Neptune's Gift: A History of Common Salt (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology) - Hardcover

"This book, with its excellent photographs, is to be recommended to everyone working on the history of salt and salt production and beyond that to everyone interested in the history of culture and technology." -- Technology and Culture

"[Multhauf's] reach is long and his grasp is firm. This work on salt has all the fluency and density of significant detail which make his earlier work, The Origins of Chemistry, so valuable." -- Nature

"A source of much knowledge and an impetus to questions about the mutual rise of science and technology, their differences country by country and period by period, and about the hard issues of externalities and of overdevelopment. Dr. Multhauf writes well, with reflection and a lively, skeptical touch." -- Scientific American

"Neptune's Gift is an excellent work, of importance to the generalist as well as to the specialist, and is deserving of a wide audience." -- American Historical Review

Common salt--a substance seemingly too ordinary to think about, yet it is the oldest of our raw materials and the basis of some of our newest inventions. Mythology and folklore abound in stories and proverbs about salt. It has been a source of revenue to governments from ancient China to ancien regime France to the United States. The search for this commodity ushered in the age of petroleum fuels.

In the first comprehensive history of salt, Robert P. Multhauf deals with its production, uses, and role in the development of modern society. Today, only about two percent of the salt produced is for human and animal consumption. Ten times as much is used in the winter salting of roads, and about half of today's enormous production is used in the chemical industries, for the production, among other things, of herbicides, pesticides, and other environment-threatening materials.