So, how will this all shake out?

In the fictional 1632 rapidly expanding economy, the market dictates the direction that refrigeration is going to take. And the best guess that we can give is the one that came from our time line. Beer and ice.

However, the complexity of a rapidly expanding technical industrial base, which is growing exponentially, is going to be difficult to predict. There are far more factors involved in this time line as opposed to ours.

Far more industries know that they can do things better, faster and cheaper with this technology.

And we haven't even begun to discuss the beneficial impact to the textile industry of refrigeration and air conditioning. When that industry takes off, there will be another major user of the technology. The phrase "air conditioning" was first used in a patent for mills, where the air was used to "condition" the yarn. But as indicated in "A Looming Challenge,"Grantville Gazette, Volume 4, that technology is some years in the future, possibly up to twenty. The refrigeration and air conditioning industry will be mature enough to accommodate a new industry by that time.

It is safe to say that if you develop a working system that will function off grid (away from the electrical power grid at Grantville) with automotive components, you will have a problem keeping up with demand.

In the short term, it is very probable that smaller scale process refrigeration can be developed out of the remnants of automobile air conditioning components. The amount of existing refrigerants, plus the collection of propane from the natural gas, gives us a strong candidate. It is conceivable that the brewing industry will be willing to invest heavily in this technology. (Remember the 70,000 Florins.) Car AC systems and components just became very valuable.

The other off grid technology that will be approached is the ammonia absorber. Remember, that this was the first real refrigeration system, and is re-creatable with some very basic technology. We only lack enough ammonia. One machine is feasible with maybe five hundred pounds of ammonia. But if we want to produce thirty machines per year, say around 1635, we are going to need a comprehensive industrial ammonia production facility to meet the demand.

It is also safe to assume that any available system that is able to operate on the electric grid will be in significant demand for beer wort cooling, ice production, comfort cooling, or any of the other industries we discussed above. What this means is that the home central system is going to be worth quite a bit to a manufacturer that has located within the reach of Grantville's power grid. This will place a demand on the technology, driving up the prices of the limited number of systems, to where the refrigeration system may be worth more than the land or the structure.

The steel and metal fabrication industry is going to need air liquefaction for oxygen production and other gasses, such as argon and nitrogen. This will likely be a separate heavy industry redeveloped parallel to the more familiar and typical applications. There will be much crossover as the air liquefaction industrygrows with the refrigeration industry. Of course, there are medical uses for oxygen that are critical as well.

The other benefiting group will be the steel business, and the availability of liquid air (oxygen) that is needed for a blast furnace, as well as dehydrating the airstreams for regular furnaces, and filling oxygen tanks for oxy-acetylene welding rigs. Remember the beginning of the article. This is a technology that is not readily visible, but is a key to modern industrial production. However, the air liquefaction process is only given a passing mention in the 1911EB. This will be a major hurdle for the steel industry. But once it is done, it is scalable with the "geared down" technology.

Do we pursue the absorption method, or should we prefer the vapor compression methods?

My bet is vapor compression, at least in the short term. Utilize the substantial resources that currently exist. Correctly managed, they should last several years, and can be modified into a wide variety of uses.

Brewing will drive the market, as it did in OTL. Supplement the R-12 and R-134a stocks with propane to achieve maximum life from the compressors and components.

Medium term, ammonia or CO2 vapor compression is an excellent option for industrial and process operations. But we need ammonia. As soon as a reliable source of producing ammonia becomes available, the industry can make a major impact. An ammonia compressor is as simple as a steam engine.

There is little new mechanical tech to develop, but the implementation of actual ammonia systems is complex. This will take some development.

It is possible to use CO2 as a refrigerant, but here too we are going to have issues with pressure vessels that can contain 1500PSI. If that can be safely overcome and is scalable, then CO2 becomes the viable option. The important point is that there are options available for vapor compression both on and off grid.

Long term, it is likely that there will be a need for pure heat powered absorption refrigeration. However the chemistry and infrastructure is going to be tricky to develop and even trickier to keep operating.

These took many years of very hard work to develop. Lithium bromide absorption (the most common and easiest to work with) is going to be hampered by a lack of the basic lithium bromide solution, as well as the multiple chemicals required to keep the machine internals from rusting away to nothing. Even Albert Einstein helped in their development in the 1920's.

Overall, it looks as if the short term needs can be met with careful management of resources, and some creative application of available systems. Once the breweries get the message, there will be an influx of cash, and development will then increase. Work should begin on ammonia and CO2 vapor compression refrigeration, and then on the ammonia absorption chillers.

Just like everything else: steam, railroads, steel, and power generation, we need to gear down, and go back to basics. Refrigeration is a marvelous process, especially to down-timers. It can fire the imagination in ways that no one before has thought of. Who knows, it could inspire methods and new applications that were never thought of in our time line. There is an ability to make a viable and valuable product from the technology. Temperature control of an environment is important.

But then again, so is beer.

Bibliography Proclaiming the Truth, an Illustrated History of the American Society of Heating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, Inc. ASHRAE, 1995 Willis Carrier, The Father of Modern Air Conditioning. Margaret Ingels. Garden City [N.Y.] Country Life Press, 1952 Air-Conditioning America, Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900-1960. Gail Cooper. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

2001 ASHRAE Fundamentals Handbook. ASHRAE, Atlanta Ga.

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica "Refrigerating" article.

Centrifugal Compression as applied to Refrigeration. W.H. Carrier, Refrigeration Engineering, February 1926.

Trade Offs in Refrigerant Selections, Past Present and Future. James M Calm and David A Didion.

Trane Company, Lacrosse Wi.

Carrier Operating Instructions, Book #175 for Carolina Theater, Charlotte NC. 1927 Carrier Engineering Corporation, 750 Frelinghuysen Avenue. Newark New Jersey A Brief History of the Artificial Ice Industry in Southern Texas. Corner of History, ASHRAE Alamo

Chapter Newsletter, Sixty Years of Ice. George C Briley PE.

The Impact of Refrigeration, Barbara Kastner-Khait, History Magazine, http://www.history-magazine.com/refrig.html 1951 Carrier Product Catalog, Carrier Corporation.

Carrier Construction Department Service Bulletins (Various), 10-1-1950 Through 2-11-55. Centrifugal Refrigeration Machines. J.G. Manning.

US Department of Health and Human Services, September 1978. "Occupational Health Guidelines for Methylene Chloride"

ASHRAE Press Release, "Was the Caveman Better Off than We Are?" Speech by AE Stacey, March 25, 1949. ASHRAE Library Speech, "Air Conditioning and the Development of New Industries" A.E. Stacey. March 17, 1947.

ASHRAE Library

New France in 1634 and the Fate of North America

by Michael Varhola

1634 was a pivotal year for the indigenous peoples of North America. It was in that year that the French Jesuit missionaries, in spite of their highest motives, set in motion a series of events that led ultimately to the destruction of those whom they came to both civilize and save for the greater glory of God. The result of these events, one hundred and fifty bloody years later, was an unstoppable European settlement on lands where disease and internecine warfare had so thinned the native population that resistance, no matter how resolute, had become futile. The Jesuits, with their holy motives, and the French and Dutch, with their more worldly ones, exacerbated the preexisting tensions and upset the tenuous balance of power that had existed for generations between the two great powers in the northeastern part of the North American continent, the Huron and Iroquois Confederations.

A small group of Jesuit priests, led by the indomitable Father Jean de Brebeuf, set forth in July, 1634 from the French trading post of Three Rivers on the Saint Lawrence River. The French had finally succeeded in cajoling a group of Huron traders to allow the missionaries to return with them to their own country, Huronia, on the southern shore of Georgian Bay.

The Jesuits were bursting with missionary zeal and optimism. They had a vision and it was a grand one.

They intended to build a Catholic empire in the wilderness. The Huron, converted, civilized, and, so they hoped, loyal to the French crown, were to be the cornerstone of that empire. Francis Parkman, in his prodigious work,France and England in North America, used these words to describe the Jesuit dream:

A life sequestered from social intercourse, and remote from every prize which ambition holds worth the pursuit, or a lonely death, under forms, perhaps the most appalling-these were the missionaries' alternatives. Their maligners may taunt them, if they will, with credulity, superstition, or a blind enthusiasm; but slander itself cannot accuse them of hypocrisy or ambition. Doubtless, in their propagandizing they were acting in concurrence with a mundane policy; but, for the present at least, this policy was traditional and humane. They were promoting the ends of commerce and national expansion. The foundations of French dominion were to be laid deep in the heart and conscience of the savage. His stubborn neck was to be subdued to the "yoke of the Faith." The power of the priest established, that of the temporal ruler was secure.

Those sanguinary hordes, weaned from intestine strife, were to unite in common allegiance to God and the King. Mingled with French traders and French settlers, softened by French manners, guided by French priests, ruled by French officers, their now divided bands would become the constituents of a vast wilderness empire, which in time might span the continent. Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him.

The Jesuits hoped to succeed where their predecessors, the Franciscan Recollets, had failed. The Recollet Fathers had labored in vain for years to bring Christianity to the semi-nomadic Algonquin bandsthat roamed the northern forests. These hunter-gatherers, however, preoccupied as they were with the daily struggle for survival, had little time for or interest in the missionaries' message. The Jesuits, accepting this reality, and also building on the successful experience of their Spanish brethren among the Guarani in South America, selected an entirely different and geographically quite distant population for their conversion efforts. They chose the Huron, the sedentary "farmers of the North," who in 1634 represented what was probably the most advanced and most concentrated indigenous population in North America. The Jesuits were not going to replicate the experience of the Recollets chasing their flock through the snowy forests of the north, only to find their prospective converts breaking into ever smaller groups as they pursued game, fish, and fur.

The Huron were not like that at all. They lived in a small number of semi-permanent villages in a relatively compact area. From that base the Jesuits hoped to reach out to the surrounding tribes, both settled corn-planters and nomadic hunter-gatherers. It was a grand plan, and not without its merits, but the Jesuits, themselves ignorant of the ways of the Huron and impatient for results, destroyed what they came to save. Intelligent and well-meaning, they often recognized their mistakes-but not until it was too late and the damage was done. The Jesuit message effectively divided the Huron into two opposing camps, both of which were weakened by disease. In addition, their fellow Frenchmen in Quebec and the Dutch in New Amsterdam gave the Iroquois, traditional enemies of the Huron, reason and means to destroy their hereditary enemies.

Of course, it did not all begin in 1634. One has to go back a quarter century before then, to when the eminent French explorer and later governor of New France, Samuel de Champlain, made the fateful decision to support the Huron and Algonquins in their unending war with the Iroquois. The first exposure of the Iroquois to European firearms was on the receiving end when a mixed force of French, Huron, and Algonquins attacked a small force of Iroquois warriors near the site of the future Fort Ticonderoga. With one discharge for his arquebus, Champlain succeeded in killing two Iroquois chiefs and mortally wounded a third. The slaughtered chiefs, seemingly safe in breastplates of wood, provided a dramatic lesson to the stunned warriors: the nature of war had changed. That which was defense against a stone arrowhead, was of no use against firearms or even arrowheads or axes of iron. The Iroquois fled in disarray. Far from being cowed by their defeat, however, they quickly adapted to the new realities. The attacks served to awaken the Iroquois to the threat that this French alliance with their Huron and Algonquin enemies posed to their survival. It served to motivate them to strengthen their own confederation and seek their own sources of metal weapons and firearms.

The Iroquois were living proof of the maxim: that which does not kill you, makes you stronger. They saw themselves as having no alternative. They were surrounded by enemies who were not only better situated geographically but who also, taken together, vastly outnumbered them. To the south were the Susquehannocks blocking access to the European settlements in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. To the east, interfering with their trade with the Dutch settlements, were the Mohicans, another hereditary enemy. To the north were the Algonquins and Montagnais, redoubtable fighters with double advantage of access to both the French traders and the quality furs, which the Europeans coveted. To the west and northwest were other Iroquoian tribes, such as the Wenro, the Erie, and the Tobacco nation.

These latter tribes, sometimes neutral and sometimes hostile, lay between them and the Huron, and the Huron lay between these tribes and the beaver-rich country along the upper Georgian Bay.

In spite of the Mohicans, the Iroquois managed to establish trade with the Dutch and, in so doing, secured a reliable source of muskets as well as other European goods. Their supply of beaver was, however, soon exhausted. That turned their eyes to the north and northwest, to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of beaver controlled by small, disorganized bands of Algonquins. These wandering bands that could be made submissive to the Iroquois were it not for their alliance with the Huron. If it were not for the Huron, the Algonquins could be forced into trading their pelts for Iroquois corn rather than Huroncorn, pelts which the Iroquois could trade for Dutch muskets, copper kettles, and hatchets. If the Huron could be destroyed or dispersed, then the way to the north would be clear.

The Huron sat astride the gateway to the fur country of the north much as the Trojans had guarded the trade route to the Black Sea and the Carthaginians had controlled access to the Atlantic from the Mediterranean. The Iroquois, like the Mycenaeans and Romans before them, found the situation intolerable. Much like their predecessors in the ancient Mediterranean, they were successful in leveraging an economic disadvantage into a popular and successful war. Just as Roman senators shoutedCarthago Delenda Est ! Iroquois chieftains must have called for the annihilation of the Huron and any others who might seek to interfere with their trade. Just as young Roman nobles and Mycenaean freebooters longed for glory and loot, so the young Iroquois warriors dreamed of returning from Huronia in triumph bearing prisoners, scalps, and European booty!

The Huron, like the Iroquois, were a confederation. Theirs consisted of four tribes, while that of the Iroquois had five. They constituted the other major power in the northeastern part of the North American. In their own language, they called themselves the Wendats, and their country was Wendake, the "land apart," which is sometimes translated as "the island." While not literally an island, Wendake occupied a relatively compact area bordered by water on most sides: Lake Simcoe on the east, Nottawasaga Bay and the Georgian Bay itself on the north and west, with streams and low lying marshy areas in the south completing the circle. Wendake lay nine hundred miles by river to the west of Quebec.

The Huron economy, like that of the Iroquois was based on the growing of corn. Because the economies of these two "super-powers" were basically the same, they had little basis for trade and cooperation. Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, this manifested itself in a continuing, if not particularly intense, cycle of warfare motivated primarily by revenge and glory. The European demand for pelts, particularly beaver, lent a serious economic motive to what had been little more than blood sport. Add the French to the mix, the result was a situation that was perilous in the extreme for the Iroquois, or, at least so it looked to them. They were cut off from both object and the currency of the fur trade. They were underdogs, much as were Romans and the Mycenaeans were before they resolved to change the situation.

What the Iroquois had going for them more than anything else was desperation and a sense of purpose.

This translated into cooperation and even a unity of effort among the five tribes of the Confederation, which had started as little more than a mutual non-aggression pact. While certainly not reaching the Roman level of organization, they probably surpassed that of the Mycenaean-led coalition that had for ten years laid siege to Troy. For the first quarter of the seventeenth century, all the cards seemed to be stacked against the Iroquois. But, as it turned out, fate dealt a blow to the Huron and changed the situation irrevocably to the Iroquois advantage. That change came in the form of Jesuit missionaries-uncompromising men of God, whose only goal was to save souls and, using Huronia as a base, covert the Huron and neighboring tribes-and, God willing, someday even the dreaded Iroquois.

What they accomplished, through tireless labor and selfless sacrifice, in the years between 1634 and 1649, was to bring disease and dissension to the Huron Confederation. The combination of which so weakened the Hurons that they ultimately could no longer withstand the unremitting onslaughts of their ancient enemy.

The Jesuit efforts were initially crowned with a measure of success. Their mission of Sainte Marie among the Huron was by 1640 the second largest French settlement in North America after Quebec. A full third of the French population of New France lived there. However, with the French came the diseases of Europe. Wave followed wave. First, there was the flu epidemic of 1636. This was followed by a smallpox epidemic. Measles, chicken pox, both killers for the Huron, and myriad other European diseases were also being continuously transported to Sainte Marie. The effect was like, not one, but asuccession of Black Deaths, reducing the population of Wendake by as much as three quarters over a period of fifteen years.

The Huron were reduced to terror and despair. Many believed that the Jesuits were sorcerers, purposefully spreading disease with the intent of forcing the Indians to accept the French God or die a horrible death. While the Jesuits denied that they were the cause of the epidemics, they did give the Huron to believe that baptism could sometimes work a miraculous cure, and, indeed, the Jesuit reports make many references to such occurrences. In any event, or so the Jesuits assured them, even when baptism did not save their bodies, it would guarantee them eternal life in the French heaven. Both these messages were divisive in the extreme. The Huron could see that the baptized died as readily as those clinging to the traditional beliefs, yet some, hoping against hope, clung to the new religion and prayed fervently to the Christian God for deliverance. For others, the epidemics gave them reason to hate the Jesuits and plot their destruction.

The message of eternal life was also divisive. Traditionally, the Huron wished for little more than to join their people who had gone before them in the land of the dead. This land was neither heaven nor hell, but was rather a place much like the land of the living, but without the rough edges of disease and starvation.

Those that were baptized could not, according to the Jesuits, join ancestors who had not been baptized.

For a tribal people, this prospect was as bad as death itself. Yet many of the Huron, possibly as many as half, accepted baptism, thereby severing themselves from their people in both life and death. By the mid-1640's the Hurons, never as cohesive as the Iroquois to begin with, had been split into two mistrustful and often hostile camps: Christians and non-Christians. Both groups were greatly depleted by disease.

The Iroquois, with their own supply of beaver exhausted, but with their population still united and relatively strong, capitalized on the weakness of the Huron. They engaged in a protracted war of attrition, interdicting the Huron trading expeditions sometimes almost in sight of the walls of Three Rivers. They attacked Huron hunting parties and Huron women tending the corn fields. They were merciless and implacable. Then, in the spring of 1649, they mounted an expedition that finally succeeded in bringing the Huron Confederation to its knees and dispersing its people. Even as weakened and disorganized as the Huron were, it was still no mean feat. An Iroquois war party, chiefly Senecas and Mohawks, had set out the previous autumn for Wendake. They foraged through the winter as they traveled at a leisurely pace toward their prey. In the spring, still undiscovered, they attacked unsuspecting Huron villages and quickly overwhelmed them. The Huron rallied and counterattacked. The Iroquois were eventually forced to withdraw, laden with booty and prisoners, but Wendake was no more. The surviving Huron sought refuge at Christian Island in Lake Huron, where they spent a miserable winter, many perishing from disease and starvation. Those who were left dispersed, some going east to settle near Quebec; some joining the Algonquins to the north. Most went south and west to join the Eries on the southern shore of Lake Erie.

With the Huron destroyed, the balance of power was permanently altered. No tribe could now stand up to the Iroquois. In short order, the Iroquois destroyed the Neutral Nations on the north shore of Lakes Erie and Ontario, the Susquehannocks to the south, and the Eries to the west. They wiped out all but the last the Mohicans. They were unstoppable and they soon reigned supreme in a vast area that stretched from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Saint Lawrence River to the Chesapeake Bay. They did not, however, have the people to occupy this area. While they had made their world safe from their traditional enemies, they had opened themselves up to a threat they could never have anticipated-European settlement. Most of central and western Pennsylvania as well as large portions of New York had been virtually depopulated. Few tribes were there to confront the settlers. The Iroquois tried desperately to move client tribes into these lands and, once there, encouraged them to fight the Europeans, but it was too little too late. The Iroquois had become victims of their own success. Theirvictory was the seed of their undoing. In destroying all those around them, they ultimately had to stand alone, not against the trivial population of French but against an unstoppable tide of English settlers.

Ironically, the French, whom they had hated ever since that day in 1609 when Champlain brought down three Iroquois chieftains with one discharge of his musket, were no real threat to them. The French wanted trading partners, albeit pliant ones, and souls for God, but the French had no intention of opening the continent to settlement by their dissidents and outcasts.

It was the English, the Puritans and Quakers, Catholics and Coventers, seeking religious freedom, and the tens of thousands of others who sought a better life in a new world, who were ultimately the real threat to the Iroquois. Their warriors fought valiantly for another hundred years, but with the defeat of the French in 1763, their fate was sealed. Pontiac, Tecumseh, and others tried to unite the tribes, but there were too few left and the European population was already too great. The Iroquois had been instrumental in their own undoing.

If, in an alternate world, somehow the events of 1634 could be altered and the Huron somehow preserved, then the history of North America would surely have unfolded differently. With the Huron intact, the Iroquois could not have taken on the tribes around them. Rather than moving into depopulated areas, English settlers would have come up against tribes that had not been dispersed by the Iroquois.

Then, when the Iroquois finally could see where the European settlement was leading and resolved to stand up to the invaders, they would have potential allies on their flanks. In fact, in a 1632 universe, they probably would even learn eventually, as the countries of Europe had learned, how things had unfolded in the other timeline: that European settlement led to the almost complete destruction of the indigenous tribes and cultures, with those remaining relegated to poverty and reservations at the bottom rung of the American ladder.

The Iroquois, in their wars against the Huron, Algonquin, and French, demonstrated resourcefulness and resolve in standing up to numerically and technologically superior enemies. They were more successful than most tribes in adjusting to the westward expansion of the United States. One can only wonder how it all would have turned out if the cards had been stacked a little more in their favor and that course of events set by the founding of the Jesuit mission in Huronia in 1634 had been somehow shifted in a direction more favorable to the indigenous peoples.

Aluminum: Will O' the Wisp?

by Iver P. Cooper

There is no doubt that aluminum is a wonder metal. Pure aluminum has a density only about one-third of iron, it is as reflective as silver, and a good conductor of heat and electricity. When exposed to air, it quickly acquires a protective coating of aluminum oxide, which shields it from further corrosion. Alloys of aluminum are extensively used as structural materials in the construction of buildings and vehicles. Because of the extensive up-time use of aluminum, a substantial amount of aluminum products passed through the Ring of Fire. This aluminum will certainly be recycled, where possible (more on that later).

What is much more difficult is producing aluminum, and its alloys, from scratch.

The process which made it possible to produce reasonably pure (over 99%) aluminum at a reasonable cost was the Hall-Heroult smelting process (1886), involving the electrolytic reduction of aluminum oxide (alumina) to the metal. Finding the ore (bauxite) and extracting alumina from it are relatively straightforward. However, the Hall-Heroult process has some additional, potentially ticklish material requirements (large amounts of electricity, the rare mineral cryolite, and highly pure carbon). Also, the more important uses of aluminum are in alloys, so we need to purify the major alloying elements, too.

Finding Aluminum Ores Aluminum is the third most abundant element in the earth's crust. While hundreds of minerals contain aluminum, the principal ore is bauxite (a name for a family of aluminum oxide minerals). The bauxites include gibbsite [Al(OH)3], boehmite [AlO(OH)] and diaspore [also AlO(OH)].

When granitic rocks are weathered, the feldspar minerals (which are complex silicates) are converted into "clay minerals," such as kaolinite (hydrous aluminum silicate). If the granite has a high aluminum content (e.g., aluminum silicates), bauxite is formed. (Hochleitner, 39) The implication is that if you are looking for bauxite, a good starting point is to find out where clay is mined for porcelain.

However, the encyclopedias provide additional clues. TheEncyclopedia Americana articles on "aluminum" and "bauxite" reveal that bauxite can be found in Europe (France, Ireland, Greece, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina), the Americas (Arkansas, Jamaica, Suriname, Guyana, Brazil), Africa (Guinea), and Asia (Indonesia). The 1911Encyclopedia Britannica (1911EB) adds Styria, Austria, India, Italy, Alabama and Georgia (EB11-A), and the modern EB, Hawaii, Australia, Malaysia, China, the Soviet Union, and Ghana. (EB-IEP, 389) Bauxite takes its name from the town of Les Baux, in France, so that pinpoints one deposit, albeit one in enemy hands. There, it is found as a reddish rock. (EB11, "Les Baux") The Irish deposit is at Irish Hill (near Larne), in county Antrim, Ireland. The Arkansas deposits are in Saline and Pulaski counties.

Several atlases likely to be in personal libraries, such as theHammond Citation World Atlasand the Rand McNally Family World Atlas , show the location of major "Al" deposits.

{The up-timers, of course, are most interested in finding bauxite in Germany. There are several clues: (1) it is in basaltic rocks of the "Westerwald," and these rocks are tertiary basalts interbedded with pisolitic iron ore, like those of Antrim (EB11-B); (2) it is found in Hesse (EB11-A), and (3) it is deposited as a reddish clay, between layers of tertiary basalt, at Vogelsberg in Germany. (EB11, "Laterite") The term "Westerwald" is pretty nondescript ("western forest"), but there is a forest so named at the modern border of Hesse and the Rhineland Palatinate. Vogelsberg is likewise shown by modern maps as a mountainous area in south central Hesse, west of Fulda. Unfortunately, the German deposits are not significant enough to be shown in the Hammond atlas.

We know, within several miles, where to look, the next question is, would we know what are we looking for?

BothThe Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Minerals , and theEyewitness Handbooks: Rocks and Minerals provide photos and "tests" for bauxite. Bauxite isn't necessarily red; it can be white, yellow or brown. (EB11-B) Red is a sign of the presence of ferric iron oxide, although the ore's color "is no sure criterion of the iron content." (EA) * * *

We want bauxites with a high alumina content. The 1911EB gives Grantville researchers the following composition data: * Antrim (Irish) bauxites: 33-60% alumina, 2-30% ferric oxide, 7-24% silica, balance titanic acid and water. (Encyclopedia Americana says that the finest Antrim bauxite is "almost free from iron.") * French bauxites: 58-70% alumina, 3-15% "foreign matter," 27% silica, iron oxide and water.

* American bauxites: 38-67% alumina, 1-23% ferric oxide, 1-32% silica. (EB11-Al, 768) (EA says that in America, ore is available with "as little as 1 percent iron oxide and 3 percent silica").

Would-be aluminum barons will no doubt show prospective investors the encyclopedia page which states "by far the greatest quantity of commercially exploited bauxite lies at or near the Erth's surface.

Consequently, it is mined in open pits requiring only a minimum removal of layers of soil and rock covering the ore." (EB-IEP 389) The modern EB says that "bauxite beds are blasted loose, dug up with power shovel or dragline, and the ore transported by truck or rail to a processing plant. . . . Refining plants are located near mine sites, if possible, since transportation is the major item in bauxite costs."

In the 1632 universe, we will still be able to use explosives to blast away overburden, if necessary.

However, access to power shovels and dump trucks will initially be limited to mining sites within driving distance of Grantville. Hence, if we are mining it further away, we will be collecting the bauxite with pickaxe and shovel, carrying it out of the mine by wheelbarrow, hoist, or mine car, and shipping it to the processing plant by pack mule, wagon, barge or ship.