Salt
Salt is the common name for the substance sodium chloride (NaCl), which occurs in the form of transparent cubic crystals. Although salt is most familiar as a food supplement, less than 5% of the salt produced in the United States is used for that purpose. About 70% is used in the chemical industry, mostly as a source of chlorine. Salt is also used for countless other purposes, such as removing snow and ice from roads, softening water, preserving food, and stabilizing soils for construction.
The earliest humans obtained their salt from natural salt concentrations, called licks, and from meat. Those people who lived near the ocean may have also obtained it by chewing seaweed or from the natural evaporation of small pools of seawater. Meat became a more important source of salt as hunting was developed, as did milk when sheep, goats, horses, camels, reindeer, and cattle were domesticated. Even today, certain peoples--such as the Inuit of the far north, the Bedouin of the Middle Eastern deserts, and the Masai of east Africa--use no other form of salt.
As agriculture developed, leading to an increased population and a diet consisting mostly of plants, it became necessary to devise ways of obtaining salt in greater amounts. The earliest method of salt production was the evaporation of seawater by the heat of the sun. This method was particularly suited to hot, arid regions near the ocean or near salty lakes and is still used in those areas. Solar evaporation was soon followed by the quarrying of exposed masses of rock salt, which quickly developed into the mining of underground deposits of salt. Two thousand years ago the Chinese began using wells to reach underground pools of salt water, some of which were more than 0.6 mi (1.0 km) deep.
In areas where the climate did not allow solar evaporation, salt water was poured on burning wood or heated rocks to boil it.
The salt left behind was then scraped off. During the time of the Roman empire, shallow lead pans were used to boil salt water over open fires. In the Middle Ages these were replaced with iron pans which were heated with coal. In the 1860s a procedure known as the Michigan process or the grainer process was invented, in which salt water was heated by steam running through pipes immersed in the water. This process is still used to produce certain types of salt. By the late 1880s open pans were replaced by a series of closed pans, in a device known as a multiple-effect vacuum evaporator, which had been used in the sugar industry for about 50 years.
Today the United States is the world's largest producer of salt, followed by China, Russia, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, and France.
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