The management of Hangzhou Machinery Company did not hesitate to completely stop the original steam tractor production line and prepare to install the gas engine on the tractor and prepare to launch the gas tractor.
The application fields of various types of machinery with gas generators as the core are still very wide. Not only the demand in industrial production is huge, but also there is very large market potential in the private sector.
This is similar to various types of machinery with steam engines as the core.
For example, steam tractors have only been around for a few years, but they are developing rapidly and are very useful for transporting goods in special circumstances. For example, many lumberyards have steam tractors for transporting logs.
Gas tractors can also do similar things and do them better.
Hangzhou Machinery Company is not willing to be just an upstream supplier of gas engines. They also want to rely on gas engines to develop various high value-added products, such as gas tractors and even gas carriages!
Hangzhou Machinery Company was also inspired by the Navy's chariots. Although the design of the Navy's gas chariots was unreliable, the Navy directly installed the gas machine on the carriage. This idea is quite good.
Therefore, Hangzhou Machinery Company non-stop introduced the concept of gas carriage and produced samples.
This sample is actually pretty good, and it’s very fun to run on the road!
But when they officially launched the new product of gas carriages, they encountered a disaster. They didn't sell any of them, and instead they were ridiculed and went crazy.
Your company is so crazy about making money that you even put a bomb on a carriage and buy it to people.
To put it bluntly, this gas carriage is a carriage plus a gas machine, plus a large bottle of gas tank.
There is no need to repeat too much about how dangerous this gas tank is.
Moreover, gas carriages were not cheap either. One cost several thousand Tang Yuan, and those who could afford it were the rich and powerful.
But no powerful person is willing to travel on a gas tank!
If you talk about the powerful, ordinary middle class people are not willing to do it either.
Too long to live!
I haven’t seen that most of the people who order gas machines are enterprises. When enterprises order gas machines for industrial production, they don’t need to carry a gas tank. They directly use pipelines to supply gas.
Not all new products will be accepted by people.
Compared with traditional carriages, gas carriages have no advantages and are even more dangerous, which is destined to fail to sell.
Not to mention launching it on the market, when the Hangzhou prefecture found out later, they directly refused the quality inspection of their gas carriages and even ordered them to ban their production of this thing.
The Hangzhou Machinery Company actually used such a dangerous thing as an ordinary carriage for takeout. The Hangzhou Machinery Company is crazy, but the government is not crazy yet.
If the gas carriage leaks and explodes during a riot, what's the difference between this and throwing a super bomb directly on the street?
This incident also caused the Hangzhou Machinery Company to reflect deeply, and finally set their sights on Jinling!
Their company's chief engineer, Qian Mu, is leading a team to work with Lin Hui's internal combustion engine research team to research gasoline engines.
If you must launch an internal combustion engine vehicle that is practical and acceptable to the market, then the gasoline engine is the best choice.
It's a pity that it won't be known how many years it will take for gasoline engines to become practical.
Despite the failure in the gas carriage, Hangzhou Machinery Company still received a steady stream of orders for its gas machines, and the delivery time of many orders was even postponed to the year after next.
At the same time, it also caused a great response from the market and the public.
Even though the gas engine still has various flaws, it is still the second practical power structure after the steam engine, and the first internal combustion engine.
The future is promising!
Many companies also want to develop internal combustion engines such as gas engines or gasoline engines, but it is not easy to do so for a while. At least they cannot use four-stroke structures, nor can they use technical structures such as carburetors.
The patents for these things are all in the hands of Hangzhou Machinery Company. It is not easy to obtain patents for these technologies.
Industry and commerce were very excited about the emergence of gas engines, but to the upper echelons of the empire, the emergence of gas engines was just like that. At most, it only had a relatively large symbolic meaning.
But the practical applications are still limited. At least in the field of industrial manufacturing, gas engines still cannot replace the role of steam engines, let alone in the field of transportation.
For now, the role of the steam engine cannot be replaced, not even in the next ten or twenty years, and even after the emergence of gasoline engines, diesel engines, etc., it still cannot be completely replaced.
Because ships need it, trains need it, and countless factories need it even more.
In terms of power, the upper echelons of the empire and the industrial world still focused most on the research and development of steam engines.
Among the major mechanical laboratories at the Royal Institute of Technology, the Steam Engine Laboratory is still the largest and has the largest concentration of elite talents.
Steam engines have continued to develop at a rapid pace, from the beginning to non-existence, then to the field of transportation, and now to almost every field. Datang now has countless steam engines.
Its power ranges from one horse to tens of thousands of horses, that's all.
In the Tang Empire, there are currently more than a dozen manufacturers that have licensed steam engine patents.
But this only counts manufacturers that have steam engine patent licenses and produce steam engines for sale.
If we only discuss the ability to produce steam engines, then this number is impossible to calculate!
Because for the contemporary Datang industry, the production of steam engines is actually no longer a problem. Even in many family-style mechanical workshops, people can directly purchase many parts and components and then assemble a steam engine.
For powerful machinery companies, they can produce their own steam engines for use, and the performance is pretty good, but of course the cost is relatively high.
However, they cannot do this because they do not have a patent authorization and are not allowed to produce their own steam engines for production and business activities.
The patent of the steam engine is owned by the Royal Institute of Technology. Due to the strong requirements of the Import and Export Committee, the Royal Institute of Technology has adopted strict management of the patent authorization of the steam engine.
Over the years, only a dozen manufacturers have obtained patent authorization, all of which are large enterprises that have undergone strict review.
Of course, patent authorization is one thing, but how to make it and whether it is good or not is another matter.
Even though more than a dozen manufacturers in the Empire have steam engine patent licenses and can produce steam engines, in fact, most of the Empire's steam engine market share is monopolized by the top three steam engine manufacturers.
Among them, the number one company is privately owned Tianjin AIA Company.