Who makes the spheres?

[Swimmingly he/him]

Spheres are ubiquitous there aren't Aimian, Kharbranthian, and Alethian spheres - there are just spheres. Nowhere are they shaped differently, and it's implied that the same value system is used across all of them. In addition, despite being made of glass, we have yet to see one shatter from mundane causes. Who manufactures/manufatured them? Were they originally just "batteries" for surgebinders?

[Natans he/him]

Make sense that they are "originally batteries for surgebinders" and with time they lost this utility and begin to be "only" the curency.

 

But I think that in a planet that is possible create any metal(soulcasters I'm lookking at you), gold and silver coins aren't the best way to run a monetary system (this metals just have value because of their rarity).

 

In roshar, apparently, there are much more gems that in earth and gems can't be soulcasted so kind make sense use them as curency =)

Edited November 21, 2013 by Natans

[Swimmingly he/him]

But how are they made? I suppose shoving bits of gem into spheres of some cheap material then soulcasting them would work, but there should still be facilities for making them somewhere. At the least, a spheremakers guild/union/city/etc. would be a major political power.

[Windrunner he/him]

You could probably just Soulcast the air around them into glass.

[Swimmingly he/him]

I forgot you could Soulcast air... Though they are slightly flattened at the bottom, even though it seems to me soulcaster fabrials tend to produce very spherical and undetailed shapes.

[bartbug he/him]

Someone should ask brandon tonight at the magic draft.

(Please, please, someone go. Please.)

[Arook he/him]

Ya has to be soul cast I can't see teams of glass blowers following the war around. Not to mention what heat could do to the gems

[Natans he/him]

Ya has to be soul cast I can't see teams of glass blowers following the war around. Not to mention what heat could do to the gems

 

I think that Kaladin mention that glass aren't expansive but aren't cheap either, so it's is possible that there are glass blowers in the camps, after all that place is almost like a city already =)

[Shardlet he/him]

They wouldn't necessarily need glass blowers per se, and also glass has a relatively low melting temp.  Add to that, the gem would be inside the glass which would prevent any substantial oxidation of any gem impurities.  The gems would only need to be at elevated temperatures for a short time to be encapsulated.

[Gloom he/him]

Nothing saying they have to manufacture spheres at the war camps. They can always ship fragments back to Alethkar for cutting and sealing. Travel to and from the warcamps seems to be a fairly regular occurrence.

 

I think it's unlikely that the glass is soulcast. Why risk a valuable gem to encapsulate what is basically a waste gem?

 

I'm sure that the manufacture is highly regulated and most likley requires representatives from foreign governments to be located on site of the manufactures to ensure quality control and adherence to standards.

[Arook he/him]

Nothing saying they have to manufacture spheres at the war camps. They can always ship fragments back to Alethkar for cutting and sealing. Travel to and from the warcamps seems to be a fairly regular occurrence.

 

I think it's unlikely that the glass is soulcast. Why risk a valuable gem to encapsulate what is basically a waste gem?

 

I'm sure that the manufacture is highly regulated and most likley requires representatives from foreign governments to be located on site of the manufactures to ensure quality control and adherence to standards.

True they could ship them back to have them recast. but that would mean exposing the large number of gems to theft. easier for the king to have them cut and recast via soulcasting then constantly risk shipping them back and forth to be cast.

 

As for soul casting I would say that the small amount of glass my not break any gems, nor is any gem a waste gem most of the gem's value is retained when it fractures it just become less useful for shard plate and soul casting, for common things it only looses a little value.

 

One other thing is sand would not be easy to come by, even beaches would be wiped clean by the storms, finding the quantity need for all the spheres would be trouble some. Also the introduction to the book on the web site explicitly states that there is no sand on the ground. 

 

As for highly regulated I don't think so its not like printing paper money or even making gold coins. If it holds storm light then it has value according to its size.  A counter fit would be apparent simply by trying to infuse the spheres. Also having the king's soulcasters make the spheres would provide any over site needed. When Dalinar talks about it he refers to his own gem cutters who would know the standards as well.

Edited November 22, 2013 by Arook

[name_here]

Spheres are ubiquitous there aren't Aimian, Kharbranthian, and Alethian spheres - there are just spheres. Nowhere are they shaped differently, and it's implied that the same value system is used across all of them. In addition, despite being made of glass, we have yet to see one shatter from mundane causes. Who manufactures/manufatured them? Were they originally just "batteries" for surgebinders?

 

But how are they made? I suppose shoving bits of gem into spheres of some cheap material then soulcasting them would work, but there should still be facilities for making them somewhere. At the least, a spheremakers guild/union/city/etc. would be a major political power.

 

I think the implication of the standardization is exactly the opposite. Roshar just doesn't seem to be politically coherent enough to have an international monetary union. And it's kinda big relative to transportation technology to have a centralized anything, although spanreeds make it potentially possible to have local branches of an organization coordinate. So the fact that spheres are basically interchangable implies that no one has much control over the currency.

 

Historically, many currencies were weights of precious metals and more-or-less identical between multiple governments except for the faces on the coins. On Roshar, each denomination of sphere contains a gem of a certain type and size, and everyone mostly agrees on how much that gem is worth. As long as the gem is real, and if it is holding Stormlight then it is, no one really cares who issued it. The value is from the material, where modern currencies generally derive their value from the issuing government declaring it has value.

 

There's a number of possibilities for who actually makes them, and it probably varies by kingdom.

1. There's a Royal Mint, and only it has the authority to make new spheres. I would guess that in the areas we've seen so far, the kings wish it worked this way but have not successfully made it so.
2. Every noble of a certain rank can issue their own, possibly with some limitations. Alethkar and Jah Keved probably have it under the control of the Highprinces.
3. Anyone who has the resources can make their own, and the moneylenders and banks generally do.

 

As for why it's standardized, everyone probably agrees with the underlying assumptions about value that lead to the selection of sizes and ordering of gem types. It may also be a remnant from pre-Recreance, when there was enough unity to agree to a single standard to simplify trade. Probably no one has successfully imposed their own currency system, although having a unique system makes controlling the money supply easier. In light of Roshar's generally feudal governments, the kings probably don't have the power to force through that kind of major change, and the Highprinces would be rather wary of any attempt to centralize power.

 

Oh, I also doubt they're made by Soulcasting; from what I can tell it's a bit expensive. The war effort uses it extensively, but wars are always expensive and in this particular case they have ready access to lots and lots of Gemhearts. Probably they pour molten glass into molds and stick a gem in the center.

Edited November 22, 2013 by name_here

[Swimmingly he/him]

On impurities, it's possible that gems on Roshar have more a more stable chemical makeup than ours; they may not even be remotely similar to Earth gemstones and are called what they are more as meaning "precious crystal colloquially known to have this colour" than as "a specific crystal configuration that exists through a range of colours, or sometimes doesn't, and can be either'

[Gloom he/him]

Sand is not a thing on Roshar in many places as brought up by name_here. So it either has to be imported, or silica has to be mined. Now beaches will have sand, regardless of the ferocity of highstorms. Not all beaches mind you, Roshar likely has a large number of rocky beaches, but sand will accumulate on beaches in some parts of Roshar. Sandy deserts on the other hand would be very rare. This would eliminate the possibility of people generally making their own spheres unless they reuse broken glass.

 

Glass can be made far more durable than what we see in general usage today. Most glass objects today are made fragile. Not so long ago, a lot of commonly used glass containers were much thicker and capable of surviving being casually mishandled or dropped. We know that glass isn't exactly common place. Kaladin had to have Sylphrena search the war camp to find the bottles he used to store his sap, and even she could only find broken bottles with which to do so. This leads me to believe that finished glass objects are reused fairly frequently.

 

The point is, that while I suppose that anyone capable of working with glass could create spheres, there are a limited number of people working glass do to the scarcity of raw materials. This would lend itself to becoming a trade commonly controlled by the nobility because they have the resources to acquire the raw materials necessary.

 

If soulcasting is actually used, I find it far more probable that they are soulcasting rocks into silica and melting it down into glass to make the spheres, rather than transforming air into glass to surround each chip. It would require less energy to transform one type of dense matter into another than it would to transform air into a type of dense matter.

[Shardlet he/him]

Silica is very common (at least on earth) in more places than just sandy beaches.  I suspect they have many Quartzitic rocks to choose from.  The fact that broken bottles are discarded rather than remelted suggests to me that glass is not crazy scarce.

 

As to soulcasting.  I think it might be simpler to pack the gem piece into a small ball of crem or whatever, shape it properly, and then soulcast it.  Skip a step as it were.  Also saves on fuel and furnace expenses.

[Scriptorian he/him]

I kind of liked the idea that the spheres are soulcast, but I remember that Kaladin specifically noted that a certain sphere had air bubbles in it, and from what we've seen with soulcasting (at least my interpretation) it doesn't seem likely that some of the air was just left out of the transformation.

 

On a side note, I think spheres as currency is a really cool idea, because it's all based on the gems soulcasting properties. The value of a gem is based on both its size and usefulness in soulcasting, creating a natural currency stabilizer, since I assume it takes a relatively set amount of stormlight to soulcast so much matter. A person can say "I know a gem is worth x much, because it can potentialy create y amount of bread". While there would be some fluctuation for commodities not able to be soulcast, the economy is set on something even more concrete than a gold-standard.

[EmagSamurai]

Maybe crem has a high enough silica content to be used for making glass. There has to a lot of sand somewhere due to the erosion of the stone caused by the high storms. Crem seems like a likely candidate for that eroded material. 

[Shardlet he/him]

Crem seems to behave more like carbonates though.

[EmagSamurai]

True, but whatever they're making the glass from has to extremely cheap, or the glass would be worth more than some of the smaller denominations. Crem would fit the bill for something that is so common that it would have nearly zero intrinsic value. 

[Natans he/him]

True, but whatever they're making the glass from has to extremely cheap, or the glass would be worth more than some of the smaller denominations. Crem would fit the bill for something that is so common that it would have nearly zero intrinsic value. 

 

Many modern coins cost more to be produced than their face value. I my country to produce a 10 cents coin it cost close to 25 cents.

 

This wiki page show that something similar occur in the US.

 

The US Mint reported that in fiscal year 2010 the unit cost of producing and shipping one-cent coins was 1.79 cents—more than the face value of the coin.^[40] By 2012, this figure increased to two cents because of the cost of materials and production. This is partly due to the significant rise in global metal demand and prices.^[4]

When copper reached a record high in February 2011,^[41] the melt value of a 95% copper penny was more than three times its face value. As of September 14, 2012, a pre-1982 penny contained 2.50904 cents' worth of copper and zinc, making it an attractive target for melting by people wanting to sell the metals for profit. In comparison, post-1982 copper-plated zinc cents have a metallurgical value of only 0.56018 cents.^[42]

The Secretary of the Treasury currently has authority to alter the percentage of copper and zinc in the one-cent coin if needed due to cost fluctuations.^[40]

Edited November 22, 2013 by Natans

[Shardlet he/him]

You are indeed correct Natans.  But that cost includes capital expenses as well as overhead.  However, If the glass in a chip itself is worth more than the chip, then it would be fairly easy to smash chips to harvest the glass and resell it.  Whereas, with coinage, the metals are alloys and/or layered metals (e.g., a US penny is zinc with a copper outer cladding).  It would be costly to harvest the copper from a penny separate from the zinc.  You'd never get  the value of the materials extracted from the coins because of the cost of the extraction itself.

Edited November 22, 2013 by Shardlet

[EmagSamurai]

That's an interesting bit about the 10 cent piece costing 25 cents. I knew a copper penny was worth more than 1 cent, but was not aware that in some countries the situation was worse. 

 

But even still, the cost of making the glass would need to be very small. If sand/silica is in fact an extremely rare substance on Roshar, then I can't see it being used to encapsulate the gems. If it costs $10 to make a penny, I doubt the mint would still be making them.

 

Edit: Yeah, what Shardlet said

 

Up-votes for both of you

Edited November 22, 2013 by EmagSamurai

[king of nowhere]

i don't see silica as being rare. silicon and oxygen are among the most common elements in the universe, and silica is the single most abundant material in the earht's crust. I don't know for sure about other planets, but if not as abundant as on earth, it is at least widespread. We prefer to get it fropm sand because sand is already conveniently broken down to dust, so it saves some mining cost. but getting silicon should be cheap also on roshar,.

[Natans he/him]

You are indeed correct Natans.  But that cost includes capital expenses as well as overhead.  However, If the glass in a chip itself is worth more than the chip, then it would be fairly easy to smash chips to harvest the glass and resell it.  Whereas, with coinage, the metals are alloys and/or layered metals (e.g., a US penny is zinc with a copper outer cladding).  It would be costly to harvest the copper from a penny separate from the zinc.  You'd never get  the value of the materials extracted from the coins because of the cost of the extraction itself.

 

Indeed, the difference in materials really complicate a comparation. But even so I can see another ways to solve the matter like a hard regulamentation in the manufacture and commerce of glass ( not that the "glass problem" really matter, this is so tertiary that will never be relevant in the book). =)  Shardlet friend you have a sharp mind. 

 

Another thing that hit me are, how much cost to buy a single bread in US? Something around 10 or so cents, correct ?

 

If you use the bread was a base (1 clear chip per bread) a brigdeman and even a soldier would receive for month only a few "dollars" as payment that is really a pittance.

[Arook he/him]

I kind of liked the idea that the spheres are soulcast, but I remember that Kaladin specifically noted that a certain sphere had air bubbles in it, and from what we've seen with soulcasting (at least my interpretation) it doesn't seem likely that some of the air was just left out of the transformation.

 

 

Your right I had forgot about that. It is possible that like the soulcast junk metal sold to the shin they could soulcast junk into glass then remold it into anything they need.