History
The first shipment of Chile saltpeter to Europe arrived in England in 1820 or 1825, but did not find any buyers and was dumped at sea in order to avoid customs toll. With time, however, the mining of South American saltpeter became a profitable business (in 1859, England alone consumed 47,000 metric tons). Chile fought against the allies Peru and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific 1879-1884 and took over the richest deposits. In 1919, Ralph Walter Graystone Wyckoff determined its crystal structure using X-ray crystallography.
Read more about this topic: Sodium Nitrate
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“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)