Human muscle is an inefficient clockwork transducer.
A strong stevedore, working at peak physical hard effort, can lift two hundred pounds four feet off the ground twice a minute. He consumes bread, meat, and beer. He needs eight hours of sleep. And after four hours of nonstop lifting, his lower-back bones compress and his grip strength degrades by forty percent.
Freight throughput at Haven-Hold Grand End-post surged past five thousand tons of copper. Then, iron ore, and timber per day, relying on human dockworkers with iron pry-bars was a working absurdity.
Giles stood on the raised check staging of the heavy locomotive repair shed, his brass measuring tongs in hand.
In the center of the bay stood Rathmor the Rusty.
The twelve-foot ancient iron-puppet had his chest armor plates unbolted. It swung open on heavy brass hinges like the doors of a bank vault. Inside his cavernous iron ribs, Master Borin Bronze-Lung was fitting a compact, thirty-horsepower overload steam dynamo, no larger than a beer keg, coupled directly to a high-pressure axial piston high-pressure pump.
Behind his eyes, the test model screen was calculating proportional fluid flow and high-pressure joint articulation.
“Two thousand pounds of pressure of crushing pressure,” Giles said. He pointed with his wooden ruler to the four-inch forged-steel cylinders mounted along Rathmor’s thighs and forearms.
