1328

## **Outgrowing the Walls: the need for Construction capacity…**

Every bit of research and development in which House Stonehearth had invested found a way to grant returns in multiples. The original mercantile, import and export business was dominant in Baldur’s Gate – and that said a great deal.

Diversifying, creating whole new markets expanded the local economy in ways local scholars couldn’t fully capture for the history books. The otherwise significant expense of the Stonehearth College, the schools, the professional academies were “loss leaders” that drove untold more business and created more gold.

By **1328**, House Stonehearth needed more physical space, but there were no organized contractors that could rise to the high Stonehearth expectation. Not unusual in that respect, so what did they do? They did what they always do: they did it themselves…

### Best Practices and Lessons Learned

The key process was learning what there was to know, then taking it all apart to see what made it tick – then putting it back together again with an eye on how to go smarter, bigger, stronger, faster. In this case, that meant hiring masons and carpenters into the House. The magic of transmogrifying contractors into staff allowed Stonehearth to create SOP based on their collective knowledge.

As storefronts, offices and warehouses were built, so were ideas. In this case, the imaginations of the construction staff were encouraged – and the results would change the nature of building. What happened was the birth (or rebirth) of different masonry construction technologies.

#### Bricks and mortar

There was a cottage industry of bricks making (so to speak), but Baldur’s Gate techniques were fairly primitive against the standards current in certain elven and dwarven enclaves.

The Stonehearth Merchant Company knew those techniques and built on them (so to speak), and further applied the factory principle, churning out enough sturdy bricks to pave the Trade Way all the way to Waterdeep.

#### Concrete materials

Concrete had been invented millennia ago, and essentially been forgotten for more rustic methods. It was an incredibly strong material, as could be seen with the continued structural strength of many buildings from antiquity. There were definite disadvantages to using it (beyond just bypassing the glacially slow stone masons guild).

The ancient methods required hand-layering the cement over the placement of aggregate, which often consisted of rubble. Additionally, ancient concrete depended on the strength of the concrete bonding to resist tension. The SMC was trying to improve on it.

The SMC’s chemistry bona fides rose to the surface, pioneering the use of hydraulic lime in concrete, along with pebbles and powdered bricks as aggregate. Further, with a pre-treatment, they were able to increase several of the properties in a mix they dubbed "Gate Cement." Importantly, this allowed a mix consistency that was fluid and homogeneous, allowing it to be poured into forms.

Further, they re-discovered the use concrete additives that had been used in ancient times. For instance, volcanic ash to the mix allowed it to set underwater. Similarly, the ancients knew that adding horse hair made concrete less liable to crack while it hardened, and adding blood made it more frost-resistant.

The SMC improved upon the horse hair idea, deducing the problem of cracking. They used the local steel foundry\* and added steel fiber instead of horse hair, then adding steel bars as overall reinforcement. They were artistic enough to come up with decorative stones inset in the surface, plus pigments to change to color, as well socketed insets, such as the ancients did.

Also noted: they needed their own foundry…

### The Baldur's Gate stonemasons were soon trained in the SMC methods…

The Guild was now inextricably tied to House Stonehearth, which gave them another avenue of expressing tremendous political power, in this case from the bottom up. The Four Dukes had a standing invitation to make it “Five Dukes” – but there were tradeoffs that were untenable for the ethics of Stonehearth.

While the dissonance wasn’t enough to turn into hostility, there was a certain wariness between them (and a knowledge that Stonehearth outright distrusted the local aristocracy).

Not that it mattered: if the SMC wasn’t building for their own use, they were contracted out to those very nobles, lesser aristocracy and general merchants (even competitors) to build the best structures money could buy. One way or another, the SMC construction division was making money.

### Steam made an appearance here, too…

#### *Water Pumps, evolved*…

Within the circles of the society, early in the year, the SMC published designs for raising water between floors employing a similar principle to that of a coffee percolator. This was similar to system devised for the Stonehearth Manor, it was the first to separate the boiler from the pumping action. Water was admitted into a reinforced barrel from a cistern, and then a valve was opened to admit steam from a separate boiler. The pressure built over the top of the water, driving it up a pipe. They installed the steam-powered device on the wall of the SMC to supply water through the building.

This was an evolved way of bringing water to interiors was a revolutionary concept, and versions of this were implemented around The Gate.

#### *Cylinders*

Their evolved boiling cylinders obtained a more complete vacuum by boiling water then allowing the steam to condense; in this way was able to raise weights by attaching the end of the piston to a rope passing over a pulley. As a demonstration model the system worked, but in order to repeat the process the whole apparatus had to be dismantled and reassembled. They quickly saw that to make an automatic cycle the steam would have to be generated separately in a boiler.

In the Oearth universe, around the mid-1670s, similar ground would’ve been covered in a collaboration between Denis Papin and Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens. As it were, with timeline inexorably altered, neither of those two gentlemen were destined to be born.