House quite big. In it there is a good public dining room, club, at it small library. If in it there is no book necessary to you, can order it by phone in the central city library. At the end of a corridor – bathrooms where at certain one o’clock in the afternoon you can shave.
I have breakfast and went to “administration”. But about this visit allow to write another time.
Be healthy. Your Karl E.”.
Letter the second
“ – You know agronomics? – the foreman when I was to him asked me.
The question surprised me a little.
– I am an electrician.
– I am an electrician too – he answered. – But at us and in electrical equipment an agronomical bias. So to speak, the agroelectrician as there is an agrochemistry. Whether you thought that you will be invited to potter with electric bulbs?
At us and school children cope with it. All electrical wiring lies in new houses on them. We have requirements to electrical equipment the. We demand something bigger from electricity, than lighting of houses and fields. You arrived to the interesting moment when we, using cheap electric energy which the piping gave us, pass to electrification of agriculture. We receive current from big power plant of the island of the Cone. Saw?
I nodded:
– Yes, grandiose construction. But you did not establish wires of high-voltage tension yet?
The foreman grinned and answered:
– You do not hurry to deny existence of what you do not see.
This answer surprised me, but I understood soon. The Soviet scientists invented the insulators allowing to lay under the earth cables for high-voltage transfer on long distances several years ago.
– Underground cables? – I asked.
The foreman in the affirmative nodded.
– It is cheaper – he answered – more economically in agriculture. Though we have lands and much, but we value each span. Elevated conducting would take away the considerable area of fields for installation of towers and would complicate operation of tractors.
– What application will have electricity in your agriculture?
– The most various. Idemte, I will show you our work. It is much made, it is necessary to make even more. – The foreman critically looked at me. – You already the person elderly, and you should study much.
We came to the suburb of the collective-farm town. Where the field road began, there was a big, long one-storey building with many wide doors. Through open doors I saw tractors of type, new to me.
– Electrotractors – the foreman explained. – Latest model. Work at accumulators. The Volga waters which thousands of years in vain spent the energy give it to us now. Our tractors as working horses, are sated with this energy and go on fields.
– And what you will do with the old tractors using fuel?
– And a lot of work will be them. Let’s transfer them to those collective farms which are too far from an electric power source. Electricity will preserve to us much precious fuel. To burn down oil from which it is possible to receive the most valuable chemical products, as a matter of fact – barbarity.
We entered the neighboring building. There were other cars: electric harrows, mowers…
– At us everything will do electricity – with pride he told. – Same spring we will take our fields in electric hand. And so were ahead of us. Somehow in the day off go to the next collective farm Realovsky – it is closer to Volga. Admire that there does electricity. By Idemte now on farmyards, they at us since fall are electrified.
The road he continued to speak:
– We not only process the earth electricity, but also we heat it. Underground electric hot-water bottles are laid. Too late spring and early fall to us will not be more terrible. But there is more to come. We have a field where we ionize the growing cereals, and the result turns out excellent. Here stalls.
The pure, warm, aired rooms lit with electricity. Near each cow – electric milking.
– The hand of the person does not touch neither a cow, nor milk. Electricity milks, processes milk, cleans cows and stalls.
Then we examined incubators. The longest room reminding the factory shop.
Yes so it, as a matter of fact, also is. It is the real factory. Here “semi-finished product” – egg – turns into “the final product of production” – a live chicken. Long black boxes last. Silence. Deficiency. For people electricity works.
– It is not necessary to look after temperature more. It is regulated automatically. Electric hot-water bottles work ideally. Everything is calculated. When term comes, our poultry breeders only here are to take ready chickens and to put new portions of eggs in incubators.
The following room met me by discordant peep. It is “nursery”, брудергауз. Here bring up the hatched baby birds. They are divided on age and are located in boxes with low walls. Over boxes electric lamps and wires, some metal spheres with needles.
– Ionization and influence by ultraviolet rays. Grow by leaps and bounds. Incidence is brought almost to naught.
– Electric chickens – smiling, I say.
– Whether still you will see – the foreman answers. – Our production does not stop all the year round as hens rush also in the winter not less, than in the summer.
– Surprisingly! – I told, with admiration looking at thousands of fluffy zheltenky chickens, cheerfully and busy pottering about in boxes.
– Perhaps, electricity is designed to play the most important role in agriculture? – I told.
The foreman looked at me with some regret – so it seemed to me – small consciousness such supposedly at the person!
– So only the narrow expert of old time can argue – he answered. – We are dialecticians, and we are not escaped by the general communication of the phenomena. Electrical equipment, chemistry, physics, agronomics, botany, biology, bacteriology, meteorology – everything has the price the same as both air, and a sunlight, and water, and mineral fertilizers are important for plants. Everything is equally important. Take away one – and the plant will die in spite of the fact that it will be provided to all rest enough. Here you get acquainted with companion Boyko, the chemist of our experimental agricultural station. Talk to it. He will tell you about agrochemistry so much that, I am sure, the chemistry will seem to you the most important in agriculture. But neither he, nor I so we do not think.
We came back to a garage where I had to get to work and study soon.
– You are free tonight? – the foreman asked me.
– Absolutely.
And so that. You still will manage to go to Realovka. And today you come by eight o’clock to club. I will show you the movie on which all moments of the electrified processing of the earth in one of our best collective farms are photographed. Look.
In the same evening I saw how huge electric plows crashed into the earth and turned off layer behind layer. I saw how behind them as if I infantry after artillery preparation, send “to finish the enemy” other cars which broke earth lumps. The third cars scattered fertilizers, the fourth sowed, exactly, carefully, accurately, the fifth mowed, reaped, connected and brought sheaves of wheat and a linking of hay from the field. No, not hay, and a fresh grass which went to a huge silo where electric current killed bacteria.
Over fields flew airplanes, and a part of sowing was made from airplanes. Other airplanes sprayed a poison for wreckers.
I saw the electric threshers giving pure, full grain. At last, I saw how electricity filled with grain huge elevators.
“Where – I thought – the overstraining horses, the exhausted bulls poured pbty the mowers, women who are unsteady for fatigue, exhausted nursing right there on a field flabby children?. Instead of them – everywhere cars, and near cars and by cars are visible the dexterous, healthy, surely working collective farmers in the blue working overalls splashed by lubricating oil”.
I admit, I did not see a picture of more fascinating. It is deification of power, the equipment, electrification, the organized work triumphing over forces majeure of the nature…
Be healthy. Write. Your Karl Ernst”.
Letter the third
“Dear Lenz!
The foreman was right: when I visited at the agrochemist Boyko, I was ready to prozakladyvat the head that the most important in agriculture is a chemistry.
Met me by Boyko in chemical laboratory of experimental station.
– Came to us to work? – he asked, giving me a hand. It was in the gray dressing gown burned by acids.
At laboratory tables stood in dressing gowns of the young man and girl, they pottered with torches, flasks, glasses, overtook, boiled, cooled…
In the certain room – a sanctuary where chemical gases do not come – under glass boxes there are chemical scales.
– Pay attention: that concussion of the soil did not affect them, scales stand not on tables, and on the shelves attached to walls. There is our last Soviet achievement – with pride told Boyko, lifting a glass box from brand new scales. – Tear off a scrap of a piece of paper and throw on scales.
I made it. Quickly weighed a scrap, removed from scales, stretched to me and told:
– Now write on a scrap a pencil your surname.
I executed also it. Quickly again put a scrap on scales. And that: scales noted an increase in weight from a short pencil inscription.