Part 8: Gathering steam
Iquique, Tarapacá
March 1886
Alejandro Puig enjoyed his time in the city. He could visit a proper bar and drink a proper beer, instead of the
Pisco that was all the people in Almonte seemed to drink, although Mouchot provided the town with a few bottles of wine made with the same grapes used for the spirit. The frenchman was serious about his wine, and his small production was rather good, which confused Puig to no end. It didn't bothered him, though, and he had grown fond of Mouchot's cooking.
After he finished his beer, he went to the Postal Office to see if he or the
Franco-Chilena had received any mail. He took his time, buying some fruit to bring back to Almonte, chatting with the locals about the news - the great topic was the "marine occupation" by the British Navy on Valparaíso and San Antonio, which was enough to keep the Chilean Navy in check - and reading the newspapers. He noticed that
El Mercurio de Valparaíso was smaller, which put a smile on Alejandro's face. A sign of the times, and a consequence of the Conservatives' reckless brutality.
He waited in line a few minutes, exchanged words with the clerk, and then received the usual bundle: some orders for the domestic boilers, correspondence in french for Mouchot, and a few letters for him and Constantino. And then, not one but two letters that he couldn't quite parse due to their importance.
The first was signed by Isidora Goyenechea and with the seal of the Lota-Cousiño Coal Company. The second was a letter by Ramon Barros Lucos, the director of the Society for the Promotion of Industry, this one with a wax seal. Puig looked at the two pieces of paper, awestruck... he knew he had other errands to run in Iquique, but for his life he couldn't remember them. He hurried outside the post office, and hired the first stagecoach he saw. He paid extra to get to Almonte fast.
It took four hours. For eteran hours to get to the town, and when he got there, he spared no time with formalities. He called Constantino, who was overseeing the workers and the production. He then startled Mouchot, who was lost in his designs and formulas. Once the three were gathered, he produced the two letters.
"Ladies first" Puig said before opening the envelope from Lota. Puig was a crude man, but he could tell that this letter came from Isidora Goyenechea's own hand. The manager of that coal operation, the richest person in Chile, and probably one of the richest in the world. He started reading aloud, but it was in French and he didn't want to butcher the language in front of Mouchot, so he gave it to him. Which proved to be a mistake, as the man fainted after a few sentences. Serrano continued once he had regained consciousness. The lady had requested five hundred domestic heaters and fifty sanitizers. She also wanted to schedule a visit the
Franco-Chilena, stressing her interest in the technology and possibilities of solar energy for industrial purposes.
After reading it, there was silence for a few minutes. Nobody knew just what to do, nobody knew even what to say after receiving the news. Alejandro only knew to serve three cups of wine. Not to celebrate, they were all too stunned for that. But the next letter would be just as heavy hitting, and being a little drunk would help in taking it better.
And the hit came, just as predicted. Ramón Barros Luco opened by noticing that Mouchot's devices were becoming all the rage in Santiago, with one even installed in
La Moneda, which had then prompted the interest on some industrialists onto the "fuel-less boiler" that powered the TSC, but the device had been dismantled and thus nobody could test it. Nevertheless, they had reason to believe that it worked as intended, because the accounting of the TSC made sense. It only made sense if they were using some sort of fuel-less power device. Barros Luco went on about having read Mouchot's work,
La Chaleur Solaire et Ses Applications Industrielles, and inquired about the factibility of using solar concentrators for mining operations. "If Solar Concentrators can acheive and sustain temperatures useful for copper smelting applications, and do so at a lower cost than traditional methods, then we could revitalize the copper industry which is now languishing due to the low prices on international markets".
The three men looked at each other. This was it. This was what the breakthrough they were looking for. Puig and Serrano raised their glasses to toast, but Mouchot didn't. He was crying. A lifetime of work, almost forty years of effort, and it was just starting to pay at last.
Bletchley, England
Both Morgan and Damian Cotrell agreed on something: it was a miserable day, even in England. Damian, with his experience at sea, could take it better than Morgan but neither liked it. They wouldn't be running errands if it wasn't of the utmost importance, and receiving an entire section of the Tarapacá Boiler required their oversight. It required the work of forty men, unloading four train wagons and then loading them to ones pulled by oxen, and then the day-long trip to the Cotrell Estate. Miserable work, for a miserable day. The men, however, worked fast and efficiently, motivated by a good pay financed by Morgan.
He felt he was indulging his brother, and for his life he couldn't see how this array of mirrors could compete with coal. But Damian saw something, and he knew his machines well enough to have authority in the matter. And so they pressed onwards.
Damian was pressed for time. He only had one week of leave left, and wanted to set up the boiler before embarking again. He spent the following days directing the reconstruction of the boiler, then coating it on grease to slow down the rust it would inevitably form in the wet english weather. Damian often imagined the machines he served as living being, it helped to understand them if he could say they were happy, or angry, or in pain. And this boiler, this machine made in the desert, he could tell it felt unwelcomed in this weather. Someday, he hoped, he could find it a better home, maybe in Egypt or Australia. But right now, he needed it to be in the center of the world. He needed the contacts and the learned minds and the opportunists and others to see the potential of his machine. He regretted not getting the chance to see the machine in action, but he trusted that his brother would follow his detailed instructions and making the machine fully operational during summer.
With the widespread adoption of the domestic water heater system developed by Franco-Chilean Solar Power Company, came notoriety to its' inventor which had evaded him during his early years in Chile (something exacerbated by the TSC' hermetic nature). Although somewhat detached from the daily operations of the Franco-Chilena, the profitability of the design allowed Augustin Mouchot greater freedom to experiment with designs. During this period, Mouchot mostly tackled the problem of tracking and focusing the moving rays of the sun. The early solar concentrator could melt a fist-sized rock into lava within two minutes after some improvements like the addition of a fresnel lens focus, but keeping the parabolic mirror at the optimal angle proved a challenge in an era before the most basic automation.
More important than the research done by Mouchot during this period was the aforementioned notoriety, which reached the upper echelons of Chilean society. Specifically, it gained the interest of Isidora Goyenechea, the manager of the Lota coal mines and the most important captain of industry in the country. Ms. Goyenechea had noticed the work of Mouchot much earlier than other Chileans, as the success of the Mouchot-Puig boiler greatly reduced the sales of coal to the TSC. No other mention to solar energy or its inventors are done on her epistolary records until a visit to Santiago. It is believed that during this visit she witnessed a solar water heater in action, which renewed her interest in solar energy.
A benevolent woman who overlooked the wellbeing of her employees, she quickly realized that these water heaters could improve the quality of the housing she provided for the miners (which was already high by standards of the day) at a comparatively low investment, without wasting valuable coal.
It is believed that altruism wasn't her only motivation, as several of these heaters were modified to track the amount of water used, and she appointed a manager to keep records on its usage and estimate the amount of "coal" they generated. She also motivated the Society for Promotion of Production (or SOFOFA as it was known in Spanish) to reach out to Mouchot and inquire about the possibilities of his designs.
In stark contrast to later energy barons like John D. Rockefeller, Isidora Goyenechea saw solar energy not as competition, but as a potential new business venture, and one that could make other businesses more efficient and thus more profitable. Her impact on the early development of solar energy will be further explored on the next chapters, but for now it suffices to say that there's a reason why Goyenechea is the third most frequent odonym in Chile, after O'higgins and Prat.), but Geothermal Heat Pumps. In an age before electricity, and one with much less reliable distribution networks, noticing that the ground remains at a stable temperature year-round and creates a differential with air temperature will have a tremendous impact on domestic heating and refrigeration.
