| Special
Salt Fact File
3361/ Petroleum geologists look
for salt deposits to lead them to oil and gas. Because of
its impervious nature, salt deposits stop oil and gas escaping,
so form a natural underground reservoir.
3362/ The first surviving record
of salt usage is 4700 years old; the Chinese Png-tzao, one
of the world's earliest writings, notes more than 40 types
of salt, and the methods of extracting and processing it are
not far removed from those still in use today.
3363/ The sea holds around 26
million tons of salt per cubic kilometre.
3364/ There are around 40 million
billion tons of salt in the worlds oceans. Enough to leave
the world covered by salt up to 50 metres high if all the
seas evaporated.
3365/ Salt has even been found
in space. In March 1998, a meteorite containing the largest
salt crystals ever seen landed in Texas. They turned out to
be around 4.5 billion years old, which means that they predate
our own solar system.
3366/ In Ancient Greece, slaves
were traded for salt, which gave us the expression 'not worth
his salt'.
3367/ The Romans used to pay
their soldiers in salt. The phrase 'sal dare' meant to give
salt, and this gave us the word 'salary'.
3368/ In Ethiopia, salt bars
were standard currency until relatively recently, and cakes
of salt were used as money in places such as Tibet and Borneo.
3369/ In Japanese theatres it
used to be the custom to sprinkle some salt on the stage to
prevent bad spirits from spoiling the play.
3370/ In Norman times, the Domesday
Book records the existence of 1195 'salina', or salt mines
along the coast between Lincolnshire and Cornwall. Nantwich,
Northwich and Middlewich are recorded, and the 'wich' part
of the name is the Anglo Saxon for 'salt town'.
3371/ Open pan salt production
was still in use in Britain, in Cheshire, as late as 1986.
3372/ For centuries salt makers
used conical wicker basket moulds called barrows to make their
'lumps' (like bricks only bigger!), which then had to be crushed
before the salt could be used. The word 'lump' has passed
into the English language. Workers had to 'lump' the salt
and their job was known as 'lumping'.
3373/ Sodium Chloride makes up
0.28% of the human body by weight.
3374/ Salt is composed of 40%
sodium and 60% chloride.
3375/ Salacious is from the Latin
salax, meaning a man in love: literally, 'in the salted state'.
3376/ Mahatma Gandhi's lead thousands
of Indians on an exhausting 240-mile march to the sea to make
their own salt in protest of a tax on the substance while
under British Rule.
3377/ In Ancient Egypt celibate
priests abstained from salt because it was thought to excite
sexual desire.
3378/ Because it inhibits the
growth of bacteria, salt is a popular food preservative, and
the ancient Egyptians used it to mummify bodies.
3379/ Elsewhere in Africa and
in Japan, salt was thought to ward off evil spirits; in Haiti
it was thought to bring zombies back to life.
3380/ In 1777 New Jersey granted
military exemptions to salt workers.
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