Salt industry

“ The primitive methods that characterized the brine industry have been adhered to with equal tenacity in the winning of rock-salt. It is extraordinary that, in the manufacture and in the mining of salt, each successive generation of salt-men, in inheriting their methods from their forefathers, or adapting them from the miners of another country, have always preserved the intense conservatism that appears to be inseparable from the industry, and have resisted all innovations that have promised to simplify or expedite their labours. ”

“ Salt is, I may remark, a Government monopoly in Japan. No one except the Government, or some person licensed by the Government, is allowed to import salt from abroad, while no one can manufacture salt without Government permission. Salt made by salt manufacturers is purchased by the Government, which sells it at a fixed price. This particular monopoly has only recently been established, and the reason put forward for it is a desire to improve and develop the salt industry and at the same time to add to the national revenue. ”

“ If the roused and insurgent consumers secure the means of production of the salt industry, in all probability they will confiscate this industry for their own profit, and their first thought will be, not to relegate it to free competition, but rather to exploit it, in common, for their own account. They will then name a director or a directive committee to operate the saltworks, to whom they will allocate the funds necessary to defray the costs of salt production. ”

“ LATEST METHODS OF SALT-MAKING In tracing the development of the salt-making industry in this country, it will be observed that, until the last quarter of a century, the old open-pan system defied improvement, and the salt-makers from generation to generation successfully resisted the endeavours of all who suggested innovations or hinted that better methods could be introduced in the manufacture. ”

“ The opposition of the salt trade to the introduction of new methods of manufacture is explained by the fact that the profits accruing from the old, clumsy, crude, and wasteful process were so large that the proprietors could see no possible reason for welcoming innovations. Moreover, the manufacture under established conditions was in the hands of a comparatively small number of makers, who could not adopt new measures without letting in more men, and the long tenure of their monopoly made the salt-men intolerant of a competitive system. ”

“ The salt industry is now said to have reached a very stable basis and the demand for salt in the United States is practically all supplied by American manufacturers. Salt can be put to a great many uses in addition to the usual requirements for table and cooking. ”

“ Let it be clearly understood that all commercial salt is produced either from the sea or from rock-salt. Sea-water is evaporated to precipitate its salt either by the heat of the sun or by artificial heat. Rock-salt is mined and refined for market purposes, and it is resolved into brine from which the salt is extracted by solar heat or the process of boiling, but whether the salines are obtained from salt lakes or from natural brine springs, or are prepared by flooding salt deposits with water and pumping it out in the form of fully saturated brine, rock-salt is the foundation for them all. ”

“ It has always been obvious to every intelligent investigator outside the little circle of salt proprietors, that the open-pan process was a survival of the dark ages, but the principle governing the precipitation of salt from brine is so simple that the equal difficulty presented itself to the practical salt-men, of either effecting further simplification or of securing further economies by the elaboration of the process. ”

“ At this same hearing, a representative of the road salt industry complained that mid-Atlantic states were importing road salt from Chile and Mexico rather than buying from mines in Ohio and Louisiana. Importing salt was cheaper than buying domestically due to the difference in transport costs. ”

“ The rock salt formation is so vast that the supply of55 brine, if not actually inexhaustible, will allow of an enormous production of salt for many generations to come. The output of white salt at Lawton for nearly a century and a half has not appreciably depleted the deposits and is not at present being drawn upon, as the Commercial Salt Company are pumping from an excellent “brine run” which is pumped without the damage to property and subsidence of land that have occurred in other parts of the Cheshire salt districts. ”

“ The decline of the Nantwich salt industry is ascribed in Poole’s History of Cheshire (1778) to various causes, including the frequent destruction by fire of the works in the town—“fourteen of which in the memory of persons living lately, having53 been destroyed in one day”; to the discovery and exploitation of new salt springs in adjacent localities; and to the superior advantages in the matter of accessibility which were possessed by Northwich and Winsford. ”

“ It is largely owing to its preservative property that common salt is an absolute necessity to the life of man and the higher animals, from a quarter to half an ounce a day being sufficient to prevent the putrefaction of food in the digestive tract in the case of an adult. In agriculture, salt is not only valuable as a destroyer of weeds and insect life, but used sparingly and with knowledge, it forms an excellent manure; while its more strictly chemical value in the manufacture of soda, chlorine, etc., causes it to play an important part in many branches of industry. ”

“ They have, in fact, to make the best of a condition of things from which there is absolutely no escape. The effects described are produced, not indeed by any sudden catastrophe, but by a slow, though equally effective process of subsidence, which may be detected in continuous operation over nearly the whole area of the Cheshire salt field, and which will continue to operate so long as the earth yields its vast stores of salt for human consumption. ”

“ From the time of the introduction of the open-pan system in Cheshire, until the beginning of the present century it was found impossible, owing to the nature of the furnaces employed in the process, to maintain a sufficiently high and uniform temperature to produce salt which, without grinding, is marketed as finest table salt, or to make more than 2 tons of salt from the consumption of 1 ton of coal. ”

“ The chronicle of the salt industry of Winsford is one of the romances of commerce. Until the river Weaver was made navigable, the Winsford salt manufacture was limited to the output of only four pans of unrecorded dimensions, which were probably worked by Middlewich makers. In 1758, the first year in which the Winsford shippings were recorded separately, the export of white salt was 1,055 tons. By the end of the century, Winsford sent 44,384 tons down the river Weaver, and, in the year 1850, their shipments had increased to 324,249 tons. ”

“ Smurthwaite, in partnership with Richard J. Taylor (son of a former President of the Church, John Taylor) engaged in the manufacture of salt, with the financial backing of a leading Church banker. Along the shores of Salt Lake, salt is obtained, by evaporation, at the cost of about sixty cents a ton; its selling price, at the neighboring smelting centers, ranges from three dollars to fourteen dollars a ton; and the industry has always been one of the most profitable in the community. ”

“ The opponents of the Bill declared that a compensation tax upon the salt trade would severely injure the industry and act as a restraint upon trade; they put forward expert witnesses to contend that if the brine—which they contended was produced by rainfall percolating through the superincumbent strata and reaching the salt—was not pumped out, it would run away to the sea, and the consequent subsidence of land and injury to property would not be arrested. ”

“ The end of Furnival need not occupy us; he came into the salt trade in 1822 with a sufficiency of financial backing, an unusual stock of confidence and energy, and a patent which “created a sensation through the whole salt trade”; we take our leave of him eleven years later in a debtors’ gaol—a victim to the methods which the Cheshire salt proprietors invariably adopted in ridding themselves of an obtrusive competitor. ”

“ But when the saturated brine is pumped up and its place is taken with a new supply of water which collects its tribute from the salt strata, and that water, in its turn, is raised, to be replaced by more, and when it is known that each 100 tons of water that traverses the salt-bed to the pumps carries away with it 25 tons of solid earth, the work of destruction that is continually going on is explained. ”

“ In 1890, an official of the Salt Union reflected with grim complaisance that, although no trade had had more patents applied to it than the salt trade, no trade could show so large a percentage of failures in the matter of reformed methods, and since all the companies that had brought forward new plants and processes in competition with the Salt Union had come short of success, he piously concluded that the system which had survived the trial of generations must be the fittest. ”

“ Individuals in every generation recognized that the methods of mediaevalism cried aloud for revision, but the salt trade resolutely and consistently set their faces, and their hands, against every suggested innovation. The salt-men were the avowed enemies of Thomas Lowndes, they drove Chrysel back to Saxony, they loaded Furnival with misfortune and landed him in gaol. ”

“ This is entirely independent of the rock-salt, which, at a low estimate, equals 120,000 tons per annum, or, say, 75,000 cubic yds., or 15·5 acres of 1 yd. thick.
In these calculations no allowance has been made for wastage, and this is very large. During the year every pan requires picking from six to twelve times, the stoved oftener than the common. This necessitates the pan being swept out and an enormous quantity of brine wasted. Besides this, the pan scale contains a large percentage of salt. Again, in drawing the salt out of the pans a large quantity of brine is wasted. ”

“ By multiple effect evaporation, a great economy in the amount of steam required is effected. Between the evaporation of brine and that of other liquors, the chief difference to be noted is that in the multiple effect system, each pan or unit is supplied with its brine independently of the others, and graining goes on in the pans, whereas in concentrating other liquors the pans are fed from the first to the second and from the second to the third. The removal of the salt from each pan has, therefore, to be arranged for. ”

“ The deposits, which are found at a considerable height above sea-level, are of great but undefined magnitude, as the lowest strata has been bored through for a thickness of 72 feet, without penetrating the formation. The rock salt here was acknowledged to be purer than any previously encountered in Cheshire, and the brine derived therefrom, containing 26·100 chloride sodium by weight, yields on evaporation an exceptionally high class of white salt. ”

“ There are no falls of earth, as in coal mines, for the rock-salt is extremely tenacious, and the miners never undermine it but blast it, which is a much safer operation. The two great dangers to which rock-salt mining is exposed, though they rarely result in loss to human life, are the falling in of the mine bodily, or of the shafts and neighbouring earths, and the breaking in of brine either at the head of the top-rock shaft or from old mines, long disused, and full of brine. ”

“ Solar salt is still manufactured in large quantities at Syracuse, where the evaporating surface covers an area of over 12,000,000 square feet, and the season’s output amounts to about 3,500,000 bushels of salt, but between the solar and the vacuum processes the American salt-men have exploited the Pan and the Kettle processes of direct-fire evaporation, and the Steam Kettle and the Grainger processes of steam evaporation ”

“ Where the salt deposits are composed of a mineral that is white, odourless, and practically pure, as in the Wieliezka system and the mines of Rumania, and particularly if labour is abundant and cheap, and the industry is a monopoly of the State, rock-salt mining will always hold its own. ”

“ It is true that experiments were made with the sizes and arrangement of the pans, that coal replaced wood and straw as fuel, that the locomotive superseded the wain as a means of transporting salt from the works to the markets, and that pumps were employed instead of buckets to raise the brine and deposit it in the cisterns which supplied the pans ”

“ SALT The salt exhibit was made up from a very complete set of specimens in sample jars taken from the Museum collections, and a large number of packages from the manufacturers. The salt of New York is obtained from the salina formation in the western part of the State. The industry is of great importance. ”

“ Capital is showing itself, almost everywhere, a remorseless Juggernaut, crushing thousands of victims beneath its ponderous wheels.” In that year a proposal to form the trade into one huge company was frustrated by the bitterness of internal jealousies. Further attempts to bring all the salt proprietors into a combination for mutual protection and profit were made and abandoned from the same cause. ”

“ Chrysel is himself amazed that pans containing 360, 900, and even 1,400 cubic feet of brine can be boiled into salt in the same space of time, and he is feign to admit that “up to now, nobody, to my knowledge, has proved what length, breadth, and depth of pan is calculated to make the most salt with the least consumption of coal. Consequently everywhere are to be found many different pans, and other varieties are continually being tested. ”