Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

After a few days, Tiberius had me come help him in the lab with his project.  He'd gathered two of the electric fish, and had a new design that he wanted to try using.  I brought along some decently thick copper wire to use as well, given copper's conductivity.  With stone shaping, it was very easy to make the shapes and designs that Tiberius had in mind for his device, and I gave him some input as well as we made it.

The concept is pretty straight forward, he was basically using the blood as both the generator and conductor.  Then channeling it to the organs which seemingly direct the electric arc through the air.  Knowing what I know about electricity though, electricity isn't like a rock, you don't just throw it through the air.  You need to make a channel for it to arc through.  So I'm guessing that the organ does something with mana to allow that.  Either that, or the blood electricity is unrelated, and the organ just generates spontaneous electricity when stimulated with mana.

That idea was easy enough to test using tectonic sense, though I was a little afraid of getting electrocuted as a result.  I used tectonic sense through one of the organs without much of the blood on it.  I got a painful shock, but nothing like what I saw before when Tiberius was testing the device in the past.  The electricity arced from one of the three prongs that protrude from one side of the organ, and arced sideways to my hand.  It seems like it does generate some of the electricity itself, but perhaps not all of it, then it arced quickly to the ground through me.

I worked with Tiberius for a slight redesign of the device, using copper wires to direct the flow of electricity toward the organ.  In his previous device, he had soaked wood in blood to act as a conductor.  In the new device, I've stone-shaped out hollow rods which we've filled with the blood.  Each rod has eight wires that run along the edges, touching the internal blood and extending out beyond both sides.  One side grasps the electric organ, and the other side can be distributed through the blood pool when it's attached to the crystal.

Though a problem with both his old device and current one seem to be getting a lot of mana to the organ itself.  I know some water and bloods make good mana conductors, but the issue of connecting that to a somewhat squishy organ is a problem.  There are multiple ways to attempt to solve that problem, like encasing the organ in a container with the blood, but without knowing exactly how it functions, it's hard to say what might work.  Even then, it's hard to say exactly what use this even has outside of experimentation purposes.

The main issue is that it's basically just static discharge, like lightning.  There is a rapid and powerful arc that instantly dissipates destructively, so it's not even like we could use this to generate electricity in any useful way in the current form, but perhaps something valuable might come from it.

The first organ got fried by the electricity being conducted through the wires.  It arced electricity dangerously around the rod for about ten seconds in half second bursts before the organ had become too charred to work anymore, and the electricity started just crackling all over the rod and surface of the blood until it died out.

If everything is working approximately how electricity on earth works, then the blood and organ are somehow generating an either negative or positive charge.  Technically, it doesn't really matter which, because for all I know, everything has opposite electric charge here, and we're operating with positrons and antiprotons.

I did get an idea, though it heavily relies on the blood not being damaged or depleted over time.  Currently, we keep cooking the blood to the point where the electric charge causes such powerful sparks that the blood stops working to generate the electric charge.  So, what if we made many small chambers with a small amount of blood, and ran wire to each of them, then connected that wire to a strong ground?  Could we get an electric differential that is somewhat stable?

Within this buried room, basically every surface acts as a ground, albeit a poor one.  Which could be partially why there is so much trouble controlling the output from that organ, though I'd guess that it'd require quite the complex manipulation to get an organ to function with precision outside it's body.

So, I discussed the idea of installing a ground wire opposite the crystal in the room.  Stone is generally very resistant to electrical flow, making it a poor ground, so I'll need to use quite a bit of copper to get enough surface area in contact with the ground to properly function as a grounding wire.

For the first iteration, I think I'll just insert some solid copper rods into the stone surface at regular intervals using stone shape, then tie them together with copper wire.  At the very least, that should be the best ground in this room by a significant margin.  While I work on getting the copper rods made and installed, I've given Tiberius some money to use to pay the fishergoblins to get more of the electric fishes.

After three days of setup, I've finished with installing the grounding rods, and made a testing bed for my idea.  What I've made is essentially about three dozen thin tubes that run back towards the crystal, with a single copper wire running down their center.  Those copper wires are then all connected to each other, and run over to the grounding wire.

Since the electricity should be running along the wire, rather than arcing through the air, we'll need a way to visualize if this is working.  To do that, I've prepared a few different tests.  I've got three separate coils of copper wire set up, with some lightstone sheathing to function as both an insulator, and to keep the wire in place.  One of the coils surrounds a steel core, another has iron filings scattered around it, and the third has both.  I have other pieces of iron around that I can use to check the magnetic effect, if there is any.

After Tiberius butchers the fish, we get some of the blood loaded into the chambers, starting the process.  Initially things seemed pretty promising.  The iron filings snapped into a magnetic grid, and even more-so around the iron core coil.  Though I noticed that the filings didn't actually stop and settle.  Less than ten seconds later, while bringing a piece of iron over to one of the coils, I could feel the heat radiating off the coils, and another ten seconds later, and the copper started to melt.  A few seconds after that, the electricity started to crackle off the severed cable, arcing to the next part of the cable to the ground.

I was thankful that I made a quick disconnect in my design for the tubes, which allowed us to drain all the blood into a container that wasn't touching the crystal relatively quickly.  On one hand, things were somewhat successful.  The electricity did seem to flow from the blood to the ground through the path of least resistance.  On the other hand, it fried the coils.

I was way more excited by the process than Tiberius was though.  He seemed far more interested in the prospect of using the electricity as a directed weapon than for other purposes, so my little experiment probably seemed like a step in the opposite direction for him.  After thinking for a while, I think I might have a guess as to what caused the coils to heat up like that.

The source of electricity is likely very unstable.  I saw the iron filings continue to twitch through the experiment, which indicates that the magnetic fields were shifting repeatedly.  So the coils were probably experiencing powerful eddy currents as the residual magnetic fields were driving opposite currents every time the electrical current shut off.  If I had to guess, we've got something like a pulsed DC to neutral circuit.  

What I'd need to fix that issue is an inductor actually capable of handling the voltage installed circuit, which means I'd need to make the inductor first.  Before I run that test though, I should run a test again using the existing blood, but with a thick cable directly to the ground, and see just how long it seems to run before the blood no longer produces electricity.  This would all be for naught if the blood only runs for ten minutes before it's fried, even with a ground.

To check that there is still electricity flowing, I'm going to put a small lever near the ground cable to work as a disconnect switch, to move the cable very slightly away from the ground, to hopefully see a spark connecting the two when I throw the switch.  I'll do that at regular intervals and roughly gauge the size of the spark to determine if we're losing electrical potential or not over time.