 In the long line of historical innovations, perhaps one of the most important ones that had the largest impact on the map today has a rather humble origin of animal excrement. To extract a key ingredient to this groundbreaking invention, I spent several days shoveling, straining, and boiling chicken droppings. Today I'm probably one of the last few crazy people still following this method, but for many centuries this was common practice and was crucial to national security. According to Taoist text, the legend is that in the 9th century, alchemists in China attempted to create the elixir of life, their combination of sulfur and saltpeter. However, instead of creating life, they accidentally discovered perhaps one of the largest harboringers of death, gunpowder. But this video is about one of the three ingredients of gunpowder, saltpeter, the chemical potassium nitrate. This chemical has countless uses, from being an oxidizer and gunpowder, a crucial ingredient for making nitric acid, something important if you were looking to make camera film, a chemical for meat-preserving stump removal, and even as a culinary ingredient. But making this chemical requires some unusual techniques. And for that, I took a visit to the desert in Utah to collect some chicken dung. This is chicken poop, and it holds the seeds of gunpowder. Edging goop here, and we're going to use this for a crucial ingredient for making gunpowder. Assisting me with this dirty deed is Joseph from the YouTube channel Good and Basic. So the ingredient we're looking for is called potassium nitrate, though historically it was called saltpeter. I don't know why Peter got his name in there, but maybe he was responsible for making explosives at one point. The peter and saltpeter is not named after a person, but actually has a similar origin to that common name. Both coming from the Latin name for rock. The mineral is effectively called rock salt in Latin, as it closely resembles the appearance of table salt. It's decomposed manure. If you pee, you produce a substance that's called urea. That substance can actually get broken down by certain types of bacteria into ammonia. Think like the cleaner that you use in your house. And then that ammonia can get broken down by yet more bacteria into nitrites, typically sodium or potassium nitrite. And then that will turn into nitrates with the addition of one more bacteria. And nitrates are stable, and they also work as a really good oxidizer. Saltpeter works as a great oxidizer because it contains several molecules of oxygen that are easily released when heated, feeding any fire that's near. When you're making gunpowder, the biggest ingredient by far that goes into that recipe is this nitrate, which actually is what makes the charcoal and the sulfur burst forth and burn really quickly instead of doing the smaller thing that they want to do. But what we're going to do is we're going to go through the soil where these chickens have been pooping. We're going to scoop up a whole bunch of their waste, which is hopefully decomposed enough to have nitrates in it. We're going to sift water through it, drain that down into a separate bucket, and then boil the resulting chicken manure soup to make, hopefully, crystals. One extra step that was done historically was to mix in some wood ash. The potassium carbonate and the wood ash would react with any calcium nitrate and convert it into some additional potassium nitrate as the end result. This is a very, very old practice. We stopped really doing this historically after the Haber-Bosch process made it possible for us to extract nitrates from the air, and nowadays we use massive factories to pull this stuff from the air in order to make it into fertilizer and explosives. What we're going to do is hopefully extract poo crystals that were traditionally used for making explosives from chicken poo. So here's precious, precious, nitrated earth. Smells delicious. Yeah. Yep. Yep. I don't know what I'm smelling for, but that's chicken poo. This used to be a national security concern for the countries of Europe. In the 1640s, it was common for European countries to have laws that allowed hired thugs of the state to go around with a warrant that allowed them to enter pretty much anybody's home and scoop up the first couple layers of dirt underneath the houseboards and then bring this dirt to a facility for processing to make gunpowder. And so in the interest of national security, there was permission from these thugs to go into churches and barns and all kinds of places, even your house, barge in, scoop up the first layer of dirt from your dirt floor house and then cart it away in wheelbarrows to try to make boom juice. I have a warrant. I'm coming for your chicken poo. So a certain animal's better for producing this? Any animal. Any animal's good for it. Typically, when we think about guano, we think about bats. And the main reason for that is that you have a stable population of bats living in a cave and it's also sheltered from the weather. And the trouble with these nitrates is we're going to extract them by running water through this soil and then collecting the water. But if it's out in the open like this, the tendency is for that to run out into the lakes and rivers and streams and just run away. So you want a place where it's building up. Any cave where there are lots of bats is great because it builds up for decades and sometimes centuries, just soaks onto the rocks and sticks. The native soil around here is a really heavy clay, which is good news for us because clay historically was used to wind ponds and keep the water from flowing down into the subsoil. So all the nitrates are probably still here. Plus, we're also in a desert, so not a lot of rain to begin with. But first, thank you to today's sponsor, Bespoke Post, who sent us a few boxes. Let's check them out. Here we got the Survival 101 kit, and we got a variety of different goods here. We got a little inflatable seat, camp carabiner for hanging your items, and nice knife, three ties, very reusable zip ties. And in another box, we got a nice little hatchet here. Be very useful. And lastly, we got a camp chair. Thanks to Bespoke Post, I now have a nice collection of goodies for my next outdoor expedition. Bespoke Post is a monthly membership club delivering awesome curated boxes of high quality goods from some pretty sweet brands. It's free to join and shows up right at your door. You like tacos, you like knives, you like socks, you like coffee. Bespoke Post has you covered. Boxes are screened based on the preference quiz you fill out. The box lineup changes each month, so you can always discover something new and unique. These boxes value at $70, but only cost you a fraction at $49 a piece. You can also cancel your subscription at any time. 20% off your first box with coupon code htme20 or using link bespokepost.com slash htme20. It's kind of politically interesting to me that farming, which feeds people and gunpowder, which kills people, fighting over the same raw ingredient. Okay, we need a brick. That's a secret ingredient. Okay, two bricks in the bottom to support it. Next, the bucket of precious nitrate and earth. Now we have water. The water will percolate down through bucket number one, and the liquor will come into bucket number two, and then we'll be ready to boil it. We don't want any solids. What we're collecting is a salt. So ideally what we're doing is we're dissolving the salt so that it will go into the water and move all the dirt behind. I actually don't want the dirt. The dirt, which will of course have some leftover nitrate salts in it, we'll just add to the garden as a fertilizer. You can see that kind of yellowish brown color in the water? Yeah. That's really good. That is a good sign. Here we go. One bucket of saturated chicken poop and one bucket of leachate. This is the material that is leached out, and clearly there's still some particles in it, but if we boil that down, that should have our crystal material in it. There we go. Okay, what does that smell like? It doesn't smell like chicken poo, which is a relief. This is going to sound really weird, but it almost smells like carrot broth. Then over the next three days, we slowly processed and boiled down the chicken dung juice into a nice thick slurry. Well, meanwhile, working on some of the other videos we collaborated on while there, hunting down Bog Or to Smelt Iron, some primitive iron casting and trying to make a cast iron sword, and the ever important poleyth. Joseph from the channel Good and Basic helped organize and coordinate most of these projects with me, and even helped me in all of the arduous tasks. So be sure to check out his channel where he explores a lot of very similar topics to what I do. Our powdered stuff here, from the battery stuff. So we've got our powdered, uh, boiled stuff here. If I put just a little bit on the end of my stick, changes the way the stick burns. So it's doing that hissing, accelerated kind of burning there. When it ran out of air right then. That's so interesting. I think we did it. This obviously isn't super pure, but it's functioning. After concentrating the liquid down, it ended up taking quite a while to purify it and get the distinct long crystal formations of salt peter. Ended up drying it out, dissolving it again, and running it through a filter a few more times, but this still failed to remove much of the brown tint to it. So I tried to recrystallize it to purify it. Salt peter is much more soluble and hot water than cold water, so by dissolving the slurry in hot water and laying it cool, you can get some crystals to form. I did this a few times to try and concentrate it as much as possible. And this is the end result. Perhaps the best way to test this is to make a slow match, also known as a fuse, and is made by soaking a piece of rope in salt peter, forming a slow burning fuse. So the yield of this is pretty small. Of a few more batches of this, so this is not the entire result of everything we did. It is a surprisingly small quantity of actual salt peter, which is really surprising considering the large quantity that we processed, it was at least two wheelbarrows full of excrement that we then processed and boiled off for three days to yield a pretty small amount. There's definitely some inefficiencies in our process. We're probably losing stuff as we try to concentrate and purify it. Probably the big thing is that they don't just process it once when they do it historically. They continuously add to it and keep processing the same stuff over and over again because every time you're going to get more and more nitrates that you can extract. So this is definitely a really important ingredient for gunpowder, probably the most important of all three. I'm hoping to do a few videos exploring some of the early inventions that involved gunpowder. However, trying to do that on YouTube could be a little bit challenging. I'm hoping to find some ways to do it and stay within the community standards and everything. But just because we don't know how the algorithm works with more controversial topics, be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss any of these upcoming videos. Probably what I'm most excited for with this compound is it's a crucial step in making nitric acid. Like in my insult Peter with sulfuric acid, which we were able to create at least an ideal amount last year, we can make nitric acid, which is then capable of dissolving silver. In the summer I was able to pay a visit to Cerro Gordo to get a bit of silver ore thanks to Brent. So I'm really excited to be able to turn this rock into a photo. Thanks again to all of our supporters on Patreon as we get into more controversial topics dealing with explosives. I've become a little bit more reliant on our supporters on Patreon. Thanks for watching and thanks again to everyone of our Patreons. 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