Reborn In 17th century India with Black Technology-Chapter 1199: The Second Industrial Revolution?

The people of the Bharatiya Empire were blissfully unaware that a new invention, one that would set off yet another industrial revolution, had just been created: the internal combustion engine. But that barely mattered, since they were already witnessing one of the two key developments that would trigger the Second Industrial Revolution, electricity and the machinery powered by it.

It had already been several years since electricity was implemented in large factories clustered across various special economic zones, but much had changed since then. The telegram had become the primary method of communication, not only for the military but also for the government. Messages that once took several hours, or even days, to be delivered now took only a few moments, or at most an hour, provided the telegram line remained uninterrupted. Even in the worst-case scenario, where a message had to be retransmitted from one base station to another, it was still far faster than the old Arkha Dristhi Communication Channel.

The various industries that had been nationalised due to the emergency were the first to enjoy free, direct communication services. They could contact any manufacturer, raw material supplier, research institute, laboratory, or virtually anyone else within a few hours and conduct trade efficiently. This change brought about an unprecedented leap in the speed of information transfer and exchange, faster than anything seen before.

And that was not all. In recent times, research into inventing machines and products that could run on electricity has also accelerated. All of this began with a single, simple invention, the electric fan. Once the principles of the dynamo were studied, most researchers and intellectuals either focused on theoretical research into electromagnetic induction, the core principle behind the dynamo, or explored ways to apply the dynamo directly to various machines. However, Sukundaraj, a professor at the Bharatiya Institute of Technology, Amritsar, put forward a bold conjecture: "Since electrical energy is generated through electromagnetic induction, caused by the relative motion between a conductor and a magnetic field within a dynamo, could it then follow that supplying electrical current directly to such a system would induce mechanical rotation instead?"

The conjecture itself was fairly easy to test. For most research institutes, even top-tier laboratories, obtaining a dynamo was extremely difficult, since it was still a classified product manufactured exclusively by industries under the military logistics department. However, for him, a professor at the Bharatiya Institute of Technology, the government’s own technical institute, securing research support was not a major obstacle.

Moreover, his conjecture caught the interest of researchers at the Bharatiya Academy of Military Sciences as well. As a result, Mukundaraj was granted access to a medium-sized dynamo for experimental testing.

The testing itself was fairly simple. After pestering the institute’s director for a long time, he managed to redirect electricity from the institute’s main dynamo, which was normally used to power lighting across the entire facility, into his laboratory. With the full output of the institute’s dynamo at his disposal, he simply connected two copper wires to the output terminals of the smaller dynamo allocated to him and linked them directly to the power supply available in his lab.

The next moment, sure enough, the central beam of the entire Dynamo began to spin at a rapid speed; his conjecture was proved true. If electricity is manually input into the terminals of the Dynamo, the central rod really does turn on its own. The Dynamo was really a reciprocal motor and a generator system, where it can both act as a consumer of power and a generator of power.

This was the first time such a machine was proven to exist in real life. So even though Mukundaraj was not the inventor of the dynamo itself, the thesis he wrote after confirming this characteristic caused a massive uproar. It drew so much attention that it even alerted the original inventor of the dynamo, Anand Binoy, a guest academician at the Bharatiya Academy of Military Sciences and Civilian Sciences, a three-time Dharma Award laureate in physics, and the discoverer of electricity, electromagnetic induction, and electromagnetism.

Soon after, various national research institutes did the test for themselves and confirmed the authenticity of the paper. Various research projects surrounding the discoveries sprang up like bamboo shoots after a rain.

Only a month after the original research of Mukundaraj was published, a student at a first-tier university in the educational capital of the empire, Sharada Pete, designed a new fan that works automatically using electricity.

The student’s design was simple, yet practical. He merely attached four fins to the central axle of the dynamo, shaping their edges with a slight curve so that air would be pushed downward and outward as the axle rotated. By all measures, there was no groundbreaking research involved, nor were any never-before-seen principles applied. He had simply integrated multiple fields of knowledge, mechanical engineering, electricity, aerodynamics, and metallurgy, and even that integration was not particularly extraordinary.

If this had been any other research project, the student would not been considered one of the promising seedlings of the year, nor a potential candidate for the Academy of Sciences. Yet despite this, his project caused a massive uproar in intellectual circles. It was even featured on the front page of the ’Prakruthi Journal’, a leading publication under the Bakshi Media Corporation.

The reason was simple. His invention shattered the imagination bottleneck that had plagued most researchers, intellectuals, and inventors across the Empire. Until then, the dynamo was still viewed as cutting-edge science, something meant only for advanced, high-tech industries, but the student’s invention proved otherwise. It showed that the dynamo could be used immediately and that it could improve the lives of ordinary people right away.

Moreover, since the dynamo produced rotational motion, something essential to countless aspects of daily life, and since it was later discovered that the rotational speed of the dynamo’s axle was directly proportional to the amount of electricity supplied, meaning the speed could be precisely controlled, a tsunami of ideas erupted from every corner of the Bharatiya Empire.

A research institute within a private company suddenly proposed that the dynamo could be used to pump water from lower elevations to higher ones, simply by attaching a propeller-type mechanism and implementing a waterproof design so that water would not come into contact with the dynamo’s internal components.

Around the same time, a research group at the Bharatiya Institute of Technology in Thanjavur began studying how the dynamo could be used to power looms for weaving cloth. This line of research immediately attracted significant funding and support from the Bakshi Group of Industries, the largest textile conglomerate in the world.

Inspired by these developments, several national and private research institutes started exploring ways to power industrial machinery, such as lathes, drills, and other essential machine tools, using electricity instead of steam. Unexpectedly, the military logistics department quickly recognised the potential of this movement. With government backing, it launched an initiative that brought all these research efforts under a single umbrella, the Nuthana Machine Tools Initiative. Under this framework, research groups were centrally coordinated, technologies were shared whenever applicable, and patent support was provided so that teams could freely use innovations without fear of intellectual property disputes.

Beyond projects focused on replacing steam-powered machine tools with electric ones, there were also more ambitious efforts underway. Some researchers were already attempting to use electricity to power vehicles such as cars, tractors, trucks, and other modes of transport.

As for whether any of these projects would succeed, or how long that success might take, only time could tell. For now, however, the vitality surging through the Empire was something that had not been seen in many years. Perhaps the last time the Empire had felt this alive was when steam cars first entered the market, and vehicles began roaming the streets of its cities.

While all of this was unfolding across the Empire, one of the people most pleased by these developments was Selvan, the elderly director of the Bharatiya Internal Pragya. Under normal circumstances, such large-scale changes were nothing but trouble for his organisation. Major shifts within the Empire always caused a sharp rise in foreign intelligence activity, with adversaries constantly trying new tricks that he had to counter with both wit and resolve.

When he was younger, he did not mind this at all. But now, with age catching up to him, he found it harder to cope with everything. He had already decided that he would retire as soon as the war came to an end.

This time, however, things were different. With the Bharatiya Military, especially the Navy, completely drawing the attention of the European Union, foreign intelligence activity within the mainland had clearly decreased. The Europeans appeared to be focusing almost all their resources on logistics channels and military movements, leaving civilian matters aside. This shift eased a significant burden from Selvan’s shoulders.

This was the era that was dubbed by historians as the era of the Second Industrial Revolution. But that is far into the future.