I always intended for Fedran to be at the brink of two era: the age of magic and the age of machines. This was tied into the desire to create a steampunk world that has some of the elements I love. But, the first dozen or so stories, I didn't realize that those ages were going to change in a great war and I was just writing stories leading to those events.
While it happens years before most of my stories, the events of Farimon's Revelation was the beginning of the age of machines. It was just a simple idea of a hedonistic mage smith trying to make a stable artifact between endless parties, sex, drugs, and masochistic relationships.
The chamber is a combination of a Faraday cage to protect a fire rune against feedback. The end result is a stable artifact that resists exploding that does only one thing: produce heat. Then, once he figured out how to produce heat safely, what to do with it? That lead to steam engines and the beginning of the machine era.
I haven't really written up the five years it took Farimon to figure out the chamber because it took him that long to stop trying to do complex and fancy magic and just focus on the basics. I also don't think it is interesting as stories go.