(Author's Note: I messed up. I've had to delete the old chapters nine and ten, since this one was supposed to be nine, and I'll republish them tomorrow as ten and eleven along with a new chapter twelve. I am so sorry.)
[Cardiff, Wales - 9:12 AM 13/10/1919]
The rain had finally eased by the time they stepped through the warped iron gates.
The factory loomed over the far edge of Roath like the carcass of some dead iron beast, its brick walls blackened by decades of soot and the constant and slightly acidic rain of South Wales. Broken panes lined the upper windows, jagged teeth of glass catching the weak afternoon light.
The factory I had bought at the pretty penny of £3,800 had once been a calcium carbide and acetylene works, one of the heavy electrochemical plants that had sprung up in the later half of the 1800s.
At its heart had been great electric arc furnaces that fused lime and coke into carbide, which was then fed into generator houses where controlled drips of water released acetylene gas in enormous quantities. Much of the original infrastructure still remained: the thick brick furnace hall, copper salt catalyst systems, acid-resistant scrubber towers, gas holders looming over the yard, and the maze of iron mains that once carried the volatile gas across the site.
Even without all that, the building had strong ventilation, explosion-proof separation spaces and rail access for lime, coke, and chlorine chemicals.
Even with part of the roof collapsed, the bones of the place were ideal and built for heat, pressure, corrosive vapours, and, above all, the careful handling of unstable gases…exactly the sort of foundations that would take years to reproduce anywhere else.
In the 1920s, the chemicals produced here would have had a wide range of industrial uses even before my plans. Acetylene was valuable for oxyacetylene welding and metal cutting; this place had supplied the shipyards, rail depots, and heavy engineering shops of the city while also supplying the whole region with compressed gas cylinders used for lamps in mines and rail signals, as well as buoys and even household lighting.
Beyond fuel and illumination, it was one of the era's most important chemical feedstocks, used to make chlorinated solvents for degreasing machine parts, acetone and acetic acid for film and textile production, vinyl compounds for paints and varnishes, and increasingly the experimental intermediates that would lead into plastics in the future.
During the war, a plant like this was seen as ageing and falling behind in efficiency compared to plants in Germany or America but was still immensely valuable because acetylene chemistry was still one of the foundations of modern industry.
I stopped just inside the yard, boots crunching over cinders, leaves and shattered slate, and looked up at the building with unmistakable satisfaction.
Kitty's father followed more slowly, collar turned up against the damp wind. He stared at the structure for a long moment, eyes tracing the vast, ugly hole punched through the roof, where an entire section of truss had collapsed inward. Through it, the grey sky hung like exposed ribs.
At last he let out a slow breath through his nose.
"You sure you didn't get ripped off?"
"For what's still here at the price I got it?" I grinned, stepping forward and gesturing toward the hulking shape of the surviving furnace block, the gas mains still running in thick iron arteries along the walls, and the tall, cylindrical holders rising behind the main works. "The company was a steal."
"The only reason it was this cheap is because the roof came down over one of the furnaces about eight months ago." I pointed toward the fallen girders. "They were being outcompeted by the plant over on Bute that opened during the war and couldn't keep up on price, and you know demand sucks right now. So when this happened." Cue me gesturing at the makeshift skylight, "They didn't have enough money to fix it, and no investor or bank was willing either."
Kitty's father gave a short grunt, still unconvinced.
"Mm."
I ran my hand along one of the old pipes, bits of rust flaking into my palm.
"Besides," I said, voice warming with quiet excitement, "it already has the equipment that'd take the longest to build from scratch. Retorts, gas scrubbers, holders, and most of the compression line. Even the acid brick towers are still standing and look fairly new, probably less than a decade old now I'm looking at them."
That finally made the older man pause.
He looked again now, somewhat comprehending the bones beneath it. The thick foundations, the heavy utility runs, the rail spur disappearing past the rear loading doors. Even if he didn't get exactly how it works.
It turns out Kitty's father is an okay bloke; he just cares about his daughter a lot. And now I had managed to convince him to work for me by doubling his salary. I had someone who could help run the plant who I would reasonably trust.
"Aye," he admitted, "that part's true."
He moved toward the second pair of doors at the other end of the plant; with a push, they opened, and I saw a courtyard with a small warehouse to one side and a small set of offices on the other and then the road before noticing the rows of terraced houses beyond the works.
"Outer parts of Roath, too," he muttered. "Not the best location possible, but at least it wasn't in Llandaff or Gabalfa."
He gave Teddy a sidelong look.
"And it's not like this place'll rely on foot traffic."
Teddy laughed under his breath. "I should hope not."
For a moment the only sound was the soft drip of rainwater through the broken roof and the distant hiss of steam from somewhere in the docks.
Then Kitty's father sighed, long and heavy, the sort of sigh that came from a man who could already see the money vanishing into repairs, wages, and endless shipments of materials.
He folded his arms.
"Are you sure this is worth it?"
I turned and looked across the ruined floor.
Past the fallen beams and puddles, he could already see it as it would become furnaces relit, generators hissing, lines running day and night, and tank cars rolling in and out under clouds of steam and chemical vapour.
A place that made something no one else in Britain yet fully understood.
He nodded once.
"Yes."
No hesitation or smile this time. Just certainty.
"You've been hesitant to tell me what this place is even going to make, but I need to know," he said.
I smiled before chucking him a small piece of dark black rubber. He looked at it uncomprehendingly.
In order for several of my ideas to be feasible, I first needed to drastically improve manufacturing precision and quantity.
I decided the best to start with was synthetic rubber since it would have a market bigger than my own projects. After some debate with myself, I had decided upon neoprene, which was the first commercially viable synthetic rubber invented in 1930 over in the States.
Germany could make "buta" rubber, but it lacked in comparison to natural rubber and was incredibly expensive to make. The only reason it was still a thing was because Germany had desperately needed a source of rubber without access to the massive farms of Brazil, Congo and Indonesia due to a British blockade.
There were better rubbers, but they would take far longer to nail down an industrial process for, so I would work on them once I had better quality machinery and a more experienced workforce. Besides, I didn't want to risk bringing technologies that existed post-WW2 before the war ended. Hell, maybe I can stop it somehow, but I honestly doubt that.
Without the American need to commercialise everything, though, the patent I had filed was called polychloroprene, which was the actual chemical name for it. We'd probably just refer to it as 'chloroprene'.
"That stuff hopefully sells for £400-£500 a tonne, and once we're set up, it should cost half that to make." I said, causing the man to freeze.
The reason I was confident that at least initially we would get that price since natural rubber usually costs about £300 a tonne was that first there was a massive shortage in Europe at the moment, and second, despite natural rubber's better elasticity and workability, it was not uniform and would break down rather quickly in the presence of chemicals. Neoprene also had better temperature stability. All were things necessary for the gaskets, seals, and moulds. Currently the British and French were reliant on German factories for what they could get of the stuff, and I was sure the government would gobble up anything we made, at least in the short term.
And thus, the company Cardiff Rubber was founded.
Over the next few months, I threw myself into perfecting the industrial process.
The chemistry itself was one thing. Making it work reliably at factory scale was another beast entirely.
A great deal of my time went into redesigning steps that, in my old world, were either handled by machines that simply did not yet exist or were done by equipment so primitive in this era that the losses would have ruined the margins before we ever sold a pound of product. That meant drawing up custom condensers, tighter pressure regulators, safer reaction vessels, and a far more efficient gas drying line than anything the original works had ever used.
Several pieces had to be made from scratch by local engineering shops, and more than once I found myself standing over machinists trying to explain why tolerances that looked obsessive on paper would save us days of downtime later.
And fuck you, imperial units, I cuss at ye, you unsightly curr… Whoever came up with this convoluted system, may you go jump on a sharpened lampost.
I could not help thinking how much easier all this would be once I had my own machine works and factories to simply order from.
Arthur, meanwhile, had taken charge of the site itself.
While I wrestled with chemistry and equipment, he had gangs of men clearing the fallen beams, hauling away broken slate, scraping decades of grime from brickwork, and stripping rust from every salvageable line and support. What could be restored was restored. What could not was replaced.
At the same time, he began quietly seeking out some of the old hands who had once worked here.
A carbide and acetylene plant was dangerous work, and men who already understood volatile gas systems, pressure lines, and the discipline such places demanded were worth their weight in silver.
Safety, however, was where I refused to compromise.
One of the major stages in the process relied on chlorine gas, and I had no intention of becoming the sort of industrialist who built his fortune upon accidentally gassing an entire city.
The bitter irony was that the safest masks, seals, gloves, and flexible hose linings all worked best when made from the very synthetic rubber we were trying to produce.
It was a perfect example of why the entire venture mattered.
So before the main production line was even commissioned, I made certain the first successful batches were diverted into bespoke protective gear, valve seals, and chemical-resistant gloves for the men who would actually keep the place running.
By the end of the season, the factory was nearly transformed.
The roof had been rebuilt in steel and slate, stronger than the original, and I had several steam-driven air pumps of the type normally used in mines installed throughout the main works. The old gas-handling halls now had constant forced ventilation, drawing dangerous vapours away from the reaction floors and keeping fresh air moving through every enclosed section.
I wanted my workers to be healthy for as long as possible.
Fortunately, finding good men has not been difficult.
With unemployment as bad as it was, there were plenty willing to work, and Arthur's reputation meant the better sort of labourers were willing to trust us before the first payroll was even issued.
I also brought in several men I had served with in the army, local lads who understood discipline and loyalty better than most.
The fitter ones became site security, watching the gates, the rail spur, and the stores. A few disabled veterans, men no longer suited for heavy labour but still sharp of mind, were given clerical and administrative roles where literacy mattered more than muscle.
It was good work.
Honest work.
And for the first time since buying the ruin, the place no longer looked like a dead factory.