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[travel] Salt-driven economy
According to my guide at the incredible Wieliczka Salt Mine, this one mine once accounted for 1/3 the GDP of Poland. (This was a few hundred years ago.)
Looking at the incredible sophistication of all the pre-Industrial-Revolution machinery made me realize that I was basically seeing the 16th century equivalent of the oil industry (and not just in the getting-things-out-of-the-ground sense). In a pre-refrigeration world, salt was the only way to store most kinds of food for later use, so demand for it was enormous. It drove a huge amount of engineering innovation as well as excavation and other logistical efforts on a grand scale (there are over 300km of passageways).
Now I know what the 16th century equivalent of me would have enjoyed working on. I'd be the guy on the surface designing the whole system -- building little scale models of new mining machines and using "advanced" math to figure out how to most efficiently allocate everything to get the salt out. At night I'd take people deep underground and throw parties.
Looking at the incredible sophistication of all the pre-Industrial-Revolution machinery made me realize that I was basically seeing the 16th century equivalent of the oil industry (and not just in the getting-things-out-of-the-ground sense). In a pre-refrigeration world, salt was the only way to store most kinds of food for later use, so demand for it was enormous. It drove a huge amount of engineering innovation as well as excavation and other logistical efforts on a grand scale (there are over 300km of passageways).
Now I know what the 16th century equivalent of me would have enjoyed working on. I'd be the guy on the surface designing the whole system -- building little scale models of new mining machines and using "advanced" math to figure out how to most efficiently allocate everything to get the salt out. At night I'd take people deep underground and throw parties.
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