The origins of chemical industry?
How the mines of Zewar transformed zinc production
One of the features of the Industrial Revolution was the translation of scientific laboratory techniques to viable industrial processes. This is usually regarded as a quintessentially European phenomenon – a product of the Age of Reason, with endeavours based on the results of reproducible scientific experiments and entrepreneurial industrialists.
However, investigations have shown that such developments took place elsewhere more than a thousand years previously. Through similar means, the production of zinc by high temperature distillation was turned into a successful industrial process. The location for this birth of chemical industry? Northern India.