Urine was used in the making of leather, cleaning clothes, and other applications I can’t recall right now. We understand its chemistry today. But what is it about urine that made ancient people say “Yeah, this should work great for our manufacturing process.”? I make the stuff every day, and nothing about it makes me sense any practical use for it.
It’s because, I suspect, it worked. People discovered this by trial and error, although what caused the trial, I don’t know. I suspect it’s because they only had a limited number of things to work with. But urine does remove the hair from animal skins, allowing you to make hairless leather. Apparently people also frequently used feces in the process. I would have hated to be a tanner back then.
Urine was also used in making gunpowder – the mixture was mixed wet, with urine doing some of the wetting. I can see out that developed – nitre pits, where the saltpeter was made, is produced by bacteria that grown in outhouses.
As for cleaning clothes, urine contains ammonia, which gets out a lot of dirt and disinfects. again, probably learned by experiment or accident. I’m sure ancient folk had lots of opportunity to get urine on clothes. The Romans used to collect it from public latrines. It was even taxed.
So it’s like the first person who ate shellfish? Someone was crazy enough to try, found out you could do it, and spread the word?
I suspect an accident, like a piece of hide falling into a latrine and being picked out sometime later. “Hey, the hair is practically falling out! Way easier now.” After that, everyone started doing it.
Probably started right when people girded their loins with animal skins.
“Me Booga. Me piss on you. You not move or me kill you!”
“Hey, Booga piss make stain go away!”
“Damn it”
A Rather unusual use was for the ‘conditioning’ of cast iron. If you cast a shape, it takes a while, months, to settle down as the molecules realign or something. It was quite normal to stack such castings under the outflow from the gents. The urine improved the quality of the finished product.
Take a large group of children, teenagers, drunks, and just plain bored and/or curious people. Give them several millennia of history. Every bodily fluid will probably end up on every conceivable surface at some point.
“Pecunia non olet.”
-The Emperor Vespasian.
Money doesn’t stink. Apparently, the French still call public urinals “vespasiennes”, in Vespasian’s honor.
Do they call me Vespasian, the great general? Nooo. Do they call me Vespasian, the wise emperor? Nooo. But you impose *one *toilet tax…
Bob, that is the first I have ever heard of that. Have you got a cite ?
I always understood that time alone was the sole factor in stabilising iron castings. They were (and are) left outside to season, of course, but I doubt that the wind and rain played much of a part. I just don’t get how urine could possibly have any effect on the internal molecules.
The “quenching” of steel to create a tempered item has a lot of mystique and downright error in it. If you plunge the steel into water, it forms a vapor layer that retards cooling, defeating your purpose. Plunging it into oil is better – you don’t get that Leidenfrost effect. There are grisly stories about plunging a red-hot sword into human bodies – except that, being mostly water, you’d think this would be no more effective.
The reason I bring this up is that I’ve seen a depiction of someone treating the blade by peeing on it. This seems even less likely to be useful – there’s not enough liquid at one time to quench it, and urine is largely water, anyway. But that depiction existed. It was shown to us by one of my Materials Science professors.
The tempering of tool steel is an interesting topic, but just FTR entirely different from the stress relief of cast iron which was what Bob ++ posted about.
FWIW the old timers (at least the old timers I encountered back in the sixties) always maintained that the oil from the sperm whale was the ultimate quenching medium for tempering tool steel.
Let’s see. Ancient times. People living in groups. If everyone pees all over, the place starts to reek. So you designate places. Start living in cities and some of the designated places include crockery. No one likes emptying the crockery, so the urine naturally turns into ammonia in place while waiting for the crock to get full enough to bother dumping.
Peeing in the shrubbery is less likely to trigger the thought that this might be a useful substance, than emptying, say, five gallon pots of ammonia would be. Or maybe not. A lot of old medical spells included the dung, blood, fat, etc. of a lot of different animals. Maybe someone used a sample of a rival’s piss and a piece of her old stained tunic for a spell, and later found that a stain on the tunic had been removed.
Once ammonia was used for cleaning togas, folks would explore other uses.
Or maybe, back farther still, the pens for displaying cattle for sale got urine-soaked enough to splash onto the boots and clothes of the people handling them. We’re used to flushing, and to livestock being somewhere else. In the past, someone had to deal with the byproducts of life on a daily basis. Up close and personal. If you can use it for something instead of paying someone to cart it off - win.
Using urine isn’t any odder than using skin or pieces of tree. We’re just not used to thinking about it.
I don’t know about how ancient ancient is.
I read something about the House of Lords smelling a little bit like urine–something to do with wool. Maybe 19th century.
Aged urine was long used for degreasing and cleaning wool just off the sheep. Conceivably, this could lead to lingering odors on a finished wool product.
Pre-literate cultural status does NOT automatically imply bad grammar, you know. 
Sorry - I have searched for a cite without success. I used to work in a factory where some parts were manufactured from cast steel. One part in particular, which acted as the base of a machine, had to support a motor, some gears and a vertical drive shaft. For decades, these castings had been ordered many months in advance and left outside to rust (nowhere near a urinal). New management, in an effort to reduce inventory, decreed that this lead time be reduced and the castings stored inside so they wouldn’t go rusty. The result was numerous warranty claims as the machined bases warped and threw the driveshaft out of line.
I am sure that it was some engineer there who told me about the urine treatment - maybe he was taking the piss?
They also used it as a remedy for tooth aches, to sterilize wounds, drank it for supposed positive health effects or impotence cures… I’m just saying, broken clocks ;).
To be fair, even today, there are people who deal with this. They’re at the other end of that “flush.”
I read a joke that was told back at that time:
Emperor’s Son: Dad, I need some money.
Emperor: Here you go.
Son: Thanks!
Emperor: Hey, tell me something – does that money smell bad?
Son: No.
Emperor: That’s odd. It comes straight from the urinals.