"Yeah! ...I hadn't actually realized how recent steels plows were, I thought - we've been able to make steel for way longer than that - but I guess it was too expensive for every farmer to have a steel plow until we could make it industrially." 

The next page is about zippers! Zippers are apparently really cool. The slider that moves the zipper up or down uses wedges to apply enough force to push the zipper teeth together or force them apart, without it feeling too difficult. For this, Evelyn can actually just go grab one of her jackets with a metal zipper from the closet, so they can look at it up close! 

Plows seem a lot more important than zippers, she is more interested in the plows. "Steel plows good because longer to wear out, or good because the plants grow better?"

"My guess would be mostly that steel is stronger than wood and won't break if the soil is super hard, which I guess is longer to wear out? I don't know, maybe they also work better at breaking up the soil and stuff. We can Google that if you want." 

"I want - how steel is made not cost very much, and what things it is better for."

"The book might talk about steel production later?" Time for a quick glance at the table of contents. "...Uh, I guess not, or at least I don't see what chapter it would be in. Want to go look up on the computer what made it so steel is cheaper to make now? - I think metal is better than wood for a lot of things, because it's strong and doesn't rot. Even boats are usually made of metal now." 

"Metal is better yes, but only if you knowing how to make it not cost a lot. I do want to look that up." Really she actually wants to go back to the Bible but she's not going to bring it up when she's been told to drop it.

(Evelyn is perhaps slightly hoping that Iomedae will learn to read in English shockingly fast and be able to read herself the Bible, at which point Evelyn will still have to answer her questions but it won't be nearly as agonizing. Maybe she can call or email someone from church and ask if they have a Bible class, or at least someone who might want to spend time with Iomedae and answer her questions?) 

She heads over to the computer to Google "why is industrial steel production cheaper." Clicks around a bit, ends up on the Wikipedia page for the Bessemer process.

"Huh! So it sounds like the main difference between iron and steel is that steel is more pure, and has a different amount of carbon - that's a different element, I think coal and soot that's left over after you burn wood are both mostly carbon - and so you need to heat the metal enough to melt it and then somehow get rid of the impurities. It sounds like about a hundred and fifty years ago, we could make steel but it was really expensive to make a lot of steel, so it was used in, like, cutlery for eating, but not really big things. ...They wanted to be able to make enough steel to use it for guns, because there was a war going on. So this scientist, Bessemer, figured out a way to melt the iron in a big crucible - a sort of pot, made of stuff that wouldn't melt at that temperature - and blow air through it, and the air would oxidize the impurities and they'd either blow away as gases or turn solid, and eventually the molten metal left would be pure. And then you'd have to add back in some carbon. ...Uh, this article is really complicated, I might want to find one that doesn't assume I know a ton of science already. But it sounds like the Bessemer process was the first time you could make a lot of steel at once, and making a lot of anything at once is usually cheaper. And then I'm assuming there were lots more discoveries over the last hundred and fifty years, and probably we also got better at mining and smelting the ore - the rock that has iron in it - to make the iron that gets turned into steel." 

"Is there a TV of making steel that shows all the parts of doing it?"

"Probably! That's a good idea." Evelyn opens a new Internet Explorer window and pulls up Youtube. "Hmm. ...Okay let's try this one, I guess. Did you want to watch it now? It'll be like seven minutes." 

" - that is not many minutes, I thinked it would take all day."

"Oh, I'm assuming they don't just park a camera at the steel plant and show the entire thing, I bet a lot of it is boring and the same thing happening for hours. I think it'll be clips of the important parts, and seven minutes is just how long it takes to explain the steps?" 

"That is good, then. I want to make steel."

Evelyn sort of doubts a youtube video is going to cover everything you need to know to make your own steel, that's - a lot of stuff, she's pretty sure, some of which is tangential to the actual steel part and requires having centuries' worth of other infrastructure. But hopefully it'll be fun anyway. They can watch it and see. 

It's - sort of interesting? The narrator is talking much too fast for her to follow, and there's no explanation of why they do anything, just what they get out of each step. Maybe it'd still be enough, if she were clever. 

"I think I do not understand enough to make steel," she says at the end of it. 

"Yeah, making steel is really complicated! I don't know most of it and I think you'd want, like, an actual textbook - we could ask the librarian about that once you know how to read better? Anyway, I think the important part, for why it's cheaper and we can use it for more things, is that factories can make a lot of steel at once and it doesn't need as many people working on it." 

Iomedae isn't sure if that's the important part. It seems a bit like saying the important part about Azlant was that they had cheap magic items. But knowing this is knowing almost nothing; to build Azlant again you need to know how to make magic items cheaply. 

It is useful for understanding Azlant and understanding America that everything is cheap. But Iomedae knew that already, and the thing she is itching to know at this point is why. 

She doesn't try to explain this. "That is good," she says instead.

It's nearly time for lunch, but they have time for some of the next book chapter next? It's about levers. There are more silly mammoth illustrations and stories to go along with it. 

Iomedae is going to stay mostly quiet. She can probably pick up these things, if she needs to; not being smart doesn't mean you can't learn most things, just that it will take you longer. But Alfirin will get it faster, or be more usefully confused if it's confusing, and given that Americans are wrong about so many things it seems like an actively unhealthy motion striving to believe the things in the books without enough discernment to notice if they're wrong. 

(She still doesn't ask about the holy book, but her eyes dart longingly over there a few times.)

...Huh.

"Do you have boards? I want to see 'levers' in the world and not only art."

Sure! Evelyn will go have a poke around for some thing they can use to play with levers.

She has a yardstick? And they'll want something for a fulcrum, hmm, she can dig in the blocks toybox and find a sturdy triangular block. They maybe want the rest of the blocks too, to use as weights on either end of their lever. 

"This stick even has numbers on!"

"It does! It's for measuring how big things are. But we could use that to try putting the fulcrum in different places so the other end of the lever is longer or shorter."

She sets up the lever on the table and tests it out with the blocks in different positions until she's convinced herself.

"Levers works like the book sayed."

"Can I try?"

"Of course!"