American: Native Empire

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

This had been proven by many cases. 

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

And at this time, 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 couldn’t make car tires.

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

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

Unfortunately, it was a bit difficult in this situation.

At this time, a chicken game was going on in various industries. 

The most representative field was cars.

It was fortunate that the government 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 meant that he would fall behind in the car brand competition.

“Yeah. We’re not the only ones having a hard time.”

The other car brands were in the same 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 time when rubber prices go down?”

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

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

But he couldn’t know that. 

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

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

“Let’s think positively. His Majesty won’t just sit back and watch.”

In fact, it was thanks to Kim Ki-woo’s 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. 

That’s why Kim Ki-woo had planted para rubber trees since they were discovered in South America, 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 America, which was suitable for growing para rubber trees.

As a result, there were many times 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 Asia’s dependence on natural rubber had deepened day by day.

Southeast Asian countries competed to plant rubber trees everywhere. 

However, as mentioned 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 time.

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 wasn’t 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 became 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 rubber’s properties, this was revealed in no time.

“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 method 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 member 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. It’s important to make a polyisoprene structure like rubber…”

The problem was that he didn’t know how to do it. 

Of course, he was researching because he didn’t 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 same thing as the current rubber shortage would happen again.

And Faint Fragrance found one among several candidates.

“Methyl isoprene seems to be the most suitable.”

As soon as Faint Fragrance made a decision, he immersed himself in the experiment.

He prepared a large number of cans and put methyl 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 time. 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 same… That was elasticity.

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

Several more experiments 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 same time.

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

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

“They synthesized a substance similar to rubber?”

“Get me a license right away!”

The birth of synthetic rubber was a welcome 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.”

“They’re 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, methyl rubber’s 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 methyl isoprene began to appear one after another.

***

Meanwhile, aluminum became popular at this time.

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

And this became the basis for mass production of aluminum.

Aluminum produced in large quantities at a very low price seemed 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.

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

This was the beginning of aluminum’s use.

“Hmm. It’s 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 experiment with it.

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

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

“Oh!”

The aluminum crumpled easily under the white horn’s touch. 

He didn’t even use much force.

Then he tore it and crumpled it some more.

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

“This… looks like it has a lot of commercial potential.”

It was a metal that could be easily deformed and was very light in weight.

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

He became 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 became much easier.

Aluminum also interested engineers who were researching the aviation field. 

One of them was Golden Lake.

At that time, airplanes were used for two purposes.

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

But the development of passenger planes was much slower. 

There was also the fact that it took time for basic technologies such as jet engines to mature, but that wasn’t all.

“Current airplanes are too heavy.”

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

As a result, they consumed a lot of fuel and couldn’t 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 time. 

It was a very light metal, after all.

But back then, it was so expensive that he couldn’t conduct any research on it.

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

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

How could he make an airplane with a metal 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 metal…”

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 wasn’t a problem for Golden Lake’s brilliant mind.

After that, Golden Lake conducted a lot of experiments. 

He didn’t know what material to alloy with to get the strength he wanted, so he focused on getting more data by increasing the amount of experiments.

Then one day.

“It’s hard!”

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

It was none other than duralumin.