“Hrm, in this case, it should be called a bucket elevator.” Su Tang saw what Luo Xingchen was asking about and, after pondering for a moment, picked the name of the machine that seemed most appropriate.
Luo Xingchen still didn’t really understand and continued asking, “So you mean to use this machine to lift the tomatoes and chili peppers up to the meat grinder? Why bother with this? Why not just let people climb up and dump them in?”
Luo Xingchen was a native of this era and had the usual thinking of a person from a feudal society. In this era, slaves were very common things and, in Luo Xingchen’s mind, there was no such concept as saving labor. After all, there were people selling their strength so she, as a person with money, only needed to pay a bit and let the slaves and servants handle this kind of work. There was completely no need to use a machine.
On the other hand, Su Tang was a modern person and, although she had adapted to this era somewhat, she still had her own thinking. For example, although she didn’t mind buying and using servants for the sake of blending in with the other people in this land, she didn’t truly treat them like animals or beasts of burden.
However, she also wasn’t the type who would go out and start trying to bang the drums of equality and respect. After all, in any era, if a single person tried to go against the local rules and established thinking there would only be two outcomes: Either they would become a trailblazing pioneer for a new era, or else they would be overwhelmed and buried by the rules they were fighting against.
And Su Tang herself had no desire to become such a trailblazer. Although leaving her name in the history books sounded great in theory, it would certainly come with a lot of pain and struggle for her on a personal level. But she just wanted to be lazy and enjoy life, she had no desire to endure such suffering.
Thus, she had no plans to promote the concept of equality for all in this era. In fact, as a modern person who had rolled around in modern society for a lifetime, her experience told her that even in the modern era of so-called equality, equality never really existed.
To some extent, the word “equality” was just a dreamy and overly idealistic word from the beginning.
However, at the same time, Su Tang had no plans to mistreat people or treat lives like grass, so when she was drawing up the plans for the workshop she included some humane considerations and would naturally use tools instead of pure labor where possible.
The manual meat grinders she had created last time were a good example of this. If she hadn’t created that machine, then it would just mean all the labor of chopping and grinding would have to be done by hand. And, honestly, manually chopping up so many tomatoes and chili peppers seemed really painful just thinking about it.
Thus, Su Tang had added this new machine which she called a “bucket elevator” alongside a considerably upscaled version of her old manual meat grinder, and that was the point causing Luo Xingchen’s confusion.
“Well, what we need to do now is build a much larger version of the old manual meat grinder which will be powered by the river. We’ll connect it to the waterwheel and, when the river turns the waterwheel, the waterwheel will also power our meat grinder.”
“But don’t forget that all of our previous manual meat grinders were very small and could only be used for grinding stuffing for meat buns. Compared to those, this new meat grinder for these tomatoes and chili peppers will be much larger.”
“But just because we’re only going to be using the new meat grinder on tomatoes and chili peppers, we can’t forget the name of the machine: it’s a meat grinder!”
Su Tang patiently explained everything to Luo Xingchen and finished by directly bringing up the name of the machine. They couldn’t forget that most important point. This wasn’t a cheese grater or a funnel or something, this thing was called a meat grinder.
“Just think about it. The river flow here isn’t slow at all, so it will easily be able to power the meat grinder. Now, you say it would be fine for people to climb up and manually put the tomatoes and chili peppers inside but, let me ask you, what do you think the consequences would be if a person were to fall in?”
As Su Tang had begun speaking with a grim tone, Luo Xingchen also seemed to finally understand something. And, as Su Tang went on to mention the powerful river, the oversized funnel that was bigger than a man’s height, and the sharp rotating blade inside…
She completely understood.
If a person were really to fall they would completely just become “meat” in the grinder, not even leaving a whole corpse behind.
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tl begging corner: