Let's post our own individual sections here, and then put them together at the top when we're done, so no one ends up editing eachother's work.
Around 595 MoP, there lived a young man named Cole Simmons, aspiring inventor and lost heir to his house. Although he belonged to a noble family, he was raised in secret by his adopted father and trusted servant of the family, a Dverfar called Gadrin. Gadrin himself was a hobbyist who, though he was of little talent, loved to toy around and make gadgets in his spare time, to the best of his abilities.
Inspired by his adopted father, the young Simmons learned and researched and developed his own craft. Simmons pioneered the field of fluid dynamics, aerodynamics and was the first to explore the field of aeronautics. By utilizing the flexible and easily accessible power of air, he redefined the limits of tools and weapons.
Simmon's first invention was an air-powered gun, the Singleshot Pump-Action Rifle, or SPAR. The SPAR wasn't too powerful, although it was a resourceful tool. The innovation here was incorporating an efficient pneumatic system for both compressing and storing air. This storage would be expanded and re-imagined to power a very simple air-drill that managed to reach RPM's high enough to completely blur the drill. Simmons expanded on this design, made it larger and functional with higher volumes of air and stronger pressure. The drills were soon adopted by Valen, purchased for a large sum; they started his business and gained him his reputation.
From there, Simmons founded the Simmons Company, moving his business from Talibar to Kerodil, where research continued on the pneumatic weapons. Compression methods improved, and even the SPAR's design was recommissioned, and developed into a model that with swap-able air tanks already filled with compressed air; Simmons decided to try designing a weapon that fired a stream of projectiles. The result was a handheld gun with a long clip-shaped container that sealed in right under the barrel. The container held long, needle-like pellets, called cone-pellets. When the trigger was pulled, it released hold of the spring in the container, which constantly pushed up the pellets. The trigger also released the gas, so a steady stream of gas would push cone-pellets as they rose, firing an inaccurate, but constant spray. This small fast-shooting gun was nicknamed the Needler.
Having been in an alliance with Talibar during a period of war with Occitan, Simmons was also pioneering designs of crafts that not only relied on air, but traveled through them, in order to support Talibar's war effort in the skies, which at this point, had been uncontested by Occitan's own gliders. Air-Ships. The first designs were quite meek; 'Wings,' which became Gliders, and then Fold-up Gliders, which became exceedingly popular with adventurers and travelers. Then came the discovery of 'light air,' or rather, purer air. Simmons Co. dabbled in the concept of filtering substances out of the air to perhaps collect some sort of valuable resource. To their surprise, the filtered air itself was the valued resource, for it became more buoyant than the air around it. This lead to the invention of floating sacks, which were further developed to create the easy-gliding airships more popular today. Simmons Co. had several variants formed from this concept. The development continued with time, and the airships also opened up paths to the island of Ara'ki, which the company attempted sojourns into, but with only minor successes. Still, the few rare minerals gained did fuel new research.
Heat-based air stimulates were developed to force air to expand while compressed, raising air pressure further. Storage and harvesting technologies improved. 'Wind Farms' were the first idea, large scale windmills that would turn smaller scale fans at their base, and force air to be pumped into a smaller space. Regular water-based mills proved more effective, however. In the spirit of trying to gain more power from these endeavors, Simmons Co. worked on a mill model to more effectively channel the power of the stream, eventually attempting to make a windmill concept for underwater use. They came up with the Water Inductor, a mix of a dam and underwater fan. The dam channeled the river current into one narrow straight, and the fan took up the entire straight.
The result was a high RPM wheel, that, through a series of gears, tied to a much larger, heavier wheel. The wheel built up momentum over time and achieved a level of force previously unreachable, which allowed Simmons Co. to compress even more air of even higher pressure at an even faster rate. This design revolutionized their manufacturing and distribution processes as well, as a host of new tools were made to store and run on the excess air-power. Naturally, proper hoses, tubes and pipes were needed to carry this air. Simmons Co. also invented these things, and would have pioneered the field of plumbing, had there been more demand for it, but this was largely left alone.
Wartime came along, and attention had to be diverted again.
