“I can imagine that.”
“Okay. Into the top of each barrel, we run a pipe from a boiler, a big kettle with a good lid. Between the kettle and each barrel we have a valve that is open and shut by hand. Still following me?”
“‘Yes.”
“Right. Now we open the steam valve which fills the lower barrel with steam. Air in the barrel is forced out into the upper barrel.”
“Uh … oh. You have a fire under the kettle.”
“Of course. Now we close the steam valve. Steam in the lower barrel cools, condensing back to water which takes up much less space than the steam. The valve in the upper barrel will not let air back in so water is sucked up the pipe to fill the lower barrel.”
“Uh…”
“Have you ever drunk through a straw?”
“A straw? No, but once when I was ill my mother had me drink hot beer through the shaft of a heron’s feather.”
“Same thing. As the lower barrel is filling, we purge the top barrel of air as we did the lower barrel. Once the lower barrel is full, we open the bottom steam valve again and close the top one. Thinking about it, these two steam valves could both be worked with the same handle. The water runs out the lower barrel and up to the top one, having been lifted sixteen yards. Closing the steam valve repeats the process.”
“Now, I don’t know how deep that mine is, but I’m sure it’s more than sixteen yards. Still, I see no reason why we can’t cascade any number of barrels, each feeding the one above it. We’d only need two steam lines, one for odd barrels and one for even.”
“Why, that sounds wondrous, Sir Conrad.” We rode a while in silence as I tried to digest it all. Then I said, “But why would you need many barrels? Why not just put a longer pipe on the first one?”
“Well, there’s a limit on how hard you can suck. Actually, I’ve said ‘suck’ because it’s easier to visualize. In truth, you can’t pull on water. Fluids lack tensile strength. What we’re really doing is lowering the pressure in the barrel and letting atmospheric pressure push the water up.”
“Atmospheric pressure … ?”
“Yes. Consider that we live at the bottom of an ocean of air. . .”
“At the bottom of an ocean!” There are times when Conrad pushes too far!
“Of air. Come on now, Vladimir. Can you really doubt that you are surrounded by air? What do you think wind is, but the motion of air? What do you think you’re breathing?”
“Well … yes. But I’ve never thought of it in those terms.”
“Okay. Now air has weight and…”
“There! You are doing it again! If air has weight, why doesn’t it fall down?”
“Huh?” Conrad said.
“It’s up in the air, isn’t it? … or maybe I can’t say that, but it’s up there, isn’t it? If it weighs something it should fall down!”
“But … it has fallen down. It’s on Earth, isn’t it? It hasn’t drifted off to the Moon, has it?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Well, it hasn’t. If you go to the Moon, you must take your air with you.”
“If I go to the bloody damn Moon! Dammit, Sir Conrad, I am trying to engage in a simple, civil conversation. We are talking about accomplishing the mundane task of getting water out of a flooded mine. I may not have your education, but I am no idiot child to be fobbed off with tales of fairies and dragons and trips to the Moon!”
The girls had dropped back as our argument heated up. We rode in silence for a bit, letting our tempers cool down. Then Conrad said, “Okay. I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to insult you. Now, we were discussing atmospheric pressure. Let’s suppose that you were walking at the bottom of a lake- No! Let me take that back. Suppose that a turtle was walking on the bottom of a lake.”
“Very well,” I said.
“Now, the turtle can look up and see the water above him, right? But you know that water has weight, always flows downhill, and settles in the lowest spot possible. Right?”
“I see. So if I could stand like an angel above the world, I might see you riding at the bottom of an ocean of air.”
“Well put, Sir Vladimir. Now, air weighs very little, but it is many miles deep. The weight of it over a single square yard is something like ten tons. Hey, don’t fly off the handle again!”
I said with some resignation, “My back must be half of a square yard. Please explain how it is that I can carry five tons of air on it with ease, when one ton of stone would squash me flat?”
Sir Conrad rubbed his neck with his fingertips, grimaced at the dirt of them and muttered, “Two weeks without a bath,” then said, “A fluid pushes equally in all directions. While it is pushing down on top of you, it is also pushing up from the bottom. Those two areas must be the same, so they cancel out. The push down equals the push up and you don’t feel anything.”
“I have tons pushing down and tons pushing up and doubtless tons pushing at all sides! Were that true, I would surely be squashed!”
“Without the air pressure on you, you would quickly die. You might say that you are already squashed, that you are used to being squashed.”
“My mother would not be delighted to hear it.”
And so it was that we talked out the morning.
Conversation with Conrad can numb the mind more than all the wine of Hungary! My one moment of glory was when Conrad thought that a “walking beam” was a log that somehow had a walking motion, whereas in truth a walking beam is a beam that a man walks on. A small victory, but something to hang the pride on.
The none bells were ringing as we entered the gates of Cieszyn. I started heading for the castle, as was my custom, but Conrad directed us to the Pink Dragon Inn.
“You and I would be welcome at the fort,” he whispered. “The girls would not.”
I saw the wisdom in this. I had heard that Conrad owned the Pink Dragon Inn, and I suppose that I expected it to be filled with more of his mechanical contrivances. What I found surprised me. The place had a large carved wooden sign, as brightly painted as a statue in church. It had a large and fat pink dragon, beer mug in hand, staring with great lechery at a small and remarkably feminine pink rabbit. This strangely proportioned rodent was grinning back at the dragon.
We were met at the door by Tadeusz, the innkeeper. He was a huge man, as round as a ball, with a full beard and a clean white-apron, yet for all his size he moved with remarkable speed.
“Sir Conrad! Welcome, my lord! It is joyous to see you again!”
“Nice to see you, too, Tadeusz.”
“This noble lord and these fine ladies, they are your guests, my lord?”
“Oh, yes. They lodge at the inn’s expense.”
I was relieved to hear this. You see, while my father is hardly a pauper, his expenses in recent years have been high. Not only had he provided three sons with horse, arms, and armor, but he had provided a total of seven large dowries in the course of getting my six sisters married. (It happened that one prospective brother-in-law had the effrontery to drop his dowry into the Odra River while on a ferryboat. To his credit, he did try to retrieve the sack, but was unfortunately wearing full armor at the time. Or perhaps fortunately, for had he not drowned, my father would surely have dealt the fellow a less honorable death. I suppose every family has a skeleton or two about.)
Be that as it may, my father does not see fit to provide lavishly for a son who has remained a bachelor. My services to Lambert had been in discharge of feudal duty, so of course I had not been paid. The duke had not mentioned money, so I could hardly broach so mundane a subject to so high a personage.
The result was that I had in my possession a total of nine pence, enough perhaps for a meal and lodging for a night. After that, well, I would always be welcome at Cieszyn Castle, Count Herman’s wife being my mother’s second cousin. Also, since my father is one of eleven living children and my mother one of seventeen, there was always a relative nearby who would be happy of company. In fact, I once computed that it would be possible to spend four and a half years visiting them all without spending a pence, without overstaying a welcome, and without imposing on the same relative twice. My family may not be wealthy, nor high in the nobility, but we are prolific.