FACTORALY - E93 SALT

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

Salt is part of life. We wouldn't be anywhere without salt - literally, it's essential to human life. From the sea that we crawled out of, to the preservation of food, we need salt. This episode shakes the facts, and seasons your ears with salty goodness. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello Bruce. Hi Simon. How are you today? I'm feeling interesting. How are you? Interesting? Well you're always interesting. Well I try to be. How are you? Interesting? Well you're always interesting. Well I try to be. How are you? I'm feeling alternative. Oh yeah. I can tell by the mohawk. Well yes I thought I'd put that on today just for you. A lot of people call it a Mohican, they don't understand what a mohawk is. Oh they're very different. Yeah very different things. So before we get too much further, hello to you lot who are listening to us. Hi Factoralites. It's nice to, well not see you, but it's nice for you to hear us again. Yes, thank you for tuning in once more. Indeed, indeed. And to what specifically have they tuned in? What is this? Who are we?

This is a podcast. Do you know what a podcast is? It's where you cast your pods it's where Apple used to have a thing called an iPod oh yes oh is that where it comes from yes because it got cast to your pod yes you know what that had never occurred to me Bruce the facts have already begun I know and that's what factorally is all about yes it is it's all about interesting but slightly useless facts random little nuggets of information to brighten your day. Crystals of... Beauty. Have to put that on the website.

Welcome to Factorily, Crystals of Beauty. Crystals of Beauty. What are we talking about today, Simon? Today we're going to be talking about salt. Salt. Yes. It gets everywhere. It does get everywhere. It's another one of those humongous topics that we're going to try and streamline a little. Now do we tell people that we're reversing roles or do we just do it anyway? Let's tell them. Okay. It's experimental for us.

Now, normally we've sort of worked our way into a little routine on Factorally. We've been doing this for a year and a half. Yeah. Something like that. And we have a pattern that we have unintentionally accidentally fallen into. I do a lot of etymology and historical stuff. Bruce does a lot of fascinating out of nowhere, huh, never knew that stuff. And then I finish up with some records. Today, just for funsies, we're going to reverse the polarity. We are.

So let's see how this goes. If this is your first time tuning in, you won't know any different and you'll think it's spectacular. If you're used to the format, you might be scratching your head. Yes. But let's see how we go. Okay. Ready? When you are. Let's do it. So Bruce, tell me a bit about salt. Interesting word salt. It's again, it's one of these proto-indo-european roots, sal meaning salt, and this root evolved into a proto-Germanic salta, which then became Old English silt, the direct ancestor of Middle English salt, in the form of which the modern word is derived. The word salt is a doublet, and I didn't know what a doublet was, so I looked it up.

I don't know what a doublet is. What's a doublet? A doublet is when you put two words together to make one word. So it's like sal and silt together. Oh I see. Makes salt. I see, right, okay. Oh I've not heard that before. That's interesting. Yeah, a doublet. I always thought a doublet was like doublet and hose.

Yes it's a sort of a renaissance jacket type thing isn't it? Yes, exactly. So they both come from the same Proto-Indo-European root and ultimately from the Latin sal but salt superseded sal and the French is sal and the Spanish and Portuguese is sal and the Italian is sali. German salz like Salzburg. Yes. Swedish and Danish they use the word salt. Right enough, so it's fairly ubiquitous We all say roughly the same word and it all means and it means sodium chloride

Brill which is what salt is I mean in this there are lots of different salts I mean there are epsom salts for example, which is magnesium sulfate. Mm-hmm But we're not talking about magnesium sulfate today. We're talking about sodium chloride Yes, and and there are sort of there are naturally well, all salt is naturally occurring in one form or another, but there's sort of unrefined salt where it exists in its natural state, such as sea water. Yes. You know, rock salt, it's a mineral, it can be mined. And then there's refined salt, which is when you get that salt and do various processes to it in order to

make it edible for human consumption. Yes although most salt started out as water so like a sea salt. Yeah. So even even rock salt started out as sea salt but some of it got buried a long time ago and turned into rock and some of it is still in the sea and is extracted from it. Yes indeed. I had never really given any thought as to how salt is processed. I just accept the fact that you tip up your shaker or you use your grinder or whatever it is and ta-da there's salt. Yes. But there are different ways of getting it. If we're talking about rock salt, it can be mined like an ore. If it's sea salt, you get a bunch of sea water, you evaporate the water,

you're left with the salt. Yes. And they're very big processes because we use so much of it. There are huge, huge industrial setups that do this on a mass scale. That's right and there's so many different sorts of salt. There's sea salt, there's Himalayan salt, that's got a bit of iron in it which makes it pink. There's kosher salt, fleur de sel, black salt, smoke salt, pickling salt, molded salt from here and iodized salt. Iodine is added to salt sometimes. Oh really? Because you need very very little iodine for health.

It actually is really good for children and intellectual development. So for the development of the brain. Right okay. It costs like sort of like five p a year to put iodine into salt. Okay. But it's one of the biggest things that that makes a big difference in in terms of the health of a community Really not all salt has iodine in it. It's good iodized salt. If you look at the salt you've got at home Yeah, so things like kosher salt sea salt Himalayan salt quite a lot of this salt isn't iodized. Hmm, but I Iodizing salt is a very good thing, I think. Interesting. I've never even heard of it till just now. So in doing the preparation for this, it suddenly occurred to me

that I've actually had accidentally some experience in places where salt comes from. You've worked in a salt mine? Not as such. And unintentionally, it's not like I go to places looking for salt, but a few places have cropped up, so I just thought I'd mention a few of these, because they're different ways of getting salt as well. So you mentioned Salzburg. I've been to Austria a couple of times with my ex who was mad on the sound of music, so naturally we went to Salzburg and all these places. Salzburg means salt fortress and through Salzburg flows the

Salzack river which means salt river. And there's just a lot of salt in the area, as you can imagine by those names. And it's pink rock salt, and it exists in the ground, as you say, probably presumably deposited by the Saltzac River over years and years and then crystallized and turned into rock. And you can go and visit these mines in Salzburg that were worked ever since 800 BC, so quite a long time. And these are really, really deep mines and people would go down with pickaxes and shovels and just chip this pink rock salt out of the walls. And it's an interesting experience to go and visit because around the 1600s, 1700s the miners installed these huge, huge wooden slides in the

mines so that they could get down to the lower levels more quickly. So as a visitor you can go into this mine and slide down this 40 meter wooden slide quite fast as part of the attraction. So that's one thing. Splinters. You wear protective clothing they give you these these white protective outfits that help you slush down the slide quite fast So that's Austria another one is in Northern Ireland in a place called Bali Castle, which again I visited on holiday and they had salt pans Yes, which I hadn't realized were a thing until I went there actual pan sort of indentations carved into the rock at the edge of the sea and the sea water is allowed to slosh up into the pans. The tide

recedes, the water evaporates and what's left is little flakes of salt and that was how they they harvested the salt all the way from the 1600s up until the Victorian era and there was sort of quite a large industrial thing at the time as well. If you go back further than that you can go back to Jericho. Oh can you? A lot and in fact a lot of human settlements were settled because of salt because of their proximity to salt. So Jericho for example is very close to the Dead Sea which is very salty. Of course yeah. Jericho would ship salt to Jerusalem and in China there's a there's a one of the very early salt mines is in Szechuan. Okay yeah. And when they were mining for salt they came across this gas which they realized they could

actually burn for heating. Oh I see. And so so the first natural gas was mined thanks to salt. No way. Yeah. How interesting. That's brilliant. And my third experience of a location that has to do with salt is the fact that I live near Epsom. Of course. You mentioned Epsom salts in the intro there. There was a natural spring on Epsom Common and legend has it, well actually fairly accurate historical fact has it, that this was discovered in the early 17th century by a farmer named Henry Wicker and he was grazing his

cattle out on Epsom Common and realized that they refused to drink from this particular spring as well. Didn't really know why, but he also noticed that the cows that bathed in the water of that spring, their scratches and wounds healed faster. And he came to the realization that this spring water was salty and it became popular. You sort of became a health tonic. People came to take the waters and Epsom was one of the country's first popular spa towns and people would go there from miles away you know sort of take a day trip out from London and go and take the salts and and so on and then the salts

started being extracted and you know being used as a medical thing known as Epsom salts. Because they're made from magnesium sulfate. It's not actually sort of like a sodium chloride Yeah, it's a different type thing. But the thing about magnesium sulfate, which is quite it's it's it moisturizes your skin It softens your skin. Okay, right So actually, you know how normally you take a bath in in normal water in your in your fingers go all wrinkly Yeah, if you take a bath in Epsom salts, they don't I see Okay If you take a bath in Epsom salts, they don't I see Okay, and also all of your aches and pains are kind of like gradually used away by the magnesium sulfate It's a good muscle relaxant. It sort of helps to to calm the nerves

Apparently bath salts were used all the way back in China around two and a half thousand BC Wow obviously not from Epsom But they've yeah, they've been around for a while. They've got lovely detoxing, cleansing, antiseptic properties and they're generally quite good for you. No longer made in Epsom, but never mind. Salt is absolutely everywhere. They use it to make leather and paper. Really? And roads and toothpaste and medicine. I mean, you find salt absolutely everywhere.

Yeah. It's not really sort of one of the major ingredients you would think to find in toothpaste, is it? No, not really, but it is. And in us, of course. Yes, of course. We're 0.4% sodium chloride. Are we? I mean, it doesn't sound like much, like half a percent. Yeah. But actually, it's a key to all sorts of other things. We have things like called type one detector cells, which detect salt. Okay. I mean, if you taste blood, blood tastes salty. Yes. And that's because it is quite full of salt. and salt sort of monitors the amount of water that's in your blood and how hydrated it is. So salt will sometimes make you want to drink more which will, and that's a receptor that says

you need to dilute the salt in your system. Right, okay. So yeah, it's vital for life. in your system. Right, okay. So, yeah, it's vital for life. I said there's a lot of it about that. I mean, in some parts of the world, there's an awful lot of it about. Take Bolivia, for example.

Okay. I don't know whether you've done any research into the Salar de Uyuni? No, not at all. Okay. This is a massive salt lake. It's a salt flat. It's quite high up. It's about three and

a half thousand meters okay eleven nearly twelve thousand feet above sea level so you to get there you need to spend a couple of days gonna gradually increasing the height that you're at otherwise you'll get some altitude sickness hmm it's about ten thousand square kilometers oh my goodness just under four thousand square miles. Wow. And it contains about 10 billion tons of salt. Goodness me. I mean it is absolutely massive and it's part of a giant prehistoric lake bed that started to drop about 30,000 40,000 years ago. Right. And as the lake evaporated the salt

became more concentrated and when the salt finally crystallized it formed a crust That's as thick as about 10 meters Gosh is it really? In some areas and you can drive across it Wow And in the middle of this there's a hotel and a spa Okay Called the Palacio de Sal and it's constructed entirely from salt

Wow They used these 35 centimeter blocks. So there's about 10,000 tons of salt to construct this 16-bedroom, four and a half thousand square meter hotel. It's got floors, walls, ceilings, tables, chairs, beds, everything is made from salt. Wow, that's brilliant. I haven't actually been to the hotel but I do know people who have been to the salt flats and they say that they are mind-blowing. That's fantastic. And this hotel was originally built in the

70s but it was rebuilt in 2007. Right. But the salt blocks are fused together by water and salt which makes the cement. Yeah. But it's an incredible place to go. Wow. Do you suppose there's any kind of centrally available repository where people could find photos of this place, Bruce? Do you know what? There might be. But you better tell us about it because that's your job this week. Oh, it is, isn't it? Reverse. We have a wonderful companion guide to this episode. If you care to go to Factorily.com Factorily.com? That's the one. You will find our blog, our show notes, where we meticulously, I say we, Bruce,

meticulously loads ten times more interesting facts than we actually say out loud on this thing. And it's a wonderful place to go if you've got a few spare days. We'll put some photos of this hotel up on said website. Yes we will. Salt obviously is very important for cooking. Of course, yes. So we get words from the word salt, like sauce. Sauce is another way of using salt. Is it? Sausage. It means salted meat.

Salsa is also salt. And salad, which is salted vegetables. Oh, that's great. So all of those come from the word salt. Oh, all the learning. And of course, before using it for cooking, it's also used So all of those come from the word salt. Oh, all the learning. And of course, before using it for cooking, it's also used in food as a preservative, isn't it? That's right.

Meat is often preserved in salt on long sea voyages when it took forever to get your food goods from one place to another. They're often packed in salt as a way of preserving them. So you'd sort of get the origins of salted beef, salted fish, things like that come from the preservation process. Yes, it was one of the reasons why salt was so valuable, is because it was a way of keeping, especially things like fish. Yeah.

If you can preserve fish, which basically goes off as soon as you look at it. Yes. Then that's a brilliant use of this mineral. And you know, they had smoking and drying and stuff, but salting was a way of really keeping it properly. Now you mentioned there that salt is such a valuable item because of all of these various uses, and it used to cost quite a lot of money to produce. Do you know the fact about Roman soldiers being paid in salt?

Oh, that fact, yes. That absolutely undeniable fact? Yes. Yes, it's not true. The word salary true. The word salary, yes, the wages that we earn comes from the Roman salarium, which is connected to salt. Yes. And it has long been propounded by nerds like me that Roman soldiers were paid in salt. And that's where we get salary. It's not true. There's one particular person who we're rather fond of mentioning on this podcast who has... Does his name begin with P? It does. Yeah. It's not true. There's one particular person who we're rather fond of mentioning on this podcast who has...

Does this name begin with P? It does, yeah. It's Pliny the Elder, Bruce. So, and it's not even a direct quote, it's a misunderstanding of Pliny the Elder's slightly ropey writings. He speculated that the origin of the word solarium could be from salt and he suggested that it could be because Roman soldiers were paid in salt. But they weren't, so he was just guessing and everyone has taken his words as completely gospel. As they do with everything that Pliny the Elder says. He's the man, isn't he? He's the guy to listen to. It is plausible that part of a Roman soldier's salary was dedicated to the

purchasing of salt because it was popular and it was quite expensive and therefore some of their salary was used for that but they certainly weren't paid directly in salt. They received rations as soldiers do which included salt but they weren't paid in it. But that is where we get the origin of the phrase to be worth your salt. So that Roman soldier is worth the salt that he has been paid a certain amount of money in order to purchase. Well that kind of makes sense now. It does. It's not quite as catchy as Romans were paid in salt, but it's, you know, truer.

Salt also plays quite a role in religion as well, doesn't it? Oh, does it? Talk about that. We hear about Lot's wife. Oh yes, oh, being turned into a pillar of salt. In Sodom and Gomorrah Yeah, the other thing is we hear about salt being used in Shinto to get rid of evil spirits, right? Yes, and in fact we I mean I don't know about you, but when I spill salt

I throw some over my left shoulder with my right hand. Yeah, I've heard about that to ward off the devil Yes, will come if you spill salt because salt was so expensive that yeah You know you had to have a way of stopping people from spilling it. Yes, but yes, you chuck a bit over your shoulder and it sort of apparently wards off the devil who's trying to sneak up behind you. Behind you, exactly. And this I didn't know. So this came as complete news to me. Have you ever seen a painting called The Last Supper?

I have, yes. Not in person, but I'm aware of it. If you look closely at Judas and his elbow, you will see that Judas has knocked over the salt cellar with his elbow. Oh, really? Yeah. And the reason for this is that salt is actually

quite important in Judaism. Right. It's a reminder of the pact between God and the Jews. I see. And on Friday night feasts, you know, Friday night dinner, a lot of Jews will dip bread into salt as a reminder of this agreement. How interesting. You mentioned the use of salt in Shinto. Yes. What's Shinto? So Shinto is a Japanese religion. I don't know if you've ever seen a sumo wrestler a sumo fight yeah and what they do at the beginning is they kind of throw this stuff around the ring yes they do and

the stuff that they're throwing around the ring is salt really yeah so essentially what salt does is it again it's a bit like throwing it over your shoulder it's to ward off evil spirits right so what you does is, again it's a bit like throwing it over your shoulder, it's to ward off evil spirits. Right. So what you do is, before you start the contest, you get rid of all the evil spirits around the ring by throwing salt. And then you can start the contest. Now isn't that interesting? I've spent my entire life, not that I've thought about it terribly often But I've spent my entire life thinking that that was something akin to The chalk that climbers use yes to absorb the sweat and give them a grip

I thought they were chucking chalk around to give them better grip so that they could wrestle the other guy So it's ceremonial. It's it's a yes a bit of salt and it's purely ceremonial. Yes, I I think I need to go and reevaluate my life beliefs Crikey, I'm glad I have enlightened you you've enlightened me. Yeah, absolutely. That's brilliant Another salt related phrase which um again, I think I've possibly been using incorrectly is to rub salt in the wound. Yes. Which I've always read to mean it's like adding insult to injury. Yes that's what I figure. Apparently this comes from old naval times that you know a miscreant aboard a ship was given the

lash of the cat of Ninetales and it created some wounds and then just to make matters worse they went and rubbed some salt in it to make it hurt even more. Yes. Apparently, partially true that certainly did happen, but they actually put salt on the wound because it's a preservative in order to prevent infection. So it's bad enough that you've been whipped and you've got lacerations across your back but we don't want you to get infected and die we want you to still be useful. Yeah. so we'll rub some salt in the wound to protect against infection gosh so it was actually meant as a as a good thing rather than just

hey let's make it even worse there's another place where there's a lot of salt. Right. In a place called Bonneville in Utah. There's a Bonneville salt flat. Right. And because you're not into speed or motoring, you may not know much about the Bonneville salt flats. Oh, I'm going to take a punt though. It's a really big, open, obstacle-less flat bit of land and they use it for speed record driving. Correct. I knew something about cars. So they've had a thing called Speed Week. So Speed Week at Bonneville Salt Flats has been going since August 1949. It's part of the Great Salt Lakes, it's actually not that far from Salt Lake City. It's about 12 miles long and about five miles wide. Contains about 147 million tons of table salt. Crikey. So it's quite a lot and

they've used it for films and stuff. One of my very favorite, I don't know if you've seen this film, it's one of my very favorite films called The World's Fastest Indian. I haven't seen that, no. Go and see it right now. We'll come back to the podcast when you're just just press pause That movie was amazing thank you. Yes, it wasn't Anthony Hopkins great. Oh, I'm so legend so good But yeah, so it's been used for all sorts of records. I'm not just speed and There's a thing called flight archery. Okay. I don't know if you've heard about this, which is basically firing an arrow as far as you can.

Huh. And it was used as the flight archery record setting place because it's completely flat, there's hardly any wind, it's very quiet. So you can fire an arrow as far as you like. Jolly good. How far have people fired an arrow? Shall we do a guess? Yeah.

I don't know, I mean it's used in battle isn't it? Yes. And you're sort of firing at the enemy from quite a distance. Yes. A couple of hundred meters? Keep going. Several hundred meters? Keep going. Kilometer? Keep going. Five kilometers? No, 1.2. 1.2 kilometers? You can fire an arrow 1.2 kilometres? You can. That's ridiculous. That's with a compound bow. You know like in Rambo, he's got the bow with the wheels at the top and the bottom?

Oh, all the pulleys, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you can fire an arrow 1.2 kilometres. Gosh. Which staggered me. Yeah, absolutely. You have to make sure no one was standing the other end.

I know. Wow. But yes, Bonneville Salt Flats has been used for setting records, including the most recent Land Speed record. Okay. Which was set on the 15th of October, 1997. Right. By the Brits.

Yes. Go us. We're so proud. So have you heard of a bloke called Andy Green? Oh yes, I have heard of him. So he pilots a thing called Thrust. Yes. So Thrust was clocked going 763 miles an hour. Oh my goodness. On Bonneville Salt Flats. That's basically there was a sonic boom when he went through the sand. Wow. This fellow was a pilot wasn't he? He was a RF pilot. He still is I think. And I found this amazing video of him actually doing that. Right. And if you go to Factorio.com and have a look I will put that video up there. Please do. And it is sensational. Hmm. It's so cool. That's a really high speed to take a vehicle on wheels, isn't it? 763 miles an hour. That's phenomenal. On the ground. Gosh. So Bruce, it's at this point in the show where I usually bring a few Guinness

World Records on the related topic, but we're switching roles today so I'm not going to do that. Oh. Have you got any? Yes I have. Oh jolly good how convenient. And in fact some of them I've already talked about. Okay. So for example the world's largest salt flat is in Bolivia. It's that one I mentioned the Salar de Uyuni. Yes. The world's largest salt hotel. Yes. Is in the same place. And I also mentioned Salt Lake City. Yes. Salt Lake City was home to the world's first KFC. No, was it really? Yeah. But Salt Lake City's in Utah. Yeah. It's called KFC, not UFC. UFC I know I feel like I've been miss sold I think the recipe came from K but the job was in you was in you okay I can accept that

that's reasonable but but Salt Lake City's got other records going for it as well oh how's it it's got the largest gathering of people wearing underpants I beg your pardon. So there's a thing called the undie run, which runs all over the world. And basically it's people turn up in their underwear. And the largest gathering of people wearing undergarments was achieved at the Utah undie run. And one of the reasons why they like doing

it in Utah is because it's a very sort of religious society or religion based society. The idea of everybody just taking their clothes off. Yes. And it's like a fingers. It's sort of a countercultural authority. Yeah. Yeah. They also have the record for the largest gathering of organ transplant recipients. Okay. Yeah. We talked about Lot. We talked about Lot's wife turning to salt because of Sodom and Gomorrah. Yeah. Well actually the longest salt cave in the world is the Malim cave in Israel. Okay. That's 10 kilometers long. That's 6.2 miles of salt cave. Wow. And it goes underneath Mount Sodom. Oh, does it really? Yeah.

Oh. Guinness also talks about salt tolerant plants and stuff, but I'm not really interested in those. What it does talk about as well is the saltiest lake in the world. Oh, go on then. Which is a place called Gate Alpond in Ethiopia. Okay.

Which is 43% salt. No way. So the Pacific is like three and a half percent salt. The Dead Sea even is 34% and this is 43% salt. It's quite small and it was discovered after a volcanic activity in 2005 and it's at about 60 degrees centigrade. So there's salty waters made up of calcium chloride and magnesium chloride. Because it was caused by this recent activity, it beat the previous record holder, which was the Don Juan pond in Antarctica. Alright, okay.

Which was at 40%, 40.3. Right. And that I think is all my records. Jolly good, well done. Thank you very much. Well, I think that all my salt related facts have dissolved. Oh very good. I'm seasoned out. So there we go. That's all of our information about the salt. Thank you so much for coming to listen to this slightly experimental episode. If you've enjoyed yourself then we would be most indebted to you if you would go

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We're on a constant journey of learning. Always. So thank you so much for coming along. We do hope you've enjoyed yourself. Please come again next time for another fun-filled episode of... Factorally! Au revoir!