One well-known politician once said: "Money is the blood of war." This formula has been true for most of human history. True, in modern times, the title of the main lubricant of the military craft from the point of view of economics could be claimed by such a thing that is not too worthy of discussion in decent circles, like urine. At one time, without a representative amount of urine, it would have been impossible to fight.
Human urine is an aqueous solution of urea in which urobacteria live. The latter rapidly convert the urea solution into an ammonia solution. And it is ammonia that is the most valuable chemical raw material with a huge range of applications. Today they learned to synthesize it in special factories. In ancient times, people had to act differently... People learned how to get ammonia from urine quite a long time ago, having appreciated the beneficial qualities of a natural product of its own life activity.
The urine was collected by special collectors. In the cities, they went to their homes every day and collected the contents of the chamber pots, after which they donated the collected urine to the workshops. Several small coins were paid for each bucket. The collected contents of the "filthy buckets" eventually found widespread use. Separately, the contents of the chamber pots from under the children were valued. Their urine was believed to be cleaner and better.
First of all, human urine was used in cloth and leather workshops. This is because the ammonia solution did an excellent job with fat and helped to remove the remnants of flesh, hair and wool from the hides. It is also important that the skin, properly aged in an ammonia solution, was processed much better and faster. In addition, ammonia was needed to create dyes, and it was, in fact, the only bleach before the active development of the chemical industry in the 19th century.
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But the most important thing in the conditions of the late Middle Ages and early modern times was that urine and ammonia solution were used by manufactories to obtain potassium nitrate - saltpeter. And the latter was (and is) the most important ingredient in the production of gunpowder. In modern times, workshops simply needed an incredible amount of human urine to produce a flammable substance.
Continuing the topic, read about 6 ways to wash yellowness from a plastic window sill.
Source: https://novate.ru/blogs/211220/57183/
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