Special Report: Piss and Progress

Technological progress has taken us from a society where we got paid for our piss to one where we have to pay other people to get rid of it.

Dateline: Woking, 14th March 2026.

I wrote this a first version of this for my old blog back in 2008, after I met David Edgerton and read his brilliant “The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History Since 1900″. It made me think about some aspects of technological change, and encouraged me to look into the history of particular English industry in far more detail than I would otherwise have thought to do so because it gave me a fun story to use in workshops to get people in the mood for thinking about invention and innovations. I’m reposting it here today because Lynette Nusbacherwas talking about… well, you’ll see.

It’s a simple story. Basically, people in England used to get paid for piss because it was needed for a variety of industrial processes (e.g., making clothes). Then, because of technological change, they didn’t. And it was just tough.

The story starts with wool.

Wool is produced by sheep. It is made of keratin — the same substance as hair, horn, hooves and our fingernails. Unlike hair, which is smooth at the microscopic level, wool has scales. These scales are the reason why wool fibres cling together and make it a good material for cloth. You can’t just take wool from a sheep and make it into clothes, though, it needs some processing. In particular, the natural oil in the wool (lanolin) has to be removed. This used to be done with urine, because urine contains ammonia that breaks down the lanolin. Once the grease is gone, the wool can be washed and dyed.

The UK once had a substantial wool trade. In fact, England’s medieval prosperity was founded on wool. In the 13th century there were three sheep to every man, woman and child and wool was the biggest export. At this time, the job of the “fuller” was vital. The fuller was responsible for treating the wool with urine. Officially recognised as one of the worst jobs in history, the fuller spent all day trampling wool knee-deep in barrels of stale urine. It would take a good couple of hours of urine-soaked trampling to produce decent wool. Fulling went back to ancient times, but as a profession it boomed in medieval times when England needed lots of fullers and therefore lots of urine.

Making another common clothing material, leather, was just as disgusting. An essential ingredient was dog faeces, which in those days was known as “pure”. The pure gatherers, who had a bad job but not as bad as the fulllers, were paid to collect it from the streets and even kennels

The pure-finders meet with a ready market for all the dogs’ — dung they are able to collect, at the numerous tanyards in Bermondsey, where they sell it by the stable-bucket full, and get from 8 d. to 10 d. per bucket, and sometimes 1 s. and 1 s. 2 d. for it, according to its quality.

From The ‘Pure’ Finders

Leather treatment also needed something called “alum”. Alum is a fixing agent that was used in a number of different industrial processes, including leather and wool manufacturing. The main sources of alum in medieval times were the Middle East and, after 1461, the Papal States north of Rome but these sources were susceptible to disruption.

In particular, after Henry VIII’s disagreement with the Pope over matters relating to marriage policies, England desperately needed its own supply and why, in 1604 at, Slapewath, near Guisborough, the first successful alum works were a cause for celebration and even today the cliffs between Saltburn and Ravenscar in North Yorkshire bear the scars of a strange, malodorous industry with human urine at its heart, a legacy of 250 years of quarrying alum, used in dyeing textiles.

Yes, urine again. The alum works needed lots of urine, so it fetched a good price. At the peak of alum production, the industry required 200 tonnes of urine every year, equivalent to the produce of 1,000 people. Local households sold theirs for a small payment but as demand began to outstrip supply, the urine was brought by boat from London and elsewhere.The industry began to scale. Public toilets were built (beginning with the ones in Hull) to supply the alum works. In a generation, England was self-sufficient.

(The Slapewath works, like all of the inland works, did not last long because the cost bringing coal and urine meant that it could not compete effectively with the large coastal works that followed it.)

London, as the largest conurbation, was a major source of urine. It was collected and transported around the country. But there were other cities in this vital network. In the 17th century, Newcastle exported large quantities of urine to Ravenscar, for example. The urine was collected from both public and private sources and transported via a distribution network to where it was needed. Taking the piss was an element of critical national infrastructure.

(Incidentally, unlike dogs where the output of thoroughbreds was considered more valuable than that of mongrels, working class urine was much more desirable than that of the nobs because the poor drank beer whereas the rich drank wine and spirits that rendered their output less useful for industrial processes.)

Jobs Done

So how come this network no longer exists? The last alum works on the Yorkshire Coast closed in 1871 and now I have to pay to have my urine taken away, rather have competing distributors hammering on my door, waving chequebooks and demanding more. What happened?

Well, the vital industrial processes noted earlier needed not urine but a particular chemical that it contains: urea and the piss supply network collapsed because chemists discovered a way to synthesis urea artificially.

(Now you understand the connection! Lynette’s comments on the urea supply chain in the context of the US attack on Iran made me dust this off!)

In fact, that discovery was a critical step in the history of science: urea was the first organic compound to be artificially synthesised from inorganic starting materials. In 1828, Friedrich Woehler prepared it by the reaction of potassium cyanate with ammonium sulphate. Although Woehler was attempting to prepare ammonium cyanate, he inadvertently disproved the theory that the chemicals of living organisms are fundamentally different from inanimate matter by forming urea, thus starting the discipline of organic chemistry.

Now, you can see why the amazing scientific discovery of the foundation of organic chemistry was not seen by all as unalloyed benefit. If your job was trampling wool in barrels of urine, you were now unemployed. If you owned or navigated the barges full of excrement traversing the waterways of our great nation, you were on the scrapheap, and with no lobby groups to plead your case to those in power.

Technology had moved on, creating fantastic new opportunities and boosting the economy to the great benefit of all (the standard of living of the average person in England started going up in 1828 and continued to grow, essentially continuously, until roughly when Gordon Brown was Chancellor of the ). But something that used to worth a lot of money — urine — now wasn’t.

Surely a Royal Institute of Associated Alum-makers (RIAA) could have sprung into existence to help society maintain a fair approach to the competing interests of the great majority of urine producers and the small minority of urine consumers. After all, it’s not as if there wasn’t adequate precedent lunatic legislation in the world of wool!

In England after 1572 by law all men except nobles had to wear a woollen cap on Sundays. This law was passed to give the wool cap makers plenty of work. Even earlier, following the Black Death, the English had “sumptuary laws” to regulate who was allowed to wear what clothes. Seriously. The peasantry were allowed only cheap wool (even if they could afford better) whereas the Posh n’ Becks of Edward III’s court could wear what they liked.

(The sumptuary laws, as an aside, also regulated what dogs people were allowed to own and thus indirectly who would have the best “pure” for sale.)

Reaction and Revolution

In the space of a few years, the entire industry collapsed. No matter how farsighted and strategic the plans of urine sector, they were out of business. I wonder if that would happen today? Perhaps the urine lobby could have attracted some key influencers to campaign across Tik Tok to protect this traditional industry. Maybe they could have funded some think tanks to come out against fake urea because it causes autism or something. Maybe Boris Johnson could have campaigned in the The Daily Mail in favour of real urea, made from real English piss, instead of campaigning against Bitcoin (which is he doing today).

Lobbying in favour of traditional industries (eg, banking) sounds good and appeals to the naturally conservative sympathies of the middle, but really, sometimes it is better to stop trampling the urine and move on. Which reminds me, I must finish that blog post about the Federal Reserve granting Kraken a “skinny” Master Account.