American: Native Empire Chapter 181: Material

What would happen if the demand for sothing increased crazily, but the supply could not keep up?

This had been proven by many cases.

It would gradually beco harder to find in the market, and the price would rise day by day.

And at this ti, the thing that caused the biggest shock in the market was none other than rubber.

How much did you say?

The person in charge of the land vehicle division frowned at the shocking price.

The price of rubber had jumped significantly since a few days ago.

Haah This is crazy.

He rubbed his forehead.

If he bought rubber at this price, he would suffer a huge loss. It was obvious as daylight.

Do you want to proceed?

Is that even a question? Of course we have to buy it!

Even if he lost money due to the rising cost of raw materials, he had to bring them in. Without rubber, he couldnt make car tires.

It would be much more damaging if the delivery of cars was delayed. It would also hurt the image with the custors.

Haah It would be nice if we could raise the price.

Unfortunately, it was a bit difficult in this situation.

At this ti, a chicken ga was going on in various industries.

The most representative field was cars.

It was fortunate that the governnt had intervened to prevent selling at too much loss, otherwise the car prices would have gone down further.

How could he lower the price in this situation?

Then he would lose market share in cars. It ant that he would fall behind in the car brand competition.

Yeah. Were not the only ones having a hard ti.

The other car brands were in the sa boat.

The one who could endure this with gritted teeth would survive in the Warring States Period of the car market.

However, his determination was overshadowed by a sense of despair again.

Will there ever be a ti when rubber prices go down?

It would be easier to endure if he knew that rubber prices would drop over ti.

It was less painful to know what you were getting into than to be clueless.

But he couldnt know that.

On the contrary, it seed more likely that rubber prices would rise further at this point.

That was because, as ntioned above, the reason why rubber prices were exploding like crazy was that the demand for natural rubber was increasing much faster than the supply.

Lets think positively. His Majesty wont just sit back and watch.

In fact, it was thanks to Kim Ki-woos preparations that such a supply of natural rubber was possible.

The science of this era had developed so fast that it was incomparable to the original history.

However, the supply of resources did not increase as quickly as he wanted.

Thats why Kim Ki-woo had planted para rubber trees since they were discovered in South Arica, and laid the foundation for mass production of rubber.

The problem was that there was a leaf blight disease in the Amazon region of South Arica, which was suitable for growing para rubber trees.

As a result, there were many tis when rubber supply was difficult.

Kim Ki-woo realized this and started trading with Southeast Asia, such as Malaysia, and actively planted para rubber tree seeds in that region.

Of course, the locals took care of everything from growing rubber trees to extracting latex, and the empire bought it from them.

Thanks to this, Southeast Asia, which was suitable for growing para rubber trees, was able to make a lot of money.

By now, Southeast Asias dependence on natural rubber had deepened day by day.

Southeast Asian countries competed to plant rubber trees everywhere.

However, as ntioned earlier, they could not keep up with the demand.

No matter how much boom there was in planting rubber trees, there were limits to manpower and ti.

On the other hand, the production of cars, bicycles, and motorcycles exceeded their limits day by day.

Naturally, the number of tires that went into them surpassed imagination.

And rubber wasnt only used for tires. Rubber was used in a variety of places.

A breakthrough was needed to resolve this situation.

***

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Since rubber supply beca unstable, research on materials to replace rubber began in earnest with imperial chemists at the forefront.

As always, the start was research on the characteristics of that material, rubber.

Perhaps because so many chemists had wrestled with rubbers properties, this was revealed in no ti.

The chain molecules of elastic materials are made up of strings of many isoprene molecules.

This paper sparked the research on synthetic rubber.

Strings of isoprene molecules So it seems important to interconnect the chain structures.

This was the general thought of the chemists who encountered this paper.

However, until then, the thod of interconnecting these chains had not been revealed.

Many chemists focused on the connection of chain structures and proceeded with their research.

Faint Fragrance was one of these chemists.

He was a black man, the least populous race in the empire.

Unlike the original history, the slave trade of blacks was mostly blocked by Kim Ki-woo.

It was not completely gone, but it had nothing to do with the Wakantanga Empire.

The empire did not recognize slavery. Recently, even the mber countries of the World Union were abolishing the slave system.

Faint Fragrance was also a case of immigrating to the empire legally, not a slave.

Isoprene. Its important to make a polyisoprene structure like rubber

The problem was that he didnt know how to do it.

Of course, he was researching because he didnt know.

He repeated his worries day and night, forgetting about day and night.

The first thing Faint Fragrance did was to find a substance with a chemical structure similar to rubber.

He felt that the answer would be there.

It also had to be easy to produce, so it had to be relatively easy to obtain.

Otherwise, the sa thing as the current rubber shortage would happen again.

And Faint Fragrance found one among several candidates.

thyl isoprene seems to be the most suitable.

As soon as Faint Fragrance made a decision, he imrsed himself in the experint.

He prepared a large number of cans and put thyl isoprene in them.

Then he watched the progress by changing the conditions such as temperature and heating period.

He even waited for months at a ti. Thanks to this, a lot of data piled up.

The substances produced in the cans varied depending on the temperature and period.

They were soft or hard.

But there was always one thing that was the sa That was elasticity.

I was right! They all have elasticity, even though they have different degrees of hardness!

Several more experints followed, but this only added confidence to his results.

As soon as he obtained reliable results, Faint Fragrance wrote a paper and announced it to the academic world, and applied for a patent at the sa ti.

It was because he could lose his patent over ti, as the experint itself was not very difficult.

In fact, so chemists accepted similar results and failed to gain fa as the first developer of synthetic rubber by a few days difference.

They synthesized a substance similar to rubber?

Get a license right away!

The birth of synthetic rubber was a welco news for those who had been suffering from rubber-related industries.

The bosses who realized this promised high royalties to Faint Fragrance and got licenses.

And soon after, synthetic rubber production began to take place actively.

The situation was that natural rubber prices were high, so the synthetic rubber market grew quickly.

As a result, in less than a year, even vehicle tires using synthetic rubber were produced.

Whew I can breathe a sigh of relief thanks to this.

I heard that those who hoarded natural rubber suffered a lot of damage.

Theyre screwed.

Thanks to this, car brands that had suffered or were suffering a lot of damage breathed a sigh of relief.

On the other hand, those who hoarded natural rubber without knowing it suffered a great loss due to rising natural rubber prices.

However, thyl rubbers heyday was short.

It was used because natural rubber was expensive, but the quality of rubber was not very good.

First of all, it was a solid tire without a tube, and it was sticky and easily eroded when exposed to oxygen.

To solve this problem, many chemists continued their research on rubber, and synthetic rubbers that were better than thyl isoprene began to appear one after another.

***

anwhile, aluminum beca popular at this ti.

After facilities for geothermal power generation were built in Iceland, cheap electricity was obtained in Iceland.

And this beca the basis for mass production of aluminum.

Aluminum produced in large quantities at a very low price seed to have many uses.

So people thought about how to use aluminum.

Aluminum is very light. Not only that, but it also has excellent ductility and electrical conductivity.

Thanks to its unique ductility, aluminum could be drawn into very thin and long wires.

And it also had superb electrical conductivity.

Thats why the first thing that utilized it was none other than high-voltage wires.

This was the beginning of aluminums use.

Hmm. Its so ductile I wonder how thin I can make it.

One day, a white horn who was studying the properties of aluminum had this question and decided to experint with it.

And the white horn was able to obtain incredibly thin aluminum.

He picked it up and slightly deford it with his hand.

Oh!

The aluminum crumpled easily under the white horns touch.

He didnt even use much force.

Then he tore it and crumpled it so more.

After all the experints were over, the white horn was sure.

This looks like it has a lot of comrcial potential.

It was a tal that could be easily deford and was very light in weight.

That ant it was very suitable for wrapping food and packaging.

He beca the first developer of this product, aluminum foil.

And it received a great response in the market. Packaging food had been very inconvenient until then, but thanks to aluminum foil, it beca much easier.

Aluminum also interested engineers who were researching the aviation field.

One of them was Golden Lake.

At that ti, airplanes were used for two purposes.

One was fighter jets, and the other was passenger planes.

But the developnt of passenger planes was much slower.

There was also the fact that it took ti for basic technologies such as jet engines to mature, but that wasnt all.

Current airplanes are too heavy.

Especially for passenger planes that carried a lot of passengers, they were even heavier.

As a result, they consud a lot of fuel and couldnt carry many passengers.

That was the reality of current passenger planes.

Golden Lake tried to solve this problem.

And what caught his eye was aluminum.

In fact, he had been interested in aluminum for a long ti.

It was a very light tal, after all.

But back then, it was so expensive that he couldnt conduct any research on it.

But now that the price had dropped significantly, he beca interested again.

Of course, using aluminum as the body of an airplane is crazy.

How could he make an airplane with a tal like aluminum that had such high ductility?

But Golden Lake believed.

That there would be another breakthrough.

If I can get enough strength from an alloy with another tal

The stagnant passenger plane industry would enter its heyday.

He suppressed his pounding heart and began his research on alloys.

It was quite different from the field he had been researching until then, but it wasnt a problem for Golden Lakes brilliant mind.

After that, Golden Lake conducted a lot of experints.

He didnt know what material to alloy with to get the strength he wanted, so he focused on getting more data by increasing the amount of experints.

Then one day.

Its hard!

He confird that a tal alloyed with aluminum, manganese, and magnesium in a certain ratio had more strength than expected.

It was none other than duralumin.