pot."

"Don't worry about whether this pot is made of copper or iron. I'm going to call it a crucible anyway."

"If you say another word, I'll spank you."

Snap Snap Snap Snap...

"Okay, add a little more of this white powder to these crucibles, from left to right."

"Yes, add sand to it. Don't pour it directly into the crucible. Use this bowl to add it. Write down how much you add to each crucible. You will need to keep records later."

"What do you mean by adding it at random? What do you mean by forgetting how much you added? Someone bring me my whip."

Snap Snap Snap Snap...

"Okay, take out the burned crucibles and dip them in this iron pipe. What do you mean by two crucibles are burned?"

"What do you mean there's sand that hasn't melted? Can the temperature be different?"

"Someone bring me my whip."

Snap Snap Snap Snap...

Well, in the end, you can’t say that the glass was successfully burned. Looking at the two crooked glass jars with holes at the bottom, Lin Hai felt a little overwhelmed.

Among the time-travel novels he had read, except for the one about a team of up to 500 people who traveled through time and space and wrote in detail about the technical details of industrialization, the other articles wrote about glass burning for no more than one chapter at most, and most of them just mentioned it in passing. Who knew it was so difficult?

Well, after reviewing it all night, Lin Hai felt that at least his skill of using a whip had improved.

It seems that formal operations are still required. It is possible to rely on luck to find the best formula and temperature in one go, but it probably won't happen to you.

Lin Hai sorted things out. The main problems now were: well, the brick kiln couldn't reach the required temperature, so he had to find a way to make a blast furnace and coking coal. A copper crucible was a bad choice; copper's melting point was too low, worse than a clay crucible. And sand couldn't be easily obtained; at least a handful of river sand wouldn't make glass...

Simply put, they are all problems.

Fortunately, fortunately, at least people are not a problem now.

After the fight between Lu Youwujiaerbaijiahei, who was known as the King of Zhentian, the mountain bandits near the county town had been almost completely wiped out. The refugees who were taken hostage by the bandits were dispersed and assigned to new settlements after their identities were verified, and became good citizens under the baojia system. As for the captured mountain kings, Lin Hai picked out a few of the most heinous crimes (in fact, they were all heinous crimes, and Lin Hai just picked a few who looked hateful and chopped them off), and the rest were all sent to the coal mines and iron mines near the county town. No matter what, coal and iron are the foundation of industry and should be valued. These mountain kings could just undergo indefinite labor reform in the mines. Of course, they themselves didn't know about this and thought they could regain their freedom after doing hard labor for a period of time.

Less than ten miles outside the city, there was a large river that the locals called the Golden River. Although Lin Hai diligently panned for gold for a while after hearing about it, he didn't even find a single strand of gold. It's easy to imagine that working people are sometimes not very realistic when naming things.

But the good thing is that Jinjiang River has abundant water and a wide plain along the river. After an on-site inspection, Lin Hai decided that if he wanted to make it bigger and stronger, he had to start from scratch. So he picked up Wang Liang's county lieutenant seal and stamped it heavily on the "Qinghetun Industrial Zone Development Plan".

If someone came to inspect and prepare to invest now, Lin Hai would definitely take out a detailed blueprint to tell him about Qinghetun's industrial development plan. In the plan, everything from the simplest hand-spinning cotton to metal smelting and even a hydropower station was available. But if the other party insisted on going to the site to take a look, well, at least the industrial zone had already started construction. Lin Hai asked Lu You to send all the captives to the riverside. The first thatched shed had been built, and there was a piece of wood with the bark not cleaned off at the door of the shed, with "Qinghe Industrial Zone Management Office" written on it in charcoal. This was Lin Hai's office.

Look, isn’t the industrial zone here?