The year is 1790 …
And President George Washington, Attorney General Edmund Randolph, and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson are about to sign the United States government’s first ever patent, the first of over 12 million that will be issued by the U.S. Patent Office in roughly the next two-and-a-half centuries.
Patent No. 1 was granted to Samuel Hopkins, of Philadelphia, for an improvement “in the making of Pot ash and Pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process.”
Potash was “America’s first industrial chemical,” an “impure form of potassium carbonate, mixed with other potassium salts,” according to the late scientist and MIT professor Henry M. Paynter. During the Revolutionary War, potash was a crucial component in the making of gunpowder, which required saltpeter, or potassium nitrate. The potassium nitrate was made with potash and a nitrogen-rich dung, oftentimes the nutrient-rich poop of bats.
Before Hopkins’ patent, potash was mainly a backwoods production process carried out by colonial settlers, according to Paynter. “In brief,” he wrote, “ashes from huge open fire of hardwood logs were gathered and leached and the resulting solution was then simply boiled down and melted into a crude black potash.”
Hopkins invented a new process by “burning the raw ashes in a furnace before they were dissolved in water.”
“This second burning resulted in much greater carbonate formation, apparently because the free carbon in raw ashes (which partly accounts for the black color) was more completely oxidized and because of exposure to concentrated carbon dioxide gas from the fire,” Paynter wrote.
Potash became a lucrative export for the United States, and, according to Paynter, during the 14-year term of Hopkins’ patent, at least twenty million dollars worth of potash was traded abroad. By 1860, America was the world’s leading producer.
But that would change when Germans discovered they could mine potash directly from natural deposits, wiping out the U.S. industry. For a time, America was fully dependent on potash imports from Germany and other countries before discovering its own mineral deposits in New Mexico, California, and Utah.
Today, though, America produces only 2% of its own potash while importing the rest from Canada.
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