The story of one of the most important inventions of the sixteenth century that nobody has ever heard of, and the multi-national syndicate that promoted it
It's wild that salt and the fuel needed to refine it shaped the balance of power between the Dutch, the French, and the Habsburgs. Impressive archival work to pull this all together, looking forward to Part II!
What struck me most is how modern the logic feels. As early as the 1560s, states weren’t simply interested in acquiring new technology. They were trying to control who could use it, where it could be deployed and who captured the profits. Patents became tools of industrial policy, fiscal policy and geopolitical leverage at the same time.
Five centuries later, the technologies have changed. The logic hasn’t all that much. The fight over chips, AI models and compute looks less like a new era than a new version of a very old game.
You might be interested in Blackthorn Salt, a new company making 20% brine from seawater in Scotland. The process uses evaporative cooling by passing seawater over bundles of twigs exposed to the wind in a tower structure. I know that industrial versions of this process have been used in Germany to concentrate dilute brines prior to thermal evaporation. You still need to remove the remaining water to crystallise the salt (less the purged bitterns of course). Blackthorn are rather coy about how they do this, so I suspect it is rather less 'sustainable' than the rest of the process. I'm a chemical engineer & have designed modern salt plants, so I have an interest in the history of salt making. I have never seen any information on the process you describe, but it would make production of salt from seawater in Northern climates less energy intensive- the principle is certainly sound.
Yup! The Holzschuher-Seeler process is the direct ancestor of the blackthorn process. I've saved this for Part II, as it was hard to explain its development without going back and forth a bit too confusingly, but by the summer of 1566 they had adapted it to be a process involving canvas sails, presumably by using them to raise a thin sheet of brine at a time to have the wind pass over it, and soon after they seem to have developed it into the more familiar "graduation houses" - vast open frames filled with straw, through which the brine was trickled. In the early 1600s it was then discovered that blackthorn lasted much longer than straw, which had a tendency to rot and need replacing sooner.
Any idea where in Dover the first operations were started in England? Elisabeth and Dudley was a fascinating relationship which is described well at Kenilworth Castle, where he built her a special wing for her 'state' visits.
Phenomenal
Thank you!
It's wild that salt and the fuel needed to refine it shaped the balance of power between the Dutch, the French, and the Habsburgs. Impressive archival work to pull this all together, looking forward to Part II!
What struck me most is how modern the logic feels. As early as the 1560s, states weren’t simply interested in acquiring new technology. They were trying to control who could use it, where it could be deployed and who captured the profits. Patents became tools of industrial policy, fiscal policy and geopolitical leverage at the same time.
Five centuries later, the technologies have changed. The logic hasn’t all that much. The fight over chips, AI models and compute looks less like a new era than a new version of a very old game.
You might be interested in Blackthorn Salt, a new company making 20% brine from seawater in Scotland. The process uses evaporative cooling by passing seawater over bundles of twigs exposed to the wind in a tower structure. I know that industrial versions of this process have been used in Germany to concentrate dilute brines prior to thermal evaporation. You still need to remove the remaining water to crystallise the salt (less the purged bitterns of course). Blackthorn are rather coy about how they do this, so I suspect it is rather less 'sustainable' than the rest of the process. I'm a chemical engineer & have designed modern salt plants, so I have an interest in the history of salt making. I have never seen any information on the process you describe, but it would make production of salt from seawater in Northern climates less energy intensive- the principle is certainly sound.
Yup! The Holzschuher-Seeler process is the direct ancestor of the blackthorn process. I've saved this for Part II, as it was hard to explain its development without going back and forth a bit too confusingly, but by the summer of 1566 they had adapted it to be a process involving canvas sails, presumably by using them to raise a thin sheet of brine at a time to have the wind pass over it, and soon after they seem to have developed it into the more familiar "graduation houses" - vast open frames filled with straw, through which the brine was trickled. In the early 1600s it was then discovered that blackthorn lasted much longer than straw, which had a tendency to rot and need replacing sooner.
Any idea where in Dover the first operations were started in England? Elisabeth and Dudley was a fascinating relationship which is described well at Kenilworth Castle, where he built her a special wing for her 'state' visits.