"So this is why the Europeans can make so much steel…"
He began studying the blueprints piece by piece, his brow slowly tightening in confusion. At one point, he pointed to a complex arrangement of water-powered bellows meant to force air into the furnace and started murmuring to himself.
"These papers say we must drive the wind into the fire using these heavy machines. But the wind from a machine is cold. My people—the children of Ogun—know that fire must be fed with breath that has already tasted heat. If we blow cold air directly onto the iron, as these lines suggest, the metal will shiver and become brittle like dry bone."
He had instinctively identified what the Göttingen design lacked: preheating.While the European plans relied on sheer mechanical force, Ogundele's tradition understood that the temperature of the blast mattered as much as its strength.
