Seeing me cut one of their best anvils with an entirely normal sword I had made myself under their watchful eyes – notwithstanding the natural way the Arcane crystallized in masterworks – was a very eye-opening experience for the dwarves Kurdran rounded up for me. With that feat to endear me to them – and prove that I knew what I was talking about – I was free to present the technological uplift package I’d put together on the trip over.

  Unlike the humans back home, whose development path was just ripe to replicate the industrial revolution of my old planet, the dwarves had an entirely different focus, not the least because of their subterranean way of life. Chiefly, most of the rivers within easy reach were of lava instead of water. Also, they’d fairly well developed their main settlements already, and tunnels dug in natural granite weren’t the sort of thing you could just demolish to put something else in place.

  With the added issue of the trolls making any dams on the surface problematic, I was fine letting Alterac pioneer electrical engineering and let it spread naturally from there, over time.

  No, what the dwarves were really into, and would allow me to solve their biggest problem, was mechanical engineering. I had no doubt this would move to include advanced thermodynamics once the gnomes’ expertise filtered up through the dwarves of Khaz Modan, so I didn’t focus on that either. The dwarves would surely discover geothermal electricity on their own once the Alterac advancements filtered out, assuming the gnomes didn’t already have it. Right now, though, it wasn’t something I was willing to introduce before they had means to make replacement parts reliably.

  Instead, I decided to remove the bottleneck on the things most essential to dwarven industry and architecture: gears.

  And all manner of other components of course, but mostly gears.

  Currently, the dwarves used individual artisanship painstakingly gained over many years of diligent repetitive practice to make all their various mechanisms and parts. Even so, their buildings and facilities still fell short of the things they’d done in Grim Batol, never mind the Great Forge in Ironforge with its massive ever-spinning gears that forever controlled the massive lava waterfall at the heart of the city.

  To say nothing of what it must have taken to craft the springs and other parts driving the things.

  I was fortunate here because my teachers in my last life had very deliberately used clockwork, and general applied mechanics and thermodynamics, as a way to demonstrate and explore material science applications. They did teach us all about electrical physics and chemistry applications too of course, but those fields tended to take on a life of their own that distracted too much from ours after a point. We did a lot of mechanical and architectural engineering instead, both in theory and practice.

  One thing I kept from it was that clockwork was a path to many wonders, but mass production took a fair few hurdles to overcome. Most important of those was being able to do consistent measurements, which relied on micrometer-level precision. For that, at the very least you needed good gage blocks. And to apply those consistently, you needed a practical metal lathe, and the creation of a practical milling machine.

  Even if you figured out all of those through trial and error, you could still miss the possibilities inherent in all those powder byproducts, like tungsten carbide tool tips. Case in point, the sum total of the dwarves’ powdered metallurgy knowledge was apprentice jewelers using metal powders to make cheap practice baubles.

  Fortunately, the dwarves did know well enough about using cobalt to harden alloys, so when I introduced them to the wonders of tungsten carbide power, they were quite appropriately in awe. It wasn’t every day that you discovered a metal with a melting point of 3,422°C.

  The biggest sticking point was that I had to give them the means to do all this stuff without relying on Light divination for precision.

  This was something I considered very important, due to what I called ‘art direction and common sense segregation.’ Which is to say, while the rickety, constantly shaking planes and gyrocopters of the future were amusingly quirky from the other side of a computer screen, I dreaded the idea of anyone actually flying those hand-fitted deathtraps. No vehicle whose wheels were off-center was safe to hop into, never mind a flying craft with off-center or outright bent propeller axles. Don’t even get me started on the hulls.

  They didn’t even have screws, everything was bolted together! By hand! It was madness!

  That dreadful future could not come to pass.

  So what I did was import the Whitworth method wholesale, which essentially consisted of rubbing three flat rocks together in A/B:A/C:B/C sequence, and so on until they became perfectly flat surfaces. That is to say, within tens of thousandths of a centimeter perfect. All without any other measuring tools.

  How this worked was simple physics: rubbing two flat rocks together eventually got you two smooth surfaces, one of which will be concave and the other a perfectly matching convex. What the father of modern Terran metrology figured out was that adding a third surface made it so the only surface that could match all three curvatures (no matter the combination) was perfect flatness. Or near enough to perfect that the difference didn’t matter.

  With this three-part stone block to use as a reference plane, I had essentially added three more zeroes to the measurement precision of Azeroth. The significance of this was not lost on the dwarves. Hopefully it wouldn’t be lost on the folk back home in Alterac either, but at this point it was up to them to make the best of the written primers I’d left behind.

  I then used this reference plane to apply this method to three stone blocks this time. I didn’t get right angles immediately, but I did get flat surfaces, which allowed me to place two of them on the reference plane and rub the uneven sides together too. I still didn’t get right angles, but the blocks did become coplanar, with the sum of their angles equaling 180 degrees. That was when I added the third block, which finally led to perfectly right angles for all of them, because no other angles could be perfectly complimentary at that point.

  After I applied the procedure to all sides of the blocks, I had three that were perfectly square.

  This, finally, gave me two reference planes that could be used perfectly parallel to each other, which let me compare the length and width of any two objects within a few tens of thousands of a centimeter. Just as importantly, I could measure the roundness of objects in the same manner, by measuring their width or thickness at different rotations, and seeing if the width ‘changed’ as they rotated or not.

  Most critically, having two reliable reference planes allowed me to create a standard unit of length that could be accurately measured and replicated.

  With the metric system now introduced to Azeroth, I used it to create the first set of consistently accurate rulers, calipers, gage blocks, and every other straight-edged utensil I and the dwarves could think of.

  Just like that, I’d given the people of Azeroth the ability to reliably and accurately use the same unit of measurement. With this, it became possible not only to make accurately dimensioned parts, but also interchangeable parts.

  Just like that, I and my now very enthusiastic helpers had gone and unlocked mass production.

  I could have stopped there and everyone would have sung my praises. Now that it was possible to make accurately dimensioned parts for literally anything, artisans could hand fit the parts to the reference parts forever, and every part would turn out hand fitted to the same reference, making all parts replaceable.

  With all due respect to the respectable Eli Whitney, though, I wanted to go further. For one, even with the exhaustive testing by the dwarf masters, it had only been a week. For another, bonding was a mutual activity even when not dealing with what might just be the most endearing creatures on the planet.

  Truth be told, a month was a lot more than I needed. I’d already given enough that the Wildhammer dwarves were honor-bound to become our eternal allies, and everyone knew it. The extra time was more to avoid hasty mistakes, and more importantly to give us time to bond with our stout little hosts until they couldn’t bear to let us go alone into danger.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Much less for their sake.

  They were endearingly earnest like that. I regretted not coming here sooner more and more every day.

  They were surprisingly humble too. I’d thought they’d harbor feelings of superiority to mankind, the scope of their architectural achievements would have justified it all on its own. I’d braced myself to fight through the most obstinate resistance to new ideas, never mind human ones.

  I faced none of that. If anything, the dwarves did their best to hide an inferiority complex. Not just from being so much smaller than elves and humans, but also being so much younger as a civilization. Humans had been around for over fifteen thousand years at this point, and our great Empire was established almost three thousand years ago. It had also never fallen, instead allowing its component nations to peacefully outgrow it. Lordaeron alone was twice as big as the Empire of Arathor at its height, and Stormwind was even bigger than that.

  Technically our history went back much further, if you didn’t distinguish between us and our vrykul ancestors, but that didn’t count anymore than the Earthen did for the dwarves. We had both undergone species-wide amnesia, in that way.

  Elvish history, of course, stretched back much longer.

  Comparatively, the dwarves only woke up three hundred years into the Arathi Empire’s zenith, and they’d had to play catch-up ever since. They’d definitely gotten a leg up on everyone else by now, when it came to digging and building, but that inbuilt talent didn’t end up transferring into much else. Except gunpowder maybe, but how much of that was owed to the gnomes was unclear.

  In the end, though some of the reverence Blindi got definitely transferred to me too, it wasn’t enough to explain how I wasn’t faced with any skepticism or resentment, when I dared claim I had things to teach even the dwarves’ best master craftsmen.

  For that alone I would have done the best I could by them, even if I hadn’t decided to do so already.

  To make a long story slightly less long, I used the rest of my month to get the dwarves to the point where they could machine parts to the desired dimensions directly. For this, I drew on another great pioneer from Earth, one John Hall. The dwarves already had the lathe well mastered, and one enterprising master had even broken off from the rest of the group to make a new one fitted to the new precision standards. This let us work together to introduce the keystone to all modern crafting: the almighty milling machine.

  Our first working prototype was a spinning cutter that could drill holes and cut sideways into a work piece, as well as use a flat cutter to cut top surfaces flat. The machine had a clamp to hold the work fixed, while three screws – one each for the x, y and z axes – moved the work relative to the cutter. Again, the main gain from this was superlative precision compared to manual work.

  Our second try was a work table that could be angled along a number of different axes to cut at angles, and was also capable of being rotated around a point, which also rotated the item around that point while the cutter remained fixed. This allowed for curved surfaces to be cut into the item too.

  By making various jigs to move the work against the cutter, we were then able to rapidly produce clockwork gears one after another. We still didn’t achieve perfect precision, certainly not consistently. The resulting parts weren’t perfect because the machines weren’t perfect, that was what happened with prototypes. But the cutting speed was incomparable. Also, once you had the part, you could just use a file in a jig to hand finish the parts to the final dimensions.

  I didn’t need to explain how much more and faster work could be done by having multiple milling machines with jigs in a line. I didn’t need to explain the assembly line concept either, the masters immediately began to speculate on the benefits of machines dedicated to specific tasks. After one machine did an operation with its jig, the work could be passed to the next where the next milling step was done, while the first could begin the same work on the next part immediately.

  There were still ways to go even further, but that required numerical control machines which were only invented in the twentieth century on Earth, and were beyond my specialty even if we could somehow skip on decades of engineering breakthroughs I didn’t know enough about.

  The gnomes would have to figure that part out, when the time came. They’d probably do it faster and easier than on Earth, if not because of their inborn affinity then due to the enchantment and magically durable metal alloys on this planet. The way the Arcane treated craft work like rituals had already made these first prototypes superior to what the humans of Earth had had to settle for at the same stage of development, even with identical design and materials.

  I’d more than done my part laying the second half of the foundation for the industrial revolution, to go with the first half back home. We’d done everything necessary to not only make the first machine tools, but also get around the substandard precision of said early machine tools.

  Needless to say, the dwarves were very happy to have a means to make endless amounts of perfectly identical shafts, wheels, pulleys and everything else they could think of. They were doubly impressed when I used it to demonstrate certain bronze alloys that self-lubricate, which allowed me to make precise shafts and bearings for all machine tools they could ever come up with in the future. I made particular spectacle out of the etching of the first screw, the utility of which was likewise grasped immediately. Many facepalms were had when a beardling doing food delivery commented on how it worked the same as fruit pressers.

  There was chagrin in their eyes too, by the time the third week drew to a close. Enough, almost, to overpower all their happiness and wonder combined. They may not have been designed to hold grudges for eternity like other dwarfs I knew of, but they certainly felt debts just as keenly. I hadn’t done their feelings of inadequacy any favors, but I let it pass without comment and roped them into a slew of test projects instead.

  Conveniently, jigs could be used with their existing lathes the same way as milling machines, by moving the cutter on the lathe with a jig to perform repeated lathe operations on a part. So they already had everything needed to jury-rig equipment capable of performing milling and lathing steps immediately one after the other on a given item. With the reference planes and measuring tools I’d given them, they would be able to quickly set up effective quality control too.

  To inaugurate our grand success, I became the first customer of the all-new dwarven machinists’ guild and ordered some very specific and incomprehensible items the dwarves completely lacked the frame of reference to ever guess the purpose of.

  And while they were doing that – and were forced to realize they would be much longer and complicated work than anything we’d played with so far – I went and put together proof of something they had completely overlooked from the very first day of our partnership.

  “Wonder Maker, you’ve done more than enough for us already,” the designated spokesman of the craft masters told me with uncomfortably honest self-deprecation when I asked for one last meeting in the craftsmans’ hall. “We’re already arguing over who gets to first name their child after you, don’t even get me started on the plans for your monument, the first statue is already going up.” That was news to me. “The sun will wink out and the world will tun to dust before we repay everything you’ve done for us, what more could you possibly think we’re worth?”

  Learning about their Earthen past hadn’t been all good in the end, now the dwarves felt inferior to their ancestors too. That I, a human, was the one who had to ‘correct’ their ‘deficiency’ only compounded that further. I was this close to start soulgazing the lot of them to show them just how thoroughly their feelings differed from mine, but that would just be adding trauma on top of everything, given my history using it.

  Paradoxically, the one who helped the least during the past month had been Blindi. He’d dropped by on and off to ‘advise’ but only ended up going on completely random tangents every time. The one about how he used a mixture of cobalt and tungsten carbide to give Tyr claws that one time had been particularly out of left field. It should have been a decent way to distract the dwarves, at least from their self-flagellation. But the opposite always happened instead, so he eventually stopped coming. Which only made the dwarves feel like even bigger failures, if their divine creator couldn’t stand to be in the same room with even their best and brightest.

  I don’t know what would’ve happened if I didn’t have so many things to keep them busy with.

  It was good that I had Aedelas constantly shadowing me, at least when I didn’t have him running errands. That way I’d had him to teach and explain everything I was doing, instead of making these dwarves feel even more inadequate by having to talk down just to them. Literally.

  Having a fallback option that would eventually go back to Alterac was good too. Backup skills were only matched in importance by backup plans for the future.

  That said, a backup plan was only a backup plan if it wasn’t the main plan.

  Taking the lid off the mould I’d brought with me, I drew what I hoped would be the keystone to that main plan. An ingot of the same material I’d used to make the proof-of-concept sword, and deposited it on the table.

  The blacksmiths stepped to the front of the group, bent over to peer at the ingot, and slowly turned from curious to shocked disbelief. Soon, they were passing the ingot from hand to hand, weighing it, hammering it, holding it over fire, and any number of other tests. All the while, they threw me increasingly furtive glances that were more awestruck and dreading than any other time during that whole month.

  I carefully didn’t display my relief at finally confirming long-held assumptions. “It’s not the sort of thing you can rework after the first casting, so you’ll have to skip past the ingot stage straight to the item you want. I don’t know how the Dark Iron Dwarves can rework ingots, if that’s really what they do, but I suspect Ragnaros the Firelord has a hand in it.” If you want slaves, it only makes sense to make them dependent on you. “On the bright side, you also aren’t locked into using only fire enchantments.”

  The dwarves looked at me with the open-mouthed amazement of a people who just realized they held in their hands something there would almost certainly be war over, if they ever let the knowledge leak.

  I’d had the suspicion since the first time I showed it to the Wheel members back home, but now I finally had categorical confirmation.

  Mangalloy was, after all, the vaunted Dark Iron ore of Mount Blackrock.

  I graciously took my leave, sent Aedelas off to train with the knights for a while, and found my way up to the surface to bask in the morning.

  There was nothing like the smell of a broken monopoly to sweeten the dawn’s air.